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80% of corporate wealth is now in just
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10% of firms – and those are the firms that have the most personal data and intellectual property.
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So, you know, mostly big tech firms, Google, Amazon, Facebook…
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Google is actually an interesting narrative arc because Google really
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invented the business model of surveillance capitalism.
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And that is the business model of essentially tracking everything you are doing,
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saying online and increasingly offline, and using it to build a profile of you and then
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selling that information to advertisers who want to target you down to a microscopic level.
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So, think about that now as it moves into healthcare, into finance, into insurance.
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Here is a real-world example that is happening…
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Insurance companies are now putting sensors
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in some countries in some markets where this is legal – sensors in peoples' cars
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or homes –so let's say I'm now driving with my child in back and I don't stop quickly enough
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at a stop light. That will be tallied – I might get a black mark on my insurance.
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First of all that's I think incredibly creepy but it also has the effect of completely changing the
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business model from a business model of the collective, in which it's about risk
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sharing and risk pooling – to separating all of us - suddenly we are all individual risks,
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and perhaps you and I can be insured but perhaps there is a pool uninsurable people over here.
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It creates this real
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tier system within society where there are people who can be completely disenfranchised.
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First Wall St and then Silicon Valley really have more power than any other entity.
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I see so many similarities between the way that Wall Street had both
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monetary capture of politics but also cognitive capture of politics before the financial crisis
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and to a certain extent after and the way Big Tech has captured the debate now.
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With the banks, there is at least some requirement for how they kind of mark things on the books.
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With tech firms - you don't have that – so it's really a very opaque system
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We are not doing transactions in dollars or sterling, we're doing transactions
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in data –and that is a barter transaction. It's a very opaque transaction.
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So if you think about what Adam Smith would have said you needed for a properly functioning market.
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You need equal access to information, you need a transparent transaction – so both parties
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need to understand what's being exchanged – and you need a shared moral framework.
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Now you could argue that in the era of big data – none of those things are in effect.
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Think about the most opaque transaction in the financial crisis – you know,
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the derivatives – weapons of mass financial destruction - and the kinds of transactions
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that we are doing on an hourly basis now are just as opaque if not more so.
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We don't really understand what is happening in the algorithmic black box.
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One of the reasons that the big tech companies have been so reluctant
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to police political advertising is they don't want to open up that algorithmic black box.
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One of the possibly elegant answers to some of the problems we've been talking
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about - from privacy, to competitiveness, to innovation – would be to create digital
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data banks where companies of all sizes, in all industries, could have access to data,
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but only in a way that citizens and democratically elected governments would decide.
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Suffice to say, we need to move from old capitalist model
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to a kind of a new more equal sharing of this wealth pie.