Data, Automation & the Shrinking Role of Human Skill - Parallels between Recorded Music and a possible Future of Surgery
Advances in networking, robotics, and AI are already shifting high-skill services: first music production/distribution, next perhaps complex surgery - from human-centric craft economies to cloud-mediated data services.
The economic rewards follow the same trajectory: away from the broad middle class that performed the work toward the owners of platforms, algorithms, and the underlying data models.
If unaddressed, this “statistical cloud” dynamic will deepen inequality, erode professional autonomy, and further expose weaknesses in current accounting rules that ignore internally generated data as an asset.
How Music Became a Data Service
| Industry Phase | Value Chain (Simplified) | Who Captures the Majority of Value Today | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physical Era (pre-2000s) | Artists → Labels → Pressing plants → Trucks → Record stores | Labels, retail, touring musicians | Historic royalty splits |
| Streaming/Data Era (2008-2025) | Artists → Digital aggregators → Spotify/Apple/YouTube → End-listeners & advertiser databases | Streaming platforms & data brokers; a few superstar catalogs | Royalty share ~70 % to platforms & labels; “middle-class” musician earnings falling The WalrusLinkedIn |
Key insight: Streaming platforms give music away (or under-price it) to harvest listener data, which in turn drives targeted ads, playlisting algorithms, and securitized royalty bundles.
Early Signals of the Same Shift in Surgery
| Technology Milestone | 2025 Status | Strategic Implication |
|---|---|---|
| Robotic platforms (e.g., da Vinci, Versius) | Widely commercialized; increased precision & reduced LOS* | Hardware + software tied to single vendor ecosystems americanhhm.comSermo |
| Ultra-low-latency networks (5G / satellite-assisted) | First cross-border procedures 5,000 km +; China’s Toumai™ receives commercial approval India TodayMicroPort | |
| Nanorobotics & micro-capsule systems | Proof-of-concept heart interventions; magnetically guided sub-cellular bots diasurgemed.com | |
| End-to-end tele-operation | 1,000+ urologic cases already logged; latency < 200 ms threshold achieved in trials AUANewsPMC |
*LOS = length of stay
Trajectory: As connectivity and autonomy improve, surgical workflows can migrate off-site. Skill encoded as data models (imaging libraries, reinforcement-learned motion primitives, real-time biomechanical sims) becomes the differentiating asset—mirroring what recommendation algorithms did for streaming services.
Accounting Blind Spots and Power Concentration
- Current IFRS & US GAAP rules
- Early policy debates (IASB Intangibles project, June 2025).
Risk Analysis
Concentrated data ownership could tip economic power toward a few platform‐owners, hollowing out the professional middle class; automation may also deskill newcomers who lose hands-on practice, heightening dependency on proprietary systems whose single points of failure threaten network-wide care.
At the same time, weak data-governance exposes patients to privacy breaches and opaque AI decisions.
Four common fallacies mask these dangers: technological determinism (assuming robots inevitably replace surgeons), linear extrapolation from music to medicine (ignoring unique regulatory and human-empathy factors), zero-sum thinking that pits tech against clinicians instead of designing shared-value models, and the perfect-uptime illusion that downplays cyber-risks and infrastructure fragility.
Opportunities & Mitigations
Treat data itself as a bookable asset so hospitals and surgeons can share in its upside.
- Tie device approvals to open-data and explainability standards that keep platforms interoperable and auditable;
- Bake royalty-style micropayments into every procedure’s data exhaust to re-allocate revenue back to clinicians;
- Mandate human-in-the-loop controls and fund continuous re-skilling from a levy on robot-generated service income; and
- Use public tele-surgical networks or targeted subsidies to guarantee patient access, preventing a two-tier system dominated by a few device vendors.
In Summary
Absent policy intervention, the cloud’s “statistical hunger” will keep pushing value toward the owners of the biggest data and machines - be that Spotify in music or a handful of surgical-robot networks in medicine.
Recognizing data as a tangible economic resource and hard-coding equitable revenue-sharing into regulation are the twin pillars needed to keep capitalism from cannibalizing its own talent base.
At the VE LAB, we know music and health are interdisciplinary; we work for a fulfilling present and shape the future of our reality with Renascene and MINY.
