Today In Data: The Rewarding, But Risky, World Of Increasing Automation

Time-consuming, manual and paperwork-heavy processes are increasingly out of fashion for digital connected consumers, and out of fit with their lifestyles. Consumers don’t want to form a digital identity — they want to create one and have it follow them wherever they go. They want to be able to tell Alexa to set their calendar, order their groceries and call them an Uber, and assume it will work automatically. Even on Wall Street, traders don’t want to trade so much as set a smarter, faster algorithm to do it for them. Life, when digitized and automated, is easier and more efficient for everyone. Unless, of course, it isn’t. An algorithm could behave unpredictably, or a wrong player could get into the automated flow.

Data:

1.4 billion: The number of consumer records believed to have been leaked to the dark web in 2017

75 percent: Share of stocks that were traded by algorithms in 2014

55 percent: Amount of U.S. households forecast to be regularly interacting with digital voice assistants by 2025

1,000: The number of points that the stock market lost in a single day due to algorithmic trading

28: The number of EU member states