Essay Sample on Significance of Big Data and Information Systems For: Machine, Platform and Crowd

Introduction

In this digital era, the balance that exists between minds and machines, products and platforms, and the core and the crowd is a subtle one and must, therefore, be carefully handled for a firm to compete favorably with its rivals. This paper shall focus on the three dimensions and discuss the significance of big data and information systems associated with each dimension.

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Machines

Human beings are fallible in nature. People sometimes make errors by trusting their own judgment, intuition or gut. When the mind, therefore, partners with a machine, much emphasis is placed on the human judgment which produces poor judgment on many occasions. This bias results from the "System 1" style of reasoning which is usually effortless and vulnerable to making errors. To make matters worse, this style of reasoning further hijacks the rational "System 2" and convinces the mind to accept an erroneous judgment as a justified one (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 47). These kinds of human miscalculations can have impactful consequences and, thus, the need to rely on machines to perform data manipulations and algorithms. Even then, algorithms are not perfect since inaccurate data produces biased decisions and as a result, proper consideration should be made in choosing the best performing alternative.

In the world today, the engineering of artificial intelligence is advancing fast. Machine learning is improving every day and their performance is comparable to humans in several domains such as vision and speech recognition capabilities, but only under controlled conditions (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 66). Neural networks, for instance, has had an impressive success with supervised learning although its unsupervised learning is nowhere near the human level; a feat which may be largely attributed to the absence of common sense in machines. Intelligent robots have significantly revolutionized many business processes where more machines and fewer people are included to offer interactions.

With artificial intelligence undergoing remarkable advancements, machines will be used even more to perform tasks such as designing objects and executing dangerous works. This, however, does not imply that machines can wholly replace human beings and work on their own. Machines lack social aspects such as empathy and leadership and as such, both machines and humans must continue working together in various settings.

Product and Platform

The internet and its related technologies have been influential in the past couple of decades across a range of industries. There have been fluctuations in revenues and shifts in consumer preferences while new entrants have flourished. A platform can be described as a digital environment characterized by near-zero marginal cost of access, reproduction, and distribution (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 118). Some of the major disruptions that have been experienced in the economy have been because of the free, perfect and instant attributes of information goods. Once something has been digitized, the marginal cost of making an additional copy is approximately zero since it is a perfect replica of the original and that each digital copy can be sent anywhere across the globe at an instant.

Digital platforms, also known as online-online platforms (O2O), have been the backbone of a majority of the world's most successful companies that deal in physical goods and services. This is because they can attract prospects as well as retain the existing capital and labor resources and, thus, offer a competitive edge. Perishable inventories may have low marginal cost but the limitations associated with the properties of physical space deny them the attributes of digital offering which are free, perfect and instant (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 155). For a producer to successfully integrate a platform, he/ she must consider the preferences of consumers as well as product complements. Two products are complements if a drop in the price of one raises the demand for the other. When the owner of a platform is aware of the advantages they can reap by allowing its access to outside developers who contribute complementary goods, demand for their product goes up and the overall revenue rises.

Platforms are successful at adding value to products since they increase the product's awareness and make its benefits known to more people. Many popular platforms, with two-sided networks, can significantly control demand where decisions of a particular set of customers and product can affect the demand of a different product by a different set of customers (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 177). When consumers forge strong associations with the platform, it greatly contributes to brand building.

Core and Crowd

The core can be defined as the dominant organizations, institutions, groups, and processes of the pre-Internet era e.g. a library. The crowd, on the other hand, is an alternative to the core and is defined as new participants and practices enabled by the internet and its related technologies. The crowd is in many aspects different from the core since it is characterized by the free, perfect and instant economics of bits. The decentralized and uncontrolled nature of the crowd, however, makes it difficult to get relevant information from the web which is fed by many users, unlike the core where the content is curated.

The crowd has on many occasions outperformed the core, say experts. One reason is that as people become more prominent and senior in their fields, blind spots become strong and lead to worse outcomes (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 218). The other reason is that a majority of problems are better solved when exposed to different perspectives. Such incompetence of the core has led to a number of established firms to seek novel ways to work together with the crowd.

One of the most remarkable dreams of decentralizing all things has been the Bitcoins innovation. The Bitcoin revolution sought to address a new online payment method that would not involve banks, credit card firms and other financial intermediaries. The entrepreneurial venture was successful in creating something as valuable as money by combining math, economics, code, and networks. At a global scale, people, though motivated by selfish interests of earning more Bitcoins, would create something of an immense value through blockchains although it is still unclear what kind of role the Bitcoin will play in modern economies and societies (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 238). Despite the vast potential shown by Bitcoins, in the face of technological advancements, it is evident that there are challenges of completely decentralizing organizations.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the impressive feats witnessed by the emergence of intelligent machines has brought transformations across many sectors in the economy, if not all. The advancements brought about by powerful platforms should not inspire job insecurities among workers but rather should be used as a tool to further their careers.

Works Cited

McAfee, Andrew, and Erik Brynjolfsson. MACHINE PLATFORM CROWD. 1st ed., W.W. NORTON & COMPANY, 2017.