Tony Fish: You’re the keeper of the future

In this interview, Tony Fish discusses the complexities of data, identity, and privacy in the digital age.

We caught Tony Fish during a walk to chat about how to define data, how to ask the right questions to solve complex problems, and how you can embrace the future.

Got some time? Read the full transcript (note that it has been edited for flow).

Yorba: Tony, thank you so much for being with me today and for taking the time to chat. A lot of our audience members might not be familiar with you or your work. Can you briefly introduce yourself and what you've been working on and thinking about for the past decades?

Tony Fish: The thing that has a common theme to what I've been thinking about is what's going to be interesting in the next five or ten years. I ended up as an investor at a fairly early age, and therefore, I'm not interested in what's happening today; I'm interested in where the value will be in five years.

I bumped into the idea around digital identity very early in what would be termed the internet…even at that point, it was quite evident that we needed some form of identity cards.

Fast forward to 2009, I wrote and published a book called “My Digital Footprint: A two-sided digital business model where your privacy will be someone else's business!”

Fast forward almost 30 years, and all we've done has created more layers of complexity around the ideas of what identity means. I'm not sure we can articulate what the problem is. And so many countries have so many different perspectives. And I use countries rather than cultures or anything else because, actually, so much of identity is framed by law. And so much of that law is based on history. And each country has a different history. So, there are different perspectives on what is thought of as identity and the value of identity.

And because of the experiences that are often written into the Constitution’s law, we have an absolute mess, which is great fun.

There is no unifying piece that is us coming together and saying, “This is how you would go about solving identity.”

Yorba: Your book, “Decision Making in Uncertain Times,” discusses how data isn't what we think it is and how we lack the vocabulary to describe the new activities, models, and assumptions of a data-driven world. How do you think this lack of understanding affects data storage related to digital identity? 

Tony Fish: Data is a relatively new concept for most people, emerging in the last 30 years. Some see data as similar to oil, where you can create value. But as an economic argument, this analogy is fundamentally flawed. The problem lies in not knowing the value of data. So, we collect as much data as possible but then struggle when we analyze it. This difficulty comes back to the problem of ontology, or the study of the nature of being.

Data is neither simple nor well-understood. I view discovering data as more like discovering a new element on the periodic table. We shouldn't try to make it something it's not, like oil or another economic model. Instead, we should study the data itself.

There are four categories of data, each with significant value. How we talk about data needs to change so we can discuss the data we have collected and the data we want to collect. Data can be:

• Data that has never been alive: The framing for data included in this category is to consider everything about us that has never been alive. For example, water, rocks, minerals, elements, gold and right now, lithium - these all have massive economic value. This category would include ideas that have been crafted for a purpose, such as cement, bronze, steel, buildings and property.

• Dead data: “Dead data is data that cannot sustain an organisation. Dead data looks like coal, oil, gas and wood. Something was alive (tree), but in death, a different value proposition has been created. There is massive economic value in dead stuff. Dead

  data includes lifeless data.” Once living but no longer able to represent life: This data may have come from a living thing, but it can't accurately represent it anymore.

• Living Data: “having life; being alive; not dead, in actual existence or use. Living systems self-assemble and heal. They can replicate, survive, flourish and adapt to almost all environments.”

• Alive Data: “Having life, and being in a state where an organism can perform independent functions beyond survival. And, for the most part, is able to contribute to survival - this, in general, is a definition of being alive. The organism has an awareness, which is something humans and many animals have. The future (near) holds the possibility that AI systems will also gain awareness of both the self and other - however, the ability to act and have agency are aspects to be debated.”
  
  (From Decision Making in Uncertain Times, Chapter 8)

The problem is that these four categories are completely different, and we lack the vocabulary to discuss data in a mature way, especially on boards. We also lack the ability to question the data in front of us because we haven't learned the right questions to ask. That's why I get frustrated with many data conversations; they're too simplistic.

Yorba: When you say that it's like elements on the periodic table, are you suggesting that data is a finite resource? 

Tony Fish: Everything is finite. Resources on our planet are limited. Some things seem infinite in the long term. Your question sparks an interesting idea. Perhaps we should find a way to make data anti-finite since it's finite. But finiteness isn't negative. Every living thing is finite, but through reproduction, it continues. Data, like humanity, can be anti-finite by passing its value to new data.

Yorba: How would this anti-finite thinking look when applied to data?

Tony Fish: Anti-finite thinking acknowledges data can have a life beyond its initial use. Finite thinking sees data as segmented by our words, born and then dead. The question isn't what happens after death but how DNA is passed on. Similarly, a piece of data has a limited life, but its value can be passed on to new data. However, the ability to verify the origin of that data weakens with each pass. This is why ontology is so important. We need a more nuanced way to think about data. It shouldn't be treated as a simple component for computation. We should approach it with reverence and fear, which we seem to have eroded out of the equation before we started.

Yorba: Intellectual property and AI are emerging, and I imagine that might allow data to have a life beyond itself. How can we stay ethical when engaging with AI for content creation and data in general?

Tony Fish: Even talking about ethics raises a bunch of questions that most people haven't bothered thinking about. Because your ethics are not my morals. And a group's set of morals doesn't always equate to an ethical series of behaviors. And ethics are judged between different communities and different people based on their past experiences of what they expect and what they've got.

What we should be looking at is the paradoxes that occur because of the data in front of us. And we don't like paradoxes. The reason we don't like paradoxes is because we can take the same piece of information and look at it from two different perspectives and have completely two different answers.

You can have two equally valuable choices from the same dataset, and it introduces the idea that one is more right than the other, i.e., it is moral or ethical.

And that loses a bunch of thinking.

Most people who end up on boards have not really spent the time thinking about philosophy. Now, we are entering an age where the aspects of philosophy and psychology on boards are one of the most important skill sets that we are completely missing. We are so predominantly focused on the idea that things have to be right or wrong, left or right—because that's the way we've been indoctrinated by finance—that we've lost the subtlety of how to have these conversations that are never convinced that we know what ethics are. What I think we lack is the ability to even talk about it in a grown-up way in a boardroom.

Yorba: What should individuals focus on when it comes to data, privacy, and identity? 

Tony Fish: We’ve oversimplified identity and expect somebody else to be doing the hard, heavy lifting.

There’s a deep reality that every company is running into data issues. And so many of them are not prepared to spend the time to do the heavy lifting.

If your duty is to focus on survival and basic growth and keeping your head above water, where is the time to start to think about some of this stuff?

We have a number of issues on an individual level. Do you want to spend time growing your business and delivering the most basic theories of functions so you can effectively pay your staff, fulfill your fiduciary duties, and have a sustainable enterprise? Or do you want to sit there thinking about philosophy?

Most people conclude that they have to survive.

Yorba: Are you hopeful for the future of data privacy? 

Tony Fish: What you don’t see is the wickedness of the problem we're trying to solve. People think, “I have an identity solution and it solves the world.” It's like, “No, this is a wicked problem…” It’s wicked because a number of the players don't want the outcome you want. So they will try to sabotage the very thing that actually could be better for you because it's better for them. Right now, we don't have the ability to have those nuanced discussions. Because we haven't got forums to have these nuanced discussions. I think we are just going to carry on trying to resolve the problems, but actually, we're just going to increasingly get frustrated.

I’m hopeful that we’ll end up having better conversations and we’ll ask better questions. We've got to stop asking the same question and start finding ways to ask better questions. And also assuming that there is a really simple answer. So, we could not oversimplify it; we can assume there's one one's solution that's gonna work for people. And that we should check the questions. The questions are massive.

You’re the generation who has to solve the problems my generation created. We depend on you and your generation, and I apologize to your generation.

Tony Fish is the author of Decision Making in Uncertain Times.