As humans we are endlessly called upon to make decisions based on the information we have, and we are defined by those decisions – as individuals, in business and as a society. Living in the ‘Age of Information’, one would hope that people’s decisions would be more informed and less biased, more based in fact and less on emotion. But instead it seems increasingly that the opposite is true. At what stage did the knowledge economy go from boom to bust?
The Age of Information seems to have proliferated into the ‘Age of Information Overload’, with a torrent of data being disseminated indiscriminately to vast, unknown audiences. In an increasingly connected world, we are addicted to being ‘informed’, glued to our smartphones, compelled to share our views and experiences across platforms to a faceless crowd. And through this, we have buried ourselves in half-thoughts, half-facts and fake news.
In business, we have reached that critical juncture at which this cornucopia of data has become a hindrance, impeding our ability to make clear decisions and limiting our productivity. It is estimated that information overload costs the US economy $900 billion per year in reduced efficiency. I can believe this. As a fund manager, my inbox was a daily irritant: thousands of un-curated emails crammed with research reports and industry data, and only a tiny fraction had any pertinence to me or my portfolio. But I was compelled to scan them for fear of missing that vital piece of information that would inform an investment decision, alter my strategy. With a recent industry survey estimating that only five per cent would have been relevant to me when I received it, I needn’t have bothered. Yet this is a common disorder in business. Commentators have started to talk of ‘Information Asphyxiation’, ‘Information Fatigue Syndrome’ and ‘Email Apnea’, all of which are the crippling effects of information overload.
So how do you cut through the relentless noise, navigate this vast resource and benefit from the insights? With social media and mobile technology allowing anyone to become an economic commentator, a financial forecaster or a stock-picker, whose opinions can you value and how can you begin to digest this sea of information in any meaningful way?
While technology has without doubt been the cause of the disease, it can also be the remedy. Huge advances are being made in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning to create tools that help us to filter and manage this deluge of data. Almost all of us have been interacting with similar technology on a daily basis, quite happily. Yet, as soon as AI is mentioned in a business context, eyebrows go stratospheric and talk turns to menacing robots destroying our jobs in a futuristic dystopia where a homogenous generation play video games while ‘bots rule supreme.
Please let me allay your fears. Whether buying a book on Amazon, listening to music on Spotify, or reading the news online, AI simply helps us consume information that interests us and promotes products that we might conceivably want to buy. It is designed by humans for humans, and we remain in control of how we use it. In the same way that Netflix applies attributes or features to its content – grouping films into genres, actors, regions – these information management systems cluster research reports into themes, regions, sectors, stocks. Like Netflix, this makes searching for the content you want much easier.
And the system is able to suggest content that you might like or need, just like the ‘recommended for you’ feature with which we are all familiar on so many consumer platforms. The application of this technology goes far beyond the world of finance, but can be used to create transformative efficiencies in sectors as various as medicine and law. Allow these systems to give you back the time and resources to make better decisions as we enter the ‘Age of Algorithm’.
Lucas Wurfbain is the Founder of FeedStock
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