The State Of Data, April 2021

Data is eating the world and there are numerous indicators of its ubiquitous presence in our lives and how it makes businesses and consumers both anxious and animated. Data dominates our deeds, debates, and dreams. "Covid has only accelerated the digital transformation, and automation is the cornerstone of digital transformation services"--Daniel Dines, co-founder and CEO, UiPath, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) startup whose revenues increased 81% in 2020 and its April 20, 2021, IPO, valued it at $36 billion "…the whole reason [AI] takes so long in the first place is that it's not easy"-- Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab "When the [NFT] bubble bursts, it's not going to wipe out this technology. It's just going to wipe out the junk"--Beeple (artist Mike Winkelmann whose NFT-certified digital mosaic piece sold for $69 million) "Data is now at the center of global trade… Digital technologies trafficking in data now enable, and in some cases have replaced, traditional trade in goods and services… The global economy has become a perpetual motion machine of data: it consumes it, processes it, and produces ever more quantities of it"--David H. McCormick and Matthew J. Slaughter "We've been talking about home robots coming for a long time, and all we have so far is the vacuum cleaner"--Jeff Burnstein, President, Association for Advancing Automation "As a supply-chain provider, as a logistics provider, we are very much in the data business"--Mario Harik, CIO, XPO Logistics "People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends--that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans. We don't have that, but people are talking as if we do"--Michael Jordan, University of California, Berkeley