Sam: A New Economy

 

 

Before Sam, people created some data from some of the assets they own. Sam enables a structural change in this economy. Sam permits the alignment of value creation with value attribution. Members of Sam are incentivised to create more data so they can benefit from the value created by the ecosystem. The old command economy of data creation which rewards proprietary silos and quota-meeting will cease to become relevant when data creators can choose to rejoin their existing communities as data earners, and not just data passengers.

Data-based value creation is centred on verified activities and not solely the amount of time it takes to do the job. Both driver and rider could be incentivised to divert their trip so either of them could take a photo of an emptied garbage bin or to check on someone with poor health. In both cases the marginal cost of fulfilling the 'micro-task' opens up new modes of economic circulation. Sam automatically remunerates both cases according to value enabled from the data stream produced.

Data derivatives will abound. Hedging against data access could permit a pharmaceutical company to pursue less certain projects which are also underwritten by the knowledge that commercialisation - even by a competitor - would create proportional revenue streams that partially defrayed the investment. Financial products based on the efficacy of data streams will be demanded by next-generation data enrichers, while data credits could be traded and stored in lieu of fiat money.

Without Sam, data remains a novel curiosity for most and gold for vertically-integrated monopolies. With Sam, data becomes a new economy that liberates latent assets and fuels new methods of value circulation.