Technology is creating and will continue to evolve and increase the impact of social and civic innovation. With technology we will see new accountability tools and platforms to raise voices to counter societal ills, be it in leadership, business and other faculties. We must however be careful so that these innovations themselves are not used to negatively impact end users, such issues like privacy and use of data must be taken on in a way that users are protected and not exposed to cybercrime and data breaches that so often occur now.
AI & ML are taking the center stage but the problem with AI and machine learning is not the sci-fi scenario of AI taking over the world and not needing inferior humans. The problem is that we are becoming more and more dependent on machines and hence more susceptible to bugs and system failures. This is hardly a new phenomenon – once a major part of schooling was devoted to, e.g., penmanship and mental arithmetic, which have been superseded by technical means. But with the tremendous growth in the amount of information, education is more focused on how to retrieve required information rather than remembering things, resulting not only in less actual storage but less depth of knowledge and the lack of ability to make connections between disparate bits of information, which is the basis of creativity. However in the past, humankind has always developed a more-advanced technology to overcome limitations of whatever technology was current, and there is no reason to believe that it will be different this time.
Secondly, applications are the most valuable assets of any organization in the digital age. More powerful data, more connected apps and more work out of the cloud in today’s digital age means increased levels of vulnerabilities for your business. Protecting your applications and your business from ever-pervasive security threats require integrated security solutions to defend critical areas of risk
We will continue to use technology to solve the problems as the technology keeps innovating, but the new fixes will bring new issues. Every design solution creates a new design problem, and so it is the way we build our global networks. The highly technological societies have to be iterative if they hope to compete, and the societies that have experienced democracy will move to curb the slide to authoritarianism that social media has accelerated. Those curbs will bring about their own unintended consequences, however, which will start the cycle anew.
Every second the codes of AI are getting polished to find out newer solutions. More user’s use the algorithms, the best results are expected to come with the biggest advance will be the use of artificial intelligence to fight disinformation, deepfakes and the like. There are AI ‘arms race’ between those spreading disinformation and those fighting/preventing it. Overall, the latter is gaining the upper hand. Fake news is more and more used to manipulate a person’s opinion. This war of information is becoming so important that it can influence democracy and the opinion of people before the vote in an election for instance.
Privacy no longer exists, and yet the concept of privacy still dominates social-policy debates. The real issue is autonomy of the individual. I should own my digital identity, the online expression of myself, not the corporations and governments that collect my interactions in order to channel my behaviour. Approaches to questions of ownership of digital identity cannot shift until the realization occurs that autonomy is the central question, not privacy.
