Get online or you’ll be left out!
The future will be online.
In the past years, we have seen a decade of digital disruption in a matter of months not years. A question arises — are businesses or individuals prepared or not?! Some are, some not. Can technology change the world? Unprecedented times are challenging but are also full of new opportunities to provide. So basically yes. The shock for companies making second-guessing their long-standing beliefs was cruel. Some have already made changes in the short term: reduced travel, more work-from-home, and updates in business operations to reduce human contact. But businesses that moved aggressively into the virtual world years ago are now better suited for the future. The ones doing things in the old ways are slowly doomed to perish.
Get online or you’ll be left out!! the new slogan in the past years.
We are led to believe that the future will be online all the time. So companies who want to stay relevant into the next decade must be equally bold about the pace of their own transformation or they will be wiped out. From an individual perspective as Google CEO said “soon everyone on Earth will be connected” has been demonstrated by almost 4.66 billion people active internet users (October 2020), encompassing 59% of the global population. This really tells us that discrimination will likely worsen and will be personal for more. People connecting to the Internet will have a cheap way to access knowledge. This connecting access will bring specific perils to privacy and security. But also will come with states (nations) controlling and censoring their population.
To better understand where the digital world is going, let’s exemplify how software has evolved. In the pre-mobile era, software largely fell into two categories: programs and operating systems. In the mobile era, we think about programs as “apps.” For apps, software resides on the device, but information (data) is in real-time, online. Now we are moving also from apps to “software everywhere”. So the services will be accessed through all the devices we own. Software (data) is only “mobile” when we can take it with us but will be “everywhere” when we don’t even need to take it with us. It will be on devices ranging from the metaverse to smart TVs and to gaming consoles, cars, and home appliances. (Oculus, Google Daydream, Microsoft Windows Holographic, Multiverse programs) This is why the next “hot new tech” will not be a device. The problem develops when vast data collected from all these devices will be compromised or inaccurate. All our decisions will be flawed or even illegal.
This evolution of technology will create also job loss. If worsen this situation will drive more people to the unemployed and to poverty. Technology may not destroy jobs in aggregate, but it will destroy plenty of jobs for specific workers in specific industries. (manufacturing, textiles/apparel, agriculture, and transportation) Combined with climate impacts this could push an additional 100 million people into poverty by 2030. Remote working, schooling, and telemedicine will become much more prevalent for those lucky enough to benefit from it. So too, alas, cybercrime. The risk of a gender gap expansion is another social issue that requires authority attention. The industrial workforce will be mainly male, with less than 10% of European programmers being women and only 24% of the IT and communication sector workforce being female. Furthermore, these trends have the potential — even in the absence of overall job numbers — to create a world in which the link between work and economic security will be weakened for large numbers of people, fuelling anger and disillusionment that will feed into politics. The combination of deep fake news and social media will pose a threat to all democracies, but this challenge is likely to be more aggressive in countries where media literacy is the lowest. Rising dissatisfaction with the way digital technologies are being used to serve the interests of narrow economic elite companies could have a powerful social impact. This tension is likely to make online privacy a hot political topic. More worryingly, is also the value of data harnessed by both businesses and governments for surveillance purposes to predict, influence, and manipulate individuals’ behaviors. For example: in a show of power at the end of 2017, Chinese officials showed how they could track down and find one reporter within 7 minutes with their vast network of 170 million CCTV cameras. Overall digital is also expected to play an increasingly important role in the retail banking sector in the next 10 years: by 2030, the vast majority of banks’ customer interactions will be app-based and AI-powered.
Globally, society has been becoming more atomized but technology has gained more proselytes precisely because of its tendency to reduce the manual workload. Technology pushed the yearning for a sense of belonging. Digital filled this gap in people’s lives. Any clear delineation between our offline and online lives will disappear — particularly for younger age cohorts who are digital natives. One worrying side-effect of the ubiquity of digital and hyper-connectivity in our lives, however, will be a declining ability to concentrate. But this full exponential and non-linear change dynamic in everything from the rate at which technologies develop to the way social movements emerge and spread will get overshadowed. People will try to adapt to this new reality in order to have a smooth transition from the old to this new world. The key will be the way that people face this new reality.
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