The fear that robots will put millions out of work has it all wrong. Data is the new oil, fueling a boom that is churning up new investors, new industries and thousands of new jobs. ----- In 2013, James “Jimi” Crawford founded a company called Orbital Insight, barely noticed at the time amid the Silicon Valley froth. Crawford had worked at NASA for 15 years and wrote software for Mars rovers. He left NASA to run engineering for Google Books, and while there he noticed that Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other new companies were driving down the cost of building and launching satellites. Crawford saw an opportunity to collect and analyze what he anticipated would be a deluge of images from a surfeit of new satellites that would circle the Earth, taking readings and pictures. Orbital Insight’s first product looked at images of cornfields all over the world, analyzing the health of plants to predict yields for traders who bet on future price swings. About two years later, Silicon Valley’s top investors decided Orbital Insight might be huge. Venture firms pumped $20 million into Crawford’s company in June 2016 and then another $50 million in September 2017. That surge of excitement wasn’t because Crawford (or investors) suddenly got smarter—it was because of significant advances in alternative intelligence. “In 2015, for the first time ever, computers got better at object recognition than humans,” Crawford has explained. AI can learn to recognize a tree or ship and see patterns amid billions of objects in images and data. Prior to such AI breakthroughs, satellite data were infinitely less useful—too cumbersome to be analyzed at fast enough speeds by traditional algorithms running on computers. Using AI, all that raw output from satellites can help traders, investors and corporations know things they could never know before and almost as soon as they happen. Early in 2017, Orbital Insight got attention for being able to mix data from various sources to find pirate fishing boats that had gone dark by turning off their radio beacons—a discovery more useful to maritime law enforcement than business, but a strong proof point for the company’s technology. In the fall, Crawford’s team relied on data from a new type of satellite technology called synthetic aperture radar to peer through Hurricane Harvey’s clouds as the storm hammered Houston. The usual satellite photos, as you might guess, can’t see through clouds. Knowing the extent of flooding during the hurricane proved tremendously helpful to insurance companies that would have to settle billions of dollars of claims later. Those two wins—the pirate ships and Harvey—helped convince hedge funds and major banks to pay Orbital Insight millions for data sets that might help them learn something about natural resources, the movement of goods or anything else that the competition didn’t yet know. “We’ve only just begun to uncover a handful of signals, but we’ve already seen the impact they can have on financial, energy and insurance markets, as well as society as a whole,” Crawford said in a statement.
