By Erik Gfesser in community — Oct 9, 2021

Community Comment: Part 9 - The "data is oil" expression is overused, but "sunshine" isn't a good "oil" substitute

The comments I provided in reaction to a community discussion thread.

CEO of Insights & Data at Global Technology Consultancy:

Data isn't oil. At least not anymore. Data is more like sunshine, abundant and unlimited in its potential. It has a positive impact on the environment. And critically, sunshine wants to be shared – not hoarded.

Gfesser: While I'm sure many of us would tend to agree that the comparison of data to oil has been somewhat overused, I'm not so sure that summoning sunlight as a replacement for oil is an apt one in this analogy. Sunlight might be abundant and have "unlimited potential", but tell this to ML engineers relying on real world data to train their models, as data has historically been a limited resource (despite the promise of synthetic data). In my view, discussing potential is similar to discussing possibility: while everything is possible, not everything is probable. Additional thoughts on this topic were made in my comments to another post last year:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6729270967148810240?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A6729270967148810240%2C6733315058924867584%29

Subscribe to Erik on Software