In September 2009, the European Internet Foundation (EIF) published: “The Digital World in 2025″ report, setting out some long-term trends which should be addressed in the area of European digital policy in the current legislature, 2009/2014. Key areas of concern were summarised under technological, economic, social and political headings. This has enabled the EIF to examine key issues of digital relevance, over the past 3 years, ahead of their becoming major matters of public debate..eg cloud computing. Now, starting late April, a new round of discussions will begin with the objective of publishing The Digital World in 2030 before June 2014.
Thanks to an imaginative Digital Futures project, focussing on 2050, initiated by the European Commission, the content of the discussions is already becoming clear. Late last year, I hosted a brainstorming event in the European Parliament with Robert Madelin, Director-General, DG CONNECT. About a hundred participants gathered to consider long term visions to be adopted as teasers for future debates on ICT-related policies, covering three main themes, relating to transformation through individual empowerment. The focus included:
- In the economic field, the future of employment; the organisation of industrial output & wealth-creation, consumer behaviour, and sustainability;
- In the social and political sphere, the sustainability of the Western welfare state; the future of education; personal identity and the survival of democracy with the democratisation of technology;
- In the technological field, questions relating to human interfaces; man/machine interaction; new forms of data storage and personal security v. personal freedom.
The overall impression left of these initial discussions was of a positive future, albeit with certain anxieties and concerns. The resilience and robustness of human beings shines through, as a key factor for survival. Underpinning the discussions is a focus on values. More specifically, there is a definite trend towards connectedness and interconnectivity “in which it is possible that we are all going to be connected, whatever…” perhaps ultimately a blurring of human beings and machines, bringing about a new form of collective consciousness. (see Futurium for further information…).
Three considerations will help steer initial thinking along these lines:
- At a EIF breakfast meeting on Tuesday 29th January, Craig Mundie, Senior Advisor to the CEO of Microsoft, provided insight into future technological trends. He explained how the long term goal is to make the computer “more like us”. In the early years of computer technology we had to “master the tool”. Now, technology has advanced to become so user-friendly that it has begun to operate in the way our brains can. Not in the sense of advanced thought capabilities, but in the way of machine learning. Computers are becoming more accurate in assessing different things than human-beings. This makes the processing of so-called “big data” an important issue, as the development and use of machine learning technology to process data is on the rise;
- Second, writing in the New York Times (see 29th January), Thomas Friedman explains further the importance of the “Great Inflection”. In the last decade, the world has gone from connected to hyperconnected, impacting jobs, industry and education. From healthcare to manufacturing, it is no longer possible for your educational foundation to last your whole lifetime. As the world becomes hyperconnected, industry goes into “hypermode”. Life-long learning will become a necessity of every skilled job of the future. Individual initiative will be required. More of the “right” education is needed, “developing skills that are complementary to technology rather than ones which can be easily replaced by it”;
- Lastly, a recent note from AT&T underlines that new information technologies can double corporate competitiveness. But critically it notes that while investment in technology is important, it is insufficient without what they call key business enablers. These include access to technology-focussed talent as well as digitalized platforms (the extent to which the technology, business process and data components are standardised, shared and integrated..”digital maturity”).
The overarching intent of this Futures exercise is not to predict the future. Too many imponderables stand in the way of this objective and history provides excellent examples of those who tried and lamentably failed. The real focus is to identify major trends underway and see how best to adapt current policies to achieve desired outcomes. It will be interesting to see what the process over the next 12 months produces.