AI and the tribute of Montezuma to Cortes

Understanding digital economies burdens governments in Latin America and the Caribbean to put AI assemblages, data, and data investments into a framework responsive to measurement and policy analysis. Data is an intangible asset: a storable, nonrival (yet excludable) factor input. However, it remains only partially captured in prevailing macroeconomic measurements.

The use of data in the digital age is a defining aspect of business. Data have become a significant input for firms as they use AI algorithms. However, data use is not yet part of business contracts. Digitally native vertical brands accelerate global business innovation using data lakes and data refineries. They offer innovative products and experiences. New vertical markets target information organisms (inforgs) by addressing their tailored needs or creating new value opportunities.

These digitally native vertical brands understand that in the infosphere revolution, the quality of data that a business can harvest determines the value of a company – not profits. An app may lose money as it scales up to cross the valley of death, but as long as it absorbs data, it could be worth billions. That data may not be worth anything now, but holding on to it is worthwhile. In data-thick societies, raw materials and commodities have been superseded by Digital Gold as the real source of added value.

Oddly, citizens still surrender their most valuable asset, their personal data – in exchange for free email services, or the opportunity to publish short portrait-oriented videos that auto-play with music overlays, and Deepfakes on social media platforms. This is reminiscent of a time when the conquistadores unfurled royal standards and offered the Indigenous peoples brass bells, shoe buckles, buttons from coat sleeves, and broken bits of crockery from the galley in exchange for golden Earflares with multifigure scenes, necklaces of golden frog ornaments and marvellous pendants.

Montezuma II dispatched emissaries to Cortés with extravagant, exotic, and wonderfully strange objects for various uses, that were much more stunning to behold than things of which visions are made. His tribute included a gold disk the size of a cartwheel; a silver disk of equal size; tiaras, Earflares, and statuettes of gold and mosaics; armbands of sterling silver; multistrand necklaces of countless gold blobs and red and green stones; gold decorations cast in complex forms; shields and helmets covered in turquoise mosaic; splendid feather fans and headdresses; and, elaborate apparel and regalia.

Today, data is the gold diadem and multistrand necklace of the New Wired World. In the digital futures we are crafting, there is no in-between, either you are sovereign or a colony. Without a data policy, countries will be filtered out of the new world data order. As we map the digital competitiveness of different countries, it is prudent to locate the deepest and widest pools of useful data and to distinguish between the raw volume of data and a nation’s “Gross Data Product” (GDP).

AI is not a single product or domain. It is an unprecedented form of agency that will alter every facet of human life. Its capacity to learn, evolve, disrupt, and surprise will unsettle everything. This disruption will alter human uniqueness and the human experience of reality.

AI Assemblages are not wholes. They lack fixed characteristics, changing as fresh connections are forged and old ones subtracted. AI assemblages are multiplicities, neither a fragment nor a complete whole but, paradoxically a “partial whole.”

AI assemblages make unforeseen and unexpected connections similar to how creative people do what they do. The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows,” (1966) is a unique example of “creative assemblage.” John Lennon read “The Psychedelic Experience” written by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert.

The book inspired the lyric, “turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.” The song has an East Indian harmonic structure with sitar and tambura. It uses reversed tape loops inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Jünglinge,” and a revolving Leslie speaker normally used with a Hammond organ to project Lennon’s voice getting closer, and then drifting away from the microphone.

The song illustrates how a creative assemblage process unfolds with agility as it flexibly reconnects and disconnects as unworkable ideas reach dead ends with workable solutions prompted organically and synthetically.

Following the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari we can understand AI assemblages as multi-layered constellations of loosely coupled objects, files, databases, and digital territories that come together intermittently creating new weavings of ideas and information.

The output of a productive assemblage is a new way of seeing, a new territorial/spatial organization, or a new realization that is valuable in one or more cultural settings. AI assemblages produce new realities by making abundant, often unanticipated connections.

AI assemblages harvest and store account-level information, conversation history, email addresses, device, IP addresses and locations, and any public or private information you use in your prompts.

Similarly, social media platforms harvest information about the content citizens view, comments they write, and, if they agree to grant this level of access, their exact geolocation, contact lists, email address, phone number, age, search, and browsing history, information about what’s in the photos and videos they upload, and the contents of their device’s clipboard. Data is development.