Although Waze is not the focus of the paper, I actually find that part very interesting. As someone who drives in NYC, I’m not sure I agree entirely with how efficient Waze is. Technically speaking, traffic moves and there’s a chance that by the time you get to the point with traffic, it has already subsided. If you are rerouted to a route that is further away, the time you spent to get there might be equivalent to the time you spend in the traffic. Similarly, if you are spending a lot of time in local traffic, with all the lights, in the long run, you might actually be spending longer on the road than if you spend a short time in traffic.
Besides that point, I think the question “But what would happen to the digital world if information were no longer costly to produce?” the author poses is interesting. It’s great that users are creating data that can be used by other technologies, but if technologies like Watson are using such data, those data are not necessarily accurate. How do we know when to trust these data since it’s not actually proofread? Regardless, I agree with Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson about how great digitalization is and how it’s provided a lot of data that are very useful for other technologies. Despite some inaccurate information, overall, those data probably do not skew conclusions that are formed from user data.