the modern world relies on technological devices too much essay

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Is Society Too Dependent On Technology? 10 Shocking Facts

Updated: June 19, 2024

Published: May 26, 2020

Is Society Too Dependent On Technology?

Technology plays a major role in our lives, and most of us may find it hard to remember a time when phones, computers, tablets, and other devices weren’t a part of everyday life. While technology certainly makes life easier and more convenient, many wonder whether or not our society is too dependent on technology.

Fact #1: According to a study by Penn State , 77% said that society as a whole relied too much on technology to succeed.

So, is society too dependent on technology? There are even more shocking facts out there to prove it.

Is Society Too Dependent On Computers/Phones?

Technology, of course, has many innumerable benefits. But this dependency on phones and computers has impacted humans negatively, too.

First and foremost, it has led users to be completely engrossed in their devices. In fact, there is even a term to describe this: “nomophobia” (no-mobile-phone-phobia) which is when a person has an actual fear of losing or being away from their phone.

Fact #2: According to Trendhunter , 66% of the population suffers from nomophobia today.

What Are The Effects Of Technology?

What does this addiction to technology do to us? Well, even if we are not addicted, technology can have an impact on our mental, physical, and emotional health and wellbeing. From causing stiff necks to heightened anxiety, technology has seeped through all aspects of our lives. And, if not used moderately, technology can really harm us, despite all its benefits — ultimately, by making us too dependent on it.

The Effects Of Technology On Entertainment

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were many ways that people could be entertained, which usually involved interacting with others without a device between them. For instance, people could attend dances, live events, amusement parks, or simply play a game of stickball with their friends from the neighborhood.

Though we still do these activities for entertainment, it’s much less so than before. The way we entertain ourselves these days has changed dramatically since phones, computers, and similar technologies have been interwoven into our lives.

Fact #3: The type of entertainment we get from technology today is known as “passive” entertainment. This could be anything from binge-watching a show on Netflix to listening to a podcast. It does not require much effort. Passive entertainment, or passive leisure, is different from active entertainment or active leisure, which involves the exertion of physical or mental energy.

The Effects Of Technology On How We Communicate

Technology has had an effect on how we communicate. Back in the day, people had to communicate primarily by talking to each other in person. Over time, technology gave us the unique ability to communicate with people who were far away from us, whether it was by making a phone call, sending an email, or shooting off a text.

Now, with a click of a button, we can talk to anyone in the world, any time of day — albeit with a few exceptions (being in a place without Internet or phone service). This may be good in theory, but the basic principles of healthy communication have been broken down. Think about it: has someone ever dumped you via a text message?

The Social Effect Of Technology

There’s no denying the fact that technology has made it easy for us to talk to our friends instantaneously. But, at the same time, many of us have forgotten how to interact with others without the devices between us. Or, they are able to use the device as a cover-up.

For example, technology has led to an increase in instances like cyberbullying, which is one of the many dangers of technology among young people.

Fact #4: According to DoSomething.org , about 37% of young people between the ages of 12 and 17 have been bullied online. 30% have had it happen more than once.

The Effects Of Technology On The Way We Travel

Technology has strongly impacted the way we travel. Today, we are able to find where we are going much more efficiently. This started with inventions like trains, automobiles, and planes. And, centuries later, we have taken this light years further by utilizing the internet and phone apps to make travel easier and more accessible.

Fact #5: In 2019, more than 37 million Americans traveled overseas . In 2002, less than twenty years prior, that number was 23 million. There’s no question that this can be largely attributed to advancements in technology, making travel more affordable and accessible.

However, this has brought humans further away from our hunter-gatherer roots; most of us would have a hard time surviving or even getting around in a foreign place without access to technology. Technology makes it easier for people to travel who otherwise wouldn’t feel confident doing so, but there’s no denying that it’s made us have more dependence on technology.

The Effects Of Technology On How We Research

A long time ago, people would get their information by doing the research themselves, usually with the help of books, a librarian, interviewing experts, or conducting experiments themselves. This could be a rather long process, and you may never come across the answer you’re looking for.

Nowadays, you can quickly type the question you have into a search engine and find your answer. Yet, there is a downside. With the easy access to information, there’s often a lot of misinformation out there, too. Some of it isn’t even written by humans.

Fact #6: According to writer Max Read of NYMag , “…less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot.”

Image by Comfreak from Pixabay

Knowing the signs: how to tell if you’re too dependent on technology.

There’s nothing wrong with using technology to make life easier and more convenient. It’s when we become too dependent on it that we need to take a step back and re-evaluate our reliance on technology.

If you’re wondering whether or not you’re too dependent on technology, ask yourself if these statements apply to your life:

• Nothing can be done without Internet access. If you lose Internet access, you’re done working for the day.
• You lose track of time when you’re online.
• You use calculators for simple calculations.
• You feel anxious without connection.
• You are addicted to your mobile phone and/or you allow machines to dictate your responses/behaviors.
• You feel buyer’s remorse everytime you buy a new device and/or you obsess over the latest gadgets.
• You have a hard time disconnecting and focusing on the present. You find you’re not living in the present and often record moments instead of appreciating them.
• You don’t have phone numbers and/or addresses memorized.
• You find it difficult to sleep.
• You don’t go out enough; socialization takes place on your phone.
• You haven’t been creative in a while.
• You’re not able to have important and serious conversations in person.
• It’s been a while since you’ve shopped at a brick-and-mortar store.
• You feel like something’s missing when you don’t have your phone.
• You have little concern for your privacy.

Most of us probably will have answered “yes” to at least a few of these statements. But, if you’ve answered yes to a majority of them, then it may be time to start addressing your reliance on technology.

The Dangers Of Technology Dependence

If you think you are too dependent on technology but wondering why technology is bad for society, well, this dependence can be dangerous. Technology can impact us physically, mentally, and emotionally if we are not careful. It can also be harmful to others. Here’s how.

1. Anxiety And Depression

Technology dependence has been linked to anxiety and depression . Whether this comes from the fact that we are withdrawn from others, the pressures from social media , the rise of cyber bullying, or the bright phone screen that is detrimental to our sleep, all of this is taking a toll on our mental health .

Fact #7: According to a study by the University of Missouri , “We found that if Facebook users experience envy of the activities and lifestyles of their friends on Facebook, they are much more likely to report feelings of depression,” said Margaret Duffy, a professor and chair of strategic communication.

2. Impatience

Technology has made us much more impatient than ever before. Because people can be available and accessible at all times, this has led us to believe that people should be accessible and available at all times. Most of us may get frustrated when someone does not answer their phone right away, or if we see that someone has seen a message but has not yet responded. For many, many years, hearing back from someone could take a long time; it was the norm.

Another way that our dependence on technology is dangerous is because it can impact our memory and the happy emotions that come with memory. Since technology has given us the ability to use memory cards on a device to store our information, we have not been accessing our brain’s memory as much as we are capable of doing.

Fact #8: A scientific article entitled “ The Brain In Your Pocket ” states that “Across three studies, we find that those who think more intuitively and less analytically when given reasoning problems were more likely to rely on their smartphones (i.e., extended mind) for information in their everyday lives.”

4. Addiction

Technology has increased the rate of technological addiction, which is characterized as the uncontrollable urge to constantly and consistently use technological devices or the programs, apps, and platforms that come with them. Technological addiction is more common among teenagers, but children and adults are seeing the effects as well.

Fact #9: According to the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation , “Researchers have found evidence that people who overuse technology may develop similar brain chemistry and neural patterning to those who are addicted to substances.” This can cause or worsen anxiety, depression, and even play a role in suicide in extreme cases.

5. Skill Replacement

Technology gives us the opportunity to learn new skills no matter where we are located. People can start businesses from scratch that run entirely online. However, this quick access to skills can present the same problem as with memorization. Because we turn to our devices for a particular skill-set (for instance, using a water intake app instead of knowing how much water we should be drinking on our own), it can impact our natural skill attainment abilities.

Image by Mediamodifier from Pixabay

The role of technological dependence on advancement and innovation.

So, technology helps us advance as a society, but are all the dangers of being dependent on technology actually hindering us and pushing us backwards? Many experts think so .

The more we become attached to certain devices and dependent on types of technology, the more we’ll work to improve those particular devices (while simultaneously losing our abilities to socialize, memorize, find solutions, and learn skills) and the less we’ll have the focus, desire, and ability to invent something new. Therefore, we need to reduce our dependence on technology if we want to keep innovating and bringing new ideas to fruition in the future.

Finding The Balance Of Technology And Society

Technology has so many advantages and benefits for society, and it’s important for us to not lose sight of that as we critique the problems with relying on it too much. Like with anything, moderation is a good way to not become too dependent. To mitigate this, we need to find a healthy balance between technology and society. This could mean limiting the amount of time you spend on your phone, to giving yourself an opportunity to find the answer to a problem without immediately searching for it online.

Is society too dependent on technology? Technology is a great resource in the classroom, and it can help us obtain the skills we need for a successful career. But, this must come in combination with learning how to navigate the requirements of academia and a future profession without completely relying on technology.

Fact #10: At University of the People, you can start earning your degree online and completely tuition-free — one of the great benefits of our program and technology — and find that balance on your own. Check out UoPeople’s degree programs today!

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More From Forbes

Is society moving in the right direction with technology rapidly taking over the world.

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Over the last centuries, society witnessed technological advancements gradually making everyday lives easier, more convenient, and – well, more interesting. In the 21st century, however, technology made a true quantum leap, with augmented reality, blockchain, artificial intelligence, and 3D printing being just a few examples of the most recent inventions.

Though we are getting used to advancements of any kind, is the development of technology really good for society?

Some Areas in Which Technology Has Changed Our Lives

Advancements in technology have already tapped into every area of life, with its impact particularly notable in these segments:

• Lifestyle. From working remotely to ordering food delivery or booking a hotel room online, most people now rely on the Internet as an irreplaceable part of their lives. Advancements in technology have completely re-shaped the everyday routine of a Modern Human.
• Health. Telehealth, EHR, 3D medical imaging, smart wearable devices that track heart rate and blood oxygen level are just a few examples of technological advancements introduced in health care over the last few decades.  
• Privacy. In the digital world, privacy is more important than ever. While the rates of cybercrimes increase, which by the way is also a recent tech innovation, such advancements as cryptography and antivirus software strike a blow, saving users’ privacy online.
• The attitude of the youth. A huge part of the modern generation literally can not imagine their lives without technology: they use smart devices at home and school, google anything they want to know, wear smartwatches, have video calls, and own robots and self-driving cars.
• Business. Such innovations as cloud computing, Big Data, Data Science, AI/ML completely reshaped the modern business landscape. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformations, prompting most businesses to switch to remote mode.
• Human behavior. With the mass adoption of mobile smart devices, people virtualized most of their day-to-day tasks. There is a dedicated mobile app for everything: booking a ride, tracking eating and sleeping habits, or even checking how one would look when he/she gets old.

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Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024, how has technology affected people.

It is indisputable that thanks to technology, we get a chance to live a life our predecessors could not even dream about. But do all tech advancements bring sole good to our lives? Or, maybe, the impact of tech innovations is quite ambiguous.

Positive Impact Of Technology

When all areas of human activity get rapidly digitized, it’s easy to become desensitized to the importance of innovations and advancements for the overall progress of society. But technology helps us immensely, for instance:

• Now that the agricultural processes are mechanized and automated, farmers may grow and harvest more crops.
• With advancements in transportation, people can travel long distances with speed and comfort – by air, land, or water.
• Communication, enriched with online channels, video calling, and 5G technologies, has reached new heights, connecting people from all corners of the globe.
• Radio, television, electronic media are indispensable means of news and information for people in any country worldwide.
• Education has recently become more accessible to all people, irrespective of their geographical location, thanks to modern technological advancements, such as online classrooms, electronic curricula, digital learning management systems among others.  

How to Get the Most out of Technology o remain empowered, not distressed, by the modern technological advancements, everyone should use them where and when needed .

For instance, you can make use of productivity and time-tracking apps available for smartphones or PCs when feeling a lack of concentration or self-discipline. Similarly, if you are concerned with your health and lifestyle, you can choose from a wide range of wearable devices and fitness apps.

Most of the digital tools can be downloaded free of charge, which makes it even easier to use them.

Negative Impact Of Technology

On the downside, some technological developments prove to be a curse rather than a blessing. Here are a few examples:

• Excessive use of gadgets, lack of offline communication, and social media abuse were proven to cause negative effects on mental health.
• In online communication, people are often hog-tied to express non-verbal cues, which results in misunderstandings and offenses.
• Relationships of those people who spend more time communicating online, compared to offline, may become tense and more fragile over time.
• Younger people, more prone to digital world addictions , sometimes lose the skills and desire to communicate with their peers face-to-face, in the real world.
• Video-gaming addicts often do not leave their homes for weeks and lead sedentary lifestyles, which eventually ruin their health.
• Teenagers spend too much time scrolling through Instagram and TikTok feeds bringing severe mental health problems to them as they tend to compare themselves to the dummy perfect images of others they see online.    

How to Reduce Negative Effects of Technology  Excessive use of technology can do more harm than good, and we should bear this in mind before we rush into digitizing our lives.

It is important to monitor the use of tech in every aspect of daily routine and, while it is not too late, limit the time spent in front of the smartphone screen. 

Also, it's a good idea to use all-in-one apps to manage a complex of tasks (e.g., having all your email accounts and messengers integrated in one place) rather than switching between a dozen of smaller apps for each activity. 

As an alternative to playing a video game or scrolling through social media, find a paper book that would interest you and spend time outdoors regularly. Instead of watching another Netflix episode in front of a TV set, talk to your family or take up gardening.

Spending more time outdoors, without electronic devices, promotes life-work balance and is generally good for a healthy lifestyle.    

Technological Advancements Of The Modern Day

Though it may be tough to predict which advancements technology would bring next, some innovations are already changing our beliefs about the world around us.

For instance, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Something that people would have considered magic just a few decades ago is now gaining popularity in business, gaming, and team building.

Wearable screens and gesture-based computing, other recent innovations, are predicted to soon substitute the usual PC and phone screens.    

Robots, another buzzword in today’s business world, have already replaced humans in some workplaces — robotic arms work at assembly or packing lines. Flying cars will soon address the issue of limited ground space and long traffic jams.

Well, people of Earth are even projected to use technological innovations to colonize other planets in the foreseeable future. The sky is no longer the limit!

Technology improves all aspects of human lives, making them easier and diverse. Though technological advancements are generally seen as a positive change, some people perceive them in a negative light.

Overindulgence in the use of digital apps and smart devices, overreliance on online tools may sometimes lead to tragic effects. Yet, if technological developments are used wisely, they bring nothing but good to society.

Clearly, technology by itself is neither good nor bad. It is only the way and extent to which we use it that matters.

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• Negative Effects of Technology on Society Words: 1456
• How Technology Has Affected Education Words: 559
• Interconnection of Nature, Society, and Technology Words: 1137
• How Technology Has Affected Communication Words: 933
• Technology in Human Interpretation Words: 1097
• Why Do Humans Rely So Much on Technology? Words: 842
• Sociotechnical Ensemble and Technology Theories Words: 1465
• The Sphere of Information Technology Words: 1107
• Using Technology in Everyday Life: Pros and Cons Words: 1400
• Impacts of the Usage of Technology Words: 887
• Technology: Is It Neutral? Words: 573
• Social Relations After Impact of Technology Words: 1658
• Technology and Its Impact on Humanity Words: 3030
• Smartphone Technology in the Society Words: 1453
• Technology and Society. Relative Influence. Words: 1636
• Technology and Interpersonal Communication Words: 1566
• The Relationships Between Technology Progress and Communication Words: 567

Are We too Dependent on Technology?

Do we rely on technology too much? Read this essay and learn whether people have become overly dependent on technology in the modern world.

Introduction

How dependent are we on technology, dependence on technology leads to less thinking, dependence on technology leads to less meaningful communication, adverse effects on children dependent on technology, positive effects of technology.

“Are we too dependent on technology?” is a popular question for debate. Many think that people’s dependence on technology is becoming too much. Others believe that humans are not dependent on technology and that reliance on automation has mostly positive effects. This dependence on technology essay aims to answer whether people have become overly dependent on technology.

Technology is a positive thing. The constant advancement in technology means that the execution of duties is becoming easier. Notably, improvements in the use of technology in the medical field have enabled doctors to save more lives.

Similarly, the automation of key processes at the workplace implies that the work environment is not only safer, but productivity is also higher. In fact, it is through technology that parents can stay in touch with their young ones studying abroad. People are now globally connected as a result of using technology. As it is, every action people have to carry out is dependent on technology.

However, the use of technology is raising concerns. First, technology has increased entertainment platforms among particular demographic groups, especially the youths who are constantly hooked on their gadgets for a long time.

Further, the over-reliance on technology is draining the healthy habits that people once used to have, leading to numerous health issues. Under this premise, I concur that people have become overly dependent on technology.

First, the use of technology implies that people are doing less thinking daily. One study has shown that constant use of the brain hinders the development of diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia in old age. In fact, proper brain development commences during early childhood when children engage in games like puzzles. Unfortunately, people in this generation work their brains less than required (Anderson and Rainie 2).

Reasons Why People Have Become Overly Dependent on Technology

In fact, people take out their calculators even for the simplest of calculations. Juggling one’s memory to remember a friend’s or relative’s number is a thing of the past. People no longer do all the thinking when there are phones with the ability to store contacts. As a result, people’s mental ability is reduced significantly, making them prone to dementia and memory loss as they age.

However, the problem is not the technology; the problem is how people use the technology. Technology is meant to aid processes, increase efficiency as well as productivity, and make life easier. However, people exploit technology by applying it even in simple tasks (Anderson and Rainie 5).

If technology would be applied as a tool other than a means of escaping reality, then its contribution to society would be seen and appreciated. However, people who sit and play video games all day make technology appear like a bad influence, yet some people play these games for relaxation and do productive jobs.

Secondly, through the influence of technology, people have stopped having quality communication with each other. Technology has invaded every aspect of life, making it hard for people to have meaningful conversations.

Notably, technology seems so convenient that word of mouth looks pretty unnecessary. For example, two friends in the same room will likely message each other than directly speak to one another. Most people have taken up the use of gadgets like iPhones and iPads, thereby spending a lot of their time on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

It means that even though people would initially meet and greet, it is no longer possible as they can communicate over the Internet, consequently limiting physical contact. Such an over-reliance on technology implies that most meaningful conversations between people are lost, leading to poor family bonding (Saidam 4).

Nevertheless, reliance on technology is essential in this digital age. The world has evolved into a digital platform, where anybody that has not joined the digital world is left behind on new developments.

Essentially, technology makes communication among people easier and can impact many people at a go without having to do bulk communication. Take, for example, a company doing job advertisements over the Internet. The adverts will likely be spotted and gain more audiences than when placed in a newspaper.

The primary reason for this phenomenon is that the world has evolved into a digital age, where people are slowly getting away from traditional means of communication. Further, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter save people the costs and inconveniences of traveling many miles to communicate, while it is possible to do so online.

The belief that technology is an essential application camouflages the various dangers associated with its use. It is believed that one way to stay afloat in the world today is keeping with trends of technological advancements and being part of the group. This way, one is kept updated and aware of what is happening worldwide.

Therefore, there is a need to join social sites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. One downside of operating these sites is requiring personal information before activating an account. Further, one has to link up with their friends and give personal details like their date of birth and location, among others. While adults may exercise dissemination of such information with caution, youths may not.

Thus, it is easier for anyone to get vital information about individuals, stalk them, and manipulate the information for their benefit. Besides, sharing such information should be a private business and not public, as everyone can gain access to you from wherever they are located. Notably, privacy is an essential element of life that is highly violated using technology.

The general population’s health is deteriorating with the advent of technology and the technological age. First, technology is applied for many purposes, even for the simplest tasks. Among the tasks are simple mathematical calculations that are manually feasible.

However, people choose to use their gadgets even when unnecessary because they do not want to leave their comfort zones. Not very long ago, children used to enjoy outdoor games. They would go around playing with other children in their community and, in the process, boost their stamina and immunity. Such interactions exposed the children to social life and various challenges like solving conflicts.

As a result, these children were smart in life and grew up as better people. It is not the case nowadays; the trend is that young children are exposed to games like PlayStation, gamepads, and joysticks rather than communal games. In effect, the children grow up with low self-esteem and communication problems as they are not used to being around people (Anderson and Rainie 2).

Further, their thinking is limited to themselves, meaning they grow up with selfishness, an inability to make friends, and poor behavioral characteristics.

Despite the negative impact of technology today, its contribution to making life easier and more convenient, as well as its simplicity to use, implies that the role of technology is crucial. One useful technological gadget is the cell phone. About 82% of the United States population is estimated to have a cell phone (Campbell 3).

Such ownership implies ease of access to information and convenience in communication. Notably, pressing just a single button on the cell phone would generate a lot of helpful information for the user. For instance, using smartphones means that people can improve their linguistic abilities and ease of messaging, which are now a big part of how people communicate.

On the other hand, all these developments in the world of technology imply that human beings are losing their culture and reality with the world. Nowadays, it seems like people cannot communicate and exist with all the available gadgets, as their use has been extended from official to private. For instance, the use of computers at the office makes work easier.

However, should all the data on official documents be lost in these computers, the companies cannot operate. Secondly, people are so used to communicating through the Internet and over the phones that should these gadgets not exist anymore, they would have difficulty communicating or maintaining touch with each other (Saidam 5).

As it is, individuals have made it seem like life would end should these gadgets be absent. On the contrary, people in previous generations would communicate and maintain constant touch with each other before the gadgets were developed.

While people would use their thoughts, get into discussions, and convene to solve pertinent issues, nowadays, people surf answers to every need. The dependency on computers has made people highly vulnerable to losing their identity (Saidam 5).

Culturally, people lose track of who they are and what is acceptable for them. A lot of cultural dilution occurs with the use of technology, like the Internet. Ideally, people start to adopt what they see online and practice it in their daily lives (Anderson and Rainie 5).

For instance, some people tend to envy the Western ways of doing things more than their traditional outlook on life. Ultimately, individuals act and behave the same with the proliferation of values.

Despite the convenience created by technology, people have become too dependent on technology. Everyday life activities are managed through technological gadgets and applications. People now rely on alarms to wake up. Phones are used to check the time and for constant communication throughout the day.

Once people get to the office, they log into emails, respond to them, and later log onto social networking sites, where they spend the better part of the day. Ideally, individuals check up on their friends and families through instant messaging on Facebook.

Once they know they are fine, they hardly create time to visit them. In fact, the type of communication between families and friends is diluted to fit social circles. Back at home, children hardly go out to play because they are constantly engrossed in their play stations.

The consequence is that the children have poor social skills, perform poorly in school, and have limited problem-solving skills. People hardly put their brains to the task because they mainly rely on technology to carry out simple arithmetic functions. Individuals are growing old and suffering from memory problems, all because they exploit the application of technology and become over-reliant on technology.

Works Cited

Anderson, Janna, and Lee Rainie. Millennials will Benefit and Suffer Due to their Hyperconnected Lives . Washington DC: Pew Research Center, 2012. Print.

Campbell, Marilyn A. “The Impact of the Mobile Phone on Young People’s Social Life.” Social Change in the 21st Century Conference , QUT Carseldine, Brisbane, 2005. Print.

Saidam, Sabri M. On Route to an E Society: Human Dependence on Technology and Adaptation Needs . 2004. Web.

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Technology over the long run: zoom out to see how dramatically the world can change within a lifetime

It is easy to underestimate how much the world can change within a lifetime. considering how dramatically the world has changed can help us see how different the world could be in a few years or decades..

Technology can change the world in ways that are unimaginable until they happen. Switching on an electric light would have been unimaginable for our medieval ancestors. In their childhood, our grandparents would have struggled to imagine a world connected by smartphones and the Internet.

Similarly, it is hard for us to imagine the arrival of all those technologies that will fundamentally change the world we are used to.

We can remind ourselves that our own future might look very different from the world today by looking back at how rapidly technology has changed our world in the past. That’s what this article is about.

One insight I take away from this long-term perspective is how unusual our time is. Technological change was extremely slow in the past – the technologies that our ancestors got used to in their childhood were still central to their lives in their old age. In stark contrast to those days, we live in a time of extraordinarily fast technological change. For recent generations, it was common for technologies that were unimaginable in their youth to become common later in life.

The long-run perspective on technological change

The big visualization offers a long-term perspective on the history of technology. 1

The timeline begins at the center of the spiral. The first use of stone tools, 3.4 million years ago, marks the beginning of this history of technology. 2 Each turn of the spiral represents 200,000 years of history. It took 2.4 million years – 12 turns of the spiral – for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking. 3

To be able to visualize the inventions in the more recent past – the last 12,000 years – I had to unroll the spiral. I needed more space to be able to show when agriculture, writing, and the wheel were invented. During this period, technological change was faster, but it was still relatively slow: several thousand years passed between each of these three inventions.

From 1800 onwards, I stretched out the timeline even further to show the many major inventions that rapidly followed one after the other.

The long-term perspective that this chart provides makes it clear just how unusually fast technological change is in our time.

You can use this visualization to see how technology developed in particular domains. Follow, for example, the history of communication: from writing to paper, to the printing press, to the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, all the way to the Internet and smartphones.

Or follow the rapid development of human flight. In 1903, the Wright brothers took the first flight in human history (they were in the air for less than a minute), and just 66 years later, we landed on the moon. Many people saw both within their lifetimes: the first plane and the moon landing.

This large visualization also highlights the wide range of technology’s impact on our lives. It includes extraordinarily beneficial innovations, such as the vaccine that allowed humanity to eradicate smallpox , and it includes terrible innovations, like the nuclear bombs that endanger the lives of all of us .

What will the next decades bring?

The red timeline reaches up to the present and then continues in green into the future. Many children born today, even without further increases in life expectancy, will live well into the 22nd century.

New vaccines, progress in clean, low-carbon energy, better cancer treatments – a range of future innovations could very much improve our living conditions and the environment around us. But, as I argue in a series of articles , there is one technology that could even more profoundly change our world: artificial intelligence (AI).

One reason why artificial intelligence is such an important innovation is that intelligence is the main driver of innovation itself. This fast-paced technological change could speed up even more if it’s driven not only by humanity’s intelligence but also by artificial intelligence. If this happens, the change currently stretched out over decades might happen within a very brief time span of just a year. Possibly even faster. 4

I think AI technology could have a fundamentally transformative impact on our world. In many ways, it is already changing our world, as I documented in this companion article . As this technology becomes more capable in the years and decades to come, it can give immense power to those who control it (and it poses the risk that it could escape our control entirely).

Such systems might seem hard to imagine today, but AI technology is advancing quickly. Many AI experts believe there is a real chance that human-level artificial intelligence will be developed within the next decades, as I documented in this article .

Technology will continue to change the world – we should all make sure that it changes it for the better

What is familiar to us today – photography, the radio, antibiotics, the Internet, or the International Space Station circling our planet – was unimaginable to our ancestors just a few generations ago. If your great-great-great grandparents could spend a week with you, they would be blown away by your everyday life.

What I take away from this history is that I will likely see technologies in my lifetime that appear unimaginable to me today.

In addition to this trend towards increasingly rapid innovation, there is a second long-run trend. Technology has become increasingly powerful. While our ancestors wielded stone tools, we are building globe-spanning AI systems and technologies that can edit our genes.

Because of the immense power that technology gives those who control it, there is little that is as important as the question of which technologies get developed during our lifetimes. Therefore, I think it is a mistake to leave the question about the future of technology to the technologists. Which technologies are controlled by whom is one of the most important political questions of our time because of the enormous power these technologies convey to those who control them.

We all should strive to gain the knowledge we need to contribute to an intelligent debate about the world we want to live in. To a large part, this means gaining knowledge and wisdom on the question of which technologies we want.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank my colleagues Hannah Ritchie, Bastian Herre, Natasha Ahuja, Edouard Mathieu, Daniel Bachler, Charlie Giattino, and Pablo Rosado for their helpful comments on drafts of this essay and the visualization. Thanks also to Lizka Vaintrob and Ben Clifford for the conversation that initiated this visualization.

Appendix: About the choice of visualization in this article

The recent speed of technological change makes it difficult to picture the history of technology in one visualization. When you visualize this development on a linear timeline, then most of the timeline is almost empty, while all the action is crammed into the right corner:

In my large visualization here, I tried to avoid this problem and instead show the long history of technology in a way that lets you see when each technological breakthrough happened and how, within the last millennia, there was a continuous acceleration of technological change.

The recent speed of technological change makes it difficult to picture the history of technology in one visualization. In the appendix, I show how this would look if it were linear.

It is, of course, difficult to assess when exactly the first stone tools were used.

The research by McPherron et al. (2010) suggested that it was at least 3.39 million years ago. This is based on two fossilized bones found in Dikika in Ethiopia, which showed “stone-tool cut marks for flesh removal and percussion marks for marrow access”. These marks were interpreted as being caused by meat consumption and provide the first evidence that one of our ancestors, Australopithecus afarensis, used stone tools.

The research by Harmand et al. (2015) provided evidence for stone tool use in today’s Kenya 3.3 million years ago.

References:

McPherron et al. (2010) – Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia . Published in Nature.

Harmand et al. (2015) – 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya . Published in Nature.

Evidence for controlled fire use approximately 1 million years ago is provided by Berna et al. (2012) Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa , published in PNAS.

The authors write: “The ability to control fire was a crucial turning point in human evolution, but the question of when hominins first developed this ability still remains. Here we show that micromorphological and Fourier transform infrared microspectroscopy (mFTIR) analyses of intact sediments at the site of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa, provide unambiguous evidence—in the form of burned bone and ashed plant remains—that burning took place in the cave during the early Acheulean occupation, approximately 1.0 Ma. To the best of our knowledge, this is the earliest secure evidence for burning in an archaeological context.”

This is what authors like Holden Karnofsky called ‘Process for Automating Scientific and Technological Advancement’ or PASTA. Some recent developments go in this direction: DeepMind’s AlphaFold helped to make progress on one of the large problems in biology, and they have also developed an AI system that finds new algorithms that are relevant to building a more powerful AI.

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• Experts Optimistic About the Next 50 Years of Digital Life
• 5. Leading concerns about the future of digital life

Table of Contents

• 1. Themes about the next 50 years of life online
• 2. Internet pioneers imagine the next 50 years
• 3. Humanity is at a precipice; its future is at stake
• 4. The internet will continue to make life better
• About this canvassing of experts
• Acknowledgments

The comments in the following section are a sharp contrast to the utopian visions of equity and advancement described above. Whereas some see the future of the internet as a great equalizer, others warn that technology can just as easily be used for control and exploitation.

Inequality on the rise: The growing divide between haves and have-nots

The majority of respondents to this study are in agreement that digital life is likely to improve the lives of people at the top of the socioeconomic ladder over the next few decades. A large share of those who predicted that internet use will produce change for the worse for most individuals over the next 50 years expressed concerns that an extension of current trends will lead to a widening economic divide that leaves the majority in the dust of the privileged class.

Johanna Drucker , professor of digital humanities in the department of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, “The question ignores the growing and disastrous division between poor, disenfranchised populations and wealthy, privileged ones. There may be huge improvements in some people’s lives and negative impacts for many, many more – pollution, toxins from waste generated by electronic media, deregulation of labor conditions for workers in the high-tech industries, deterioration of support systems and social infrastructure and so on.”

Michael Kleeman , a senior fellow at the University of California, San Diego, and board member at the Institute for the Future, wrote, “Because of the economic disparity the new technologies will be used with those with access to more resources, financial and technical. The digital divide will not be one of access but of security, privacy and autonomy.”

Jillian C. York , director of international freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, commented, “I don’t believe that technology will be a net negative; rather, I worry and suspect that it will make life better for some of us but worse for others. Much of the technology coming out of Silicon Valley aims to serve elites, when we should be aiming toward equality for all.”

Zoetanya Sujon , a senior lecturer specializing in digital culture at University of Arts London, commented, “In my view, and drawing from the growth of global big tech companies and decreased pluralization of global platforms, I believe that in 50 years, the economic and cultural divides between rich and poor, developed and developing nations, technologically advanced and disadvantaged will continue to grow. These divides are serious and already take place within urban centers, between developing and developed nations, and between rural and urban areas, to name only a few sites of division. Thus, for those with capital, including access to new technologies and the literacies that come with them, life will likely involve wearable and ubiquitous computing based on internet and platformed communication…. These kinds of tools will likely be available only to those with the economic and cultural capital to access them.”

John Laudun , a respondent who provided no identifying details, commented, “The next 50 years is going to be great for a percentage of humans smaller than the percentage of humans for whom things will probably get worse. We continue to forget that 75% of the world’s populations are effectively peasants, individuals (living in families, groups, etc.) who engage in subsistence agriculture. Too often when we project into the future we imagine ourselves, people like us or the people we think we see. But there are hosts of groups that we do not see. How will technological advances, and their various implementations, help or hurt them? No one, for example, could have predicted the explosion in micro-transactions connecting villagers to one another and a wider world thanks to the cellphone.”

Christopher Leslie , lecturer in media, science and technology studies at South China University of Technology, wrote, “There will be many opportunities for consumers and entrepreneurs in the internet of the future, but the technology will mostly enhance the businesses and countries that already are ahead. It seems likely that a different kind of networking technology, perhaps truly decentralized and certainly separated from telecommunications companies, will be developed to challenge the inequalities fostered by today’s use of internet technology. The general trend in the technological society to this point has been that more people have received more benefits to their lives. This is in terms of any meaningful metric: health care, education, political participation, sense of self. This will continue into the next 50 years. However, the inequalities perpetrated by the modern use of digital technology will mean that not all people will benefit. The overall trend will be positive, but some ways of life and some categories of people will suffer a detriment that may be extreme.”

John Willinsky , professor and director of the Public Knowledge Project at Stanford Graduate School of Education, explained why he selected the automated survey response that digital life will be mostly beneficial for most individuals’ lives over the next few decades: “I say ‘mostly for the better’ as both praise and critique, because the ‘mostly’ speaks to the continuing inequities in the distribution of the ‘better,’ and – while ‘mostly’ suggests a majority of benefits – it will take a great deal of concern and effort to ensure that that those benefits are distributed with some lesser degree of inequality than previously to more people and, by the same token, more people need to participate in the processes behind that distribution.”

Fernando Barrio , director of the law program at the Universidad Nacional de Rio Negro, Argentina, commented, “The ubiquitous-tech society will imply a better, more enjoyable life for those being part of it. Wearable technology, tech implants, AI-medicine, autonomous robot workers and companions and many other coming technologies will allow humans to reach new limits of what to do and expect. However, the question is, with an ever-increasing income concentration at global scale in almost every country, how many members of the society will be able to be part of the enjoyment of that ubiquitous, hyper-connected, AI-tech society?”

James Scofield O’Rourke , a professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, commented, “People will be ‘mostly better off’ in 50 years’ time, largely because of our ability to apply things we already know, i.e., the decoding of the human genome, our understanding of the fragility of our planetary environment and more. The singular exception will be that group of people who have no assets, no education, no opportunity, and as a result, no hope. They will be reduced to dependence on the kindness of neighbors, strangers and the government.”

Elizabeth Feinler , the original manager of the ARPANET Network Information Center and an Internet Hall of Fame member, said, “As the internet matures, I hope the big guys will remember the little guys. As a pioneer, I remember when the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brins and countless other famous and successful entrepreneurs were working out of garages or dorm rooms, often penniless but with a lot of perseverance behind a great idea. Leave room for the next little guy – the one who comes up with a great pair of socks, or produces lovely artwork, or sells that gizmo you can’t live without for $19.95, or develops a security system that works, or cures cancer or Alzheimer’s – to hang their shingles on the internet too. True, one of them may challenge your greatness – it’s the American way – but don’t crowd them out. Just make your own service, product or idea better, and enjoy the challenge.”

Michael Veale , co-author of “Fairness and Accountability Designs Needs for Algorithmic Support in High-Stakes Public Sector Decision-Making” and a technology policy researcher at University College London, responded, “Technological change will improve some of the lowest standards of living in the world today, but beyond a certain point (e.g., provision of basic needs), it is unclear who will benefit. It is likely that technological change will force countries to reconsider how they measure welfare, progress and societal benefit, and this is likely to differ strongly across different countries and cultures.”

Ryan Sweeney , director of analytics at Ignite Social Media, commented, “Technology has the potential to further divide humans on a class level. Those who can afford the technology will have significant benefits from wealth-maintenance to extension of life. Those who cannot afford the technology will likely remain disconnected or will not receive the same level of service as those who can.”

Ian O’Byrne , an assistant professor at the College of Charleston whose focus is literacy and technology, said, “The main challenge is whether or not we have the social, political and educational imagination to adapt and effectively use these technologies. If we do not (and history has shown this again and again), then a relative few will be able to leverage these new powers and tools, while the remainder may be worse off for it.”

A policy director with the European Commission wrote, “Millions of people in the world still do not have access to clean water, education, clean energy, fast and cheap communication and the health and welfare benefits that are associated with that (not to mention economic growth and job potential).”

Peter Asaro , a professor at The New School and philosopher of sci-tech and media who examines artificial intelligence and robotics, commented, “The penetration of the internet deeper into the physical and social world will benefit some greatly, many to some degree and most little or negatively. Most of the benefits will go those who have already benefited from the internet. Some benefits will be derived from aggregating and analyzing the collected data, but few people will see the connection.”

Joshua Loftus , assistant professor of information, operations and management sciences at New York University and co-author of “Counterfactual Fairness in Machine Learning,” commented, “I expect inequality to continue growing in each new dimension. For many in the world it will be a long and drawn-out apocalypse. For others it will be an augmented reality wonderland of hyperstimuli and consumption. It will be better for some and worse for others. For non-humans, for example, mass extinction will probably accelerate.”

Simeon Yates , director of the Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Science at the University of Liverpool, said, “I sadly believe that we will see a world of digital haves and have-nots – where the majority have access but utilize a limited set of services (as is the case with written literacy).”

An associate professor of sociology at a major university in Japan responded, “The digital divide will become a more serious problem. Most tech companies will make apps and digital tools for people who easily utilize internet and digital devices and also for English users. This creates an illusion of ubiquitous internet, but the infrastructure will tend to be made for only those people. This could create huge social problems.”

A program director for technology at a U.S. Ivy League school said, “Adoption of technology will be uneven, and the rich will get richer. Surveillance technology will keep the masses from organizing for social and political movements. The rich will get richer.”

Life will not be better for most individuals if current trends expand, extend

A number of respondents expressed concerns over the power of large technology companies, the rise of platforms that offer services in exchange for data and marketing dollars, the potential for growing lack of human agency in the algorithm age, the potential loss of jobs as humans are replaced in workplaces, and other worries over emerging potential negatives of digital life.

Amy Webb , founder of the Future Today Institute and professor of strategic foresight at New York University, commented, “In 2018, there are nine companies (which I call the Big 9) that control the future of humanity, because they are building the future of artificial intelligence. Over the next five decades, we will see widespread consolidation in the fields of AI and digital platforms. We’ll trade convenience for choice and find that we have far fewer options for everything, from how fast to drive in our cars to which restaurants we’ll choose for dinner. Our professional and personal lives will be tethered to a provider – likely Amazon or Google – which will maintain and run our smart homes, hospitals, schools, city infrastructure and offices. We will probably see a vast new digital divide: The wealthiest among us will have the privilege to remain anonymous if they choose, while everyone else will submit to continual surveillance for marketing and business intelligence. Importantly, during the next five decades, America will have fallen far behind China, primarily because of China’s long-term, comprehensive AI strategy and its integration into other state-level initiatives. In the U.S. commercial interests are what propel AI, platforms and digital media. The interests of for-profit companies don’t necessarily align with the best interests of democracy, our country or humanity. With significant investment in these fields, there is tremendous pressure to generate commercial products and services, and the speed required doesn’t leave room to ask critical questions about a technology’s impact on individuals, communities or our society. If we do not change the developmental track of AI in the present, the probability of negative scenarios will increase during the next 50 years. Collectively, we fetishize the future. Few are actively mapping longer-term outcomes, and that is a big mistake.”

Anita Salem , systems research and design principal at SalemSystems, wrote, “Without a concerted effort to design these new systems ethically and responsibly with a goal of improving the human condition, we will see a world of increasing power disparity with capitalism and corporations at the top. Worldwide, we already see a rise in authoritarianism, a weakening of democracy and the dominance of transnational corporations. In the United States, we are also seeing a shift in demographics and economics that looks to further weaken democratic ideals of freedom (but not for people of color), identity (a corporation has human rights) and free speech (journalists are the enemy of the people).”

Roland Benedikter , co-director of the Center for Advanced Studies at Eurac Research Bozen, South Tyrol, Italy, responded, “The overall problem is democracy. The internet as we know it has been invented by and within open societies. If there will be a multipolar global order in the full sense, it might be partially nondemocratic, thus lowering basic rights and opportunities as compared to now.”

Simeon Yates , director of the Centre for Digital Humanities and Social Science at the University of Liverpool, said, “I see a much greater commercial role in the digital sphere unless net neutrality can be enforced. As more of the internet is served up through walled garden/gated community platforms and apps – digital places whose access is commercially or organizationally constrained – there are inherent threats to open society and democracy. This is ironically the opposite of the hopes of the internet’s founders and first users. If we want to see an internet for all – for the many, not the few – we need to realize that this will need regulation and policy. I see the internet becoming ever more part of politics and policy on many fronts therefore.”

Jillian C. York , director of international freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, commented, “I expect to see the world’s platform companies break up, and a more diverse array of platforms to enter the market. This may lead to more silos, but it could also create safer spaces for communication for various communities…. As for laws, it remains to be seen – but I worry that if our democracy continues down the road it’s on, the internet will suffer.”

Danny O’Brien , international director for a nonprofit digital rights group, commented, “My hope will be that these tools will be at the control of individual users, not hidden or concentrated in smaller, more powerful groups.”

Kenneth Cukier , author and data editor for The Economist, commented, “These tools in the hands of the populists and authoritarians of 2018, in 50 years’ time, mean that if safeguards are meagre, a surveillance state is possible. Freedom might be winnowed even if most people feel better off. This could be a horrible irony.”

Andrian Kreye , a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Germany, said, “Current conditions will solidify monopoly capitalism, making it harder and harder for users to escape the grip of the grid and for newcomers to break into the business. The internet as we know it in 2019 is the basic structure for a world based on an AI-driven infrastructure…. User interfaces will be speech- and thought-based, turning users even more into nodes of an ever-expanding network. For most people, these technological advances will increase convenience and ease of use. For corporations using networked AI this will mean a wealth of data and constant contact with a consumer base that can be steered and nudged with increasing ease.”

Jonathan Taplin , director emeritus at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, wrote, “At the very moment when the bottom-up networked revolution is affording us the opportunity to disperse power closer to the people, both our politics and our business are concentrating power in fewer hands. We can change this, but we need to act now.”

Brian Harvey , lecturer on the social implications of computer technology at the University of California, Berkeley, said, “Just in this past year, there has been a big increase in popular understanding of who profits from social media technology. If that new understanding leads to rebellion, perhaps the internet can return to the anarchist utopia that was first envisioned. But if it fizzles out, people will still be bought and sold by social media.”

Peter Levine , associate dean for research and professor of public affairs at Tufts University, wrote, “Right now, the internet seems to be eroding journalism as a profession, giving a few big companies and governments (like China’s) more social control, and balkanizing citizens. Those trends may continue, or they may provoke a civic backlash that yields a better internet.”

Mauro D. Ríos , an adviser to the eGovernment Agency of Uruguay and director of the Uruguayan Internet Society chapter, responded, “The internet will reach very advanced technological development but will lose freedom due to economic and political interests over the network. It is possible that the international community will develop a parallel network or establish technical environments on the internet that are beyond the control of governments or organizations.”

[now being]

A professor of computer science expert in systems at a major U.S. technological university wrote, “On the one hand, the future technological changes will lead to positive societal changes, if the political power in control of knowledge is benevolent and progressive. On the other hand, if the political power is repressive (e.g., the Orwellian vision described in his book ‘1984’), then the technological changes will result in significant negative changes, possibly a dystopian society. In other words, technological changes are enablers that can be used for good or for evil. The question of whether they will better or will worsen an individual’s life is not a technological question, but a political one, of how technological advances will be used. My hope is that the political forces will evolve toward bettering individual lives.”

Ramon Lopez de Mantaras , director of the Spanish National Research Council’s Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, said, “Unfortunately, with the arrival of the internet we did not only open a box that contains good and positive things. We opened a box that is causing lots of problems. We are living in an accelerated pace that leaves us less and less time for reflection. We are on a train running at very high speed that is taking us nobody knows where. Are we happier now than 30 years ago? I do not think so! And when one reads about the social credit initiative in China one should be really afraid. In summary, there will be more stress due to living an accelerated life and real threats to our freedom and privacy.”

Mike O’Connor , a retired technologist who worked at ICANN and on national broadband issues, commented, “I’m deeply pessimistic about the future of the planet in general and digital life in specific. The undercurrent of the present day pits earnest volunteers (like me) against ever more sophisticated and well-funded corporations and governments. I believe that 2050 will find us in a dystopian environmental nightmare in which the internet I love has become a devastatingly powerful tool of suppression and mind control. The next 50 years will see the end of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance and the descent back into a much more authoritarian era. Techniques being beta tested in current politics (e.g., Russian meddling, Brexit, Trump) will be viewed as unsophisticated trial runs of control technologies built by the very best minds – people who are well compensated for their efforts. While I’m a fan of ‘plucky opponents,’ I don’t believe the forces of good stand a chance against the gathering intellectual and ethical darkness.”

Ken Birman , a professor in the department of computer science at Cornell University, responded, “Bill Gates often points out that by any statistical metric you can define, global quality of life and also quality of life in the Western world have risen enormously for many decades now. I see no reason for this to change in the 2050 time period, with one major exception: Some countries, notably China, seem to be viewing the internet as a massive technology for spying on their own population and on much of the rest of the world. Russia seems to view the internet as a playground for disruption. North Korea has used it to extort money and to harass their enemies. So I do worry that research on strong ways to protect security and privacy, and to protect against intrusion, needs a great deal of additional emphasis and investment, to enable the bright future Bill Gates sees and also to protect against this sort of harassment and meddling.”

An engineer and chief operating officer for a project automating code said, “The internet will become a highly regulated and monitored form of communication with its main aim to promote consumerism. People’s use of it in seeming information will be mined to an intimidating extent, putting severe limitations of personal freedoms. People wanting social change, which will mean equity and justice will withdraw from electronic communications. The use of encoding will eventually be made illegal except for those with sociopolitical power.”

An expert in algorithms and bias and assistant professor artificial intelligence at a major European university wrote, “At some moment the question of who owns or controls the algorithms will become the prime question for humanity, and at the moment algorithms will become uncontrollable by humans we will face a whole lot of other questions. Whether that will happen in the next 50 years or earlier, or later, who knows? But, that there is this trend of algorithms replacing/controlling any interaction between humans and the world (and other humans) is undeniable and already happening: Facebook controls much of our social communication, Google manages our lives and information consumption, Twitter mediates our chit-chat, and with the rise of modern smartphones the control of visual information (e.g. Google Lens) is coming. And this is just the beginning. Algorithms will take more control over our lives (health, music preferences, job choices, satisfaction, etc.) and the world (markets, cities, deployment of resources and much more).”

One of the world’s foremost experts in the sociology of human-technology interaction said, “I fear not only an integration but surveillance so that there is a chill on political and social expression. Already you see the start of this kind of regime in China. Social control in exchange for convenience is what I mostly fear.”

What’s going to happen if humans become cyborgs or AI gets smarter than us?

A share of respondents reflected on the potential dark side of recent innovations – a world in which neural implants help connect people’s brains to the internet – and shared concerns about the prospects of technology moving toward and beyond human-level artificial intelligence.

Frank Tipler , a mathematical physicist at Tulane University, commented, “We may see human-level AI within 50 years. Once the human level is reached, AI will automatically take off to superhuman levels. Humans will cease to be the dominant life form in the universe. If humans accept their loss of being the dominant life form, then AI technology can raise human standards of living. If humans join AIs as downloads, this will also be good. But if humans decide to make war or enslave the AIs, it will be very bad. I’m optimistic, hence my answer that internet evolution over the next 50 years will be mostly positive in individuals’ lives.”

Erik Huesca , president of the Knowledge and Digital Culture Foundation, based in Mexico City, said, “The greatest point of tension between humans and intelligent entities (not necessarily robots) will be the values of our current society, privacy and respect for democracy and the diversity of communities and cultures. If systems whose objective is efficiency interact in the social field with humans, there can be seeds for the type of totalitarianism that we are seeing today. The idea of the individual in societies highly linked by networks can disappear. Technologies will be aimed at development of superhumans with genetic modification. (It is cheaper to modify an organism than to produce entities from other materials.) The values of human life will change. The new sciences of life will be the key point of knowledge development.”

Frank Feather , futurist and consultant with StratEDGY, commented, “Thinking ahead 50 years, it is highly likely that DigiTransHumanoids, who will replace humans as a species, will be able to network and communicate directly with each other on a brain-to-brain basis, via the cosmic wavelengths that carry today’s platforms. As such, no platforms will be needed. There may well be a Google-like cosmic platform that prevails if Google itself transforms itself into that platform. We need to understand that each and every technology is an extension of the human species and its abilities – abilities that are vastly underdeveloped. DigiTransHumans will be vastly more advanced in our next evolution, and they will unify this planet and reach out into the cosmos from where they first originated.”

Michael Dyer , an emeritus professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, commented, “One of the greatest existential threats to humanity will be, not AI, but General Artificial Intelligence (GAI). Our humanity is based in our bodies, not our minds (when comparing ourselves to synthetic entities with similar or greater mental capabilities). Synthetic GAI entities will not be born; they will not grow from children into adults; they will not grow old and die. They will not urinate or defecate. They will not have sex. Change the embodiment of mind and you change what it means to be human. GONE would be the following: Disney movies (since no children), romantic novels (since no sex) and all experiences based on bodily desires (recharge batteries vs. good meal at a restaurant). If GAI is allowed then elimination of humanity will occur, either via general spread of GAI entities or by development of a single, super-intelligence GAI.”

Alexey Turchin , existential risks researcher at Foundation Science for Life Extension, responded, “If there will be life on Earth at all, that is assuming a positive outcome, we will live in the world dominated by global benevolent superintelligence, where there will be no border between VR, AI and individual minds of fleshy humans and uploads.”

Anita Salem , research and design principal at SalemSystems, shared a dystopian post-human scenario, writing, “In 50 years, digital tools, if used at all, will be used for entertainment only. Video and chat apps will be created by the corporate powers to shape opinions and behaviors of the masses and will be widely and publicly displayed. The Dark Web will be alive as a black market and revolutionary system used by the outcasts. Organic/chemical communication systems will be used by corporations for real work and they will form the underlying structure of computing systems. They will be embedded in everything, including humans. This will be the ‘post-human’ era, where the human/machine interface is embedded at birth, invisible and pervasive.”

What if having less work leads to the opposite of the ideal ‘life of leisure’?

A share of respondents shared thoughts about a world with fewer jobs for humans.

Mark Maben, a general manager at Seton Hall University , wrote, “Right now, we are ill-prepared to manage how artificial intelligence will disrupt the nature of work across the globe, both emotionally and institutionally. Humanity has to plan immediately for the loss of literally billions of jobs around the world as AI and automation replace people in all types of work. This means governments must step up to provide for displaced workers through benefits like a universal basic income, health care, retirement security AND guiding people to accept a new definition for what it means to perform meaningful work. Parenting, volunteering, lifelong learning, mentoring, leisure, artistic creation and other pursuits must be raised in stature and acceptance. But the response to economic disruption so far has been nationalism, authoritarian, scapegoating, violence against ‘the other’ and denial of what’s to come. While I believe in the potential for technological progress to improve our lives, I lack faith in our ability to successfully manage that progress for social good. As E.O. Wilson wrote, ‘We have created a “Star Wars” civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.’ That’s a dangerous combination, one that presents a real risk for individuals.”

Justin Amyx , a technician with Comcast, said, “It can be potentially catastrophic to low-wage, unskilled workers. Without a plan to do something to mitigate that displacement – of machines taking people’s jobs – poverty may prevent access therefore stifling growth. If we do resolve to account and accommodate for these potential issues there is no telling where technology can possibly go.”

Marc Noble , a respondent who provided no identifying details, commented, “AI, if properly developed, will take over a lot of jobs. A lot of IT positions will disappear; programming will be relegated to a very small number if at all. AI will develop its own language and communications channels that will be faster, more efficient and a lot more secure. The need for old industries and fossil fuels will be sharply curtailed.”

Johanna Drucker , professor of digital humanities in the department of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, suggested a movement toward planned creation of non-technological job positions as work evolves. She wrote, “Distributed computing, embedded into ‘natural’ interfaces, will create a seamless integration of access to networked information and experience in the physical, analog world. The hazard is that the greater the integration, the higher the risks of codependence. I would advocate for physical labor (urban gardens and forests, elder care, child care, local food production and preparation) to be part of the emerging social structure. Free human beings from labor that is meaningless, but give them work with a purpose. Keep in mind that skills like plumbing and electrical work cannot be outsourced and that infrastructure is massively physical and built on stacks of systems that have to work together. We should always have a way to sustain ourselves without networked technologies. Reduce our path dependencies, fragment the supply chains, resist monopoly controls, change the values of the culture toward sustainable and equitable human and animal life. Someday the idea of huge profits and private control of massive wealth will look as grotesque as the idea of heads on pikes and guillotines do now.”

An assistant professor of social justice based in the U.S. wrote that in a world with fewer jobs for humans thanks to networked AI and other transformations, “Technology will end humanity, as people will no longer strive to be the best they can be.”

Who’s really in charge here – humans or automated digital systems?

Concerns over slipping into a world with no real human agency were expressed by some respondents.

Marc Brenman , managing partner at IDARE LLC, said, “The internet will become transparent to us. We will think our way through it, using implanted devices. There will be no privacy. Everything will be remembered, and there will be no forgiveness. Virtual reality will become reality. The very concept of ‘virtual’ will almost disappear. People will be able to distinguish fact from fiction even less than we do today. Unscrupulous people will use this technology to create our obedience. Free will will be eroded. We will surrender even more of our time to bread and circuses, celebrities, puppies and kittens. We will live so long that life itself will be a burden. Machines will do everything better than we can, including creating art.”

An assistant professor of social justice at a U.S. university wrote, “People will become helpless and rely on tech for almost everything. Tech will take over almost all routine activities, but this will not empower most. Rather, tech will serve as a prison.”

John Sniadowski , a director for a technology company, wrote, “To the vast majority of internet users, the internet is akin to making a cup of tea. You simply want to fill the kettle from the tap, switch on the kettle, boil the water and pour it onto the tea. They don’t ever think about the infrastructure that makes that possible. This means that people will adopt any internet that makes life easier without thinking of the consequences.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “I fear that we will end up in an extremely dystopian situation where autonomous AI makes decisions for society with significant disparities between the haves and the have-nots. This is not inevitable, but I think controlled self-learning and self-management is necessary for a beneficial contribution to society.”

A strategy consultant wrote, “People will lose individuality and cultures will die, merged into one Eurocentric mass with threats to trade, aid and international access. Minorities will be corralled and shamed online into silence and acceptance as online speech and media overwhelms typical law. Copyrights will be enforced beyond fair use, leaving entertainment and information heavily blockaded from the poor.”

An anonymous respondent predicted that the public will just tune into entertainment to cope with the new realities of this dystopia others have described, writing, “Oh, brave new world that has such addictive pacification tools available. People will not be better or worse off. They will be distracted from their situation with individualized circuses.”

Corporate self-regulation is seen as unlikely remedy due to market capitalism

The 50th year of computer networking has been one of commonly expressed disillusionment with the current state of affairs online. A large share of respondents to this canvassing say that profit-based enterprises’ domination over the network of networks and thus the world – now and in future – is what concerns them most.

Cliff Zukin , professor of public policy and political science at the School for Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, said, “Looking backward, there are two axioms that have stood the test of time: 1) Information is power and 2) Power corrupts. Fifty years into the future – by then I expect everything will be global and individual at the same time – we either won’t be here, or we will have figured it out. If we figured it out, there will be no independent states, nor much difference between human and robot. All big players will be multinational corporations. Borders won’t exist; countries electing their own leaders won’t exist. We will have a governance structure of the internet determined by those powerful enough to make that happen. In other words, the Empire will win.”

Douglas Rushkoff , a professor of media at City University of New York, responded, “When technological development is determined solely by the market we get some unintended consequences. Barring a major shift in emphasis away from corporate capitalism, the benefits of any technological development will probably be determined by how aggressively one company or another pursues its goals. Some technologies will be less bad, because the manufacturers want to be less harmful. But even those outside traditional venture funding, who attempt to create beneficial technologies, will be subject to the supply chain and platform limitations of the mainstream technologies. So it’s going to be really hard to develop any capital-intensive tools that don’t serve capital over people.”

Christian Huitema , internet pioneer and consultant focused on privacy online, previously Internet Architecture Board president, chief scientist at Bell Research and Microsoft distinguished engineer, commented, “We developed a wonderful communication technology only to see it captured by large corporations and governments. It will take several generations for humanity to regain control…. The ad-funded business model evolved in generalized corporate surveillance. It requires more attention to drive more revenue; AI-driven user interactions are providing that. This AI + ads feedback loop is creating digital drug addicts.”

Seth Finkelstein , consulting programmer at Finkelstein Consulting, commented, “I, for one, welcome our new platform overlords. I see almost no check on the tendency toward monopoly control, or at the very best, oligarchy involving a handful of corporate behemoths. It’s sobering to realize that the very few serious restrictions that exist come from major nation-states (i.e., China’s own desires for internal control). That’s the level of power needed for an effective opposition. Looking at the history of the 20th century, it’s entirely possible that the 21st century will see some massive convulsion similar to the Great Depression or a World War. And the aftermath of that event (presuming civilization still exists) could entail strong antitrust laws that would severely limit the data-mining business models of many of today’s major internet companies. It’d be a horrible way to get that outcome, but if the past is any guide, one of the few ways it would ever happen.”

Walid Al-Saqaf , senior lecturer at Sodertorn University, member of the board of trustees of the Internet Society, commented, “With consolidation on the internet as an ongoing threat to democracy and fairness to citizens, there will be a greater tendency to move to alternative decentralized solutions that aim at empowering citizens more directly as bitcoin did. That being said, I expect a pushback by governments and conglomerates that will fight to remain in power, leading to an inevitable clash of wills. At the end of the day, it will be mass adoption of which technology that will determine who will win.”

John Leslie King , computer science professor, University of Michigan, and a consultant on Cyberinfrastructure for the NSF CISE and SBE directorates for several years, commented, “It is hard to know exactly what will happen with power-reinforcing technologies in a climate that is tending to exacerbate wealth and income inequalities, given the proven influence of wealth and income on the social order. It is not crazy to imagine IT reinforcing the power of an elite that already has a lot of power, especially if that elite tends to be aggrandizing power to begin with. Many IT proponents think that some version of libertarian utopianism will arise to save the day by taking power from ‘the man’ and giving it to ‘the people.’ In my experience, ‘the man’ doesn’t want to lose power to ‘the people’ or anyone else. It is a mistake to think of technology as changing anything. Technology is, at most, one of several powerful forces that shape things.”

Michael Veale , co-author of “Fairness and Accountability Designs Needs for Algorithmic Support in High-Stakes Public Sector Decision-Making” and a technology policy researcher at University College London, responded, “As more and more tasks and interactions move online, political battles will become increasingly about the governance of the internet. The interconnectedness of this policy area means that new democratic institutions will be needed that are more global in nature. Some old-style, exclusive, powerful networks will find new forms online, as a new political elite are ‘digital-first.’ A consistent battle between centralization and decentralization is likely to continue, with AI tools enabling individuals and small firms to make and connect compelling services, and the value-add of a large design and management bureaucracy like Facebook will decrease. Competition rules might be in place to force services to work with each other, and the failure of the ad-supported funding model will mean that individuals are often paying a premium for enhanced access to exclusive networks of people and activities.”

A professor of computing and digital media expert in in artificial intelligence and social computing predicted, “The trends around democratic governance of technology are not encouraging. The big players are U.S.-based and the U.S. is in an anti-regulation stance that seems fairly durable. Therefore, I expect computing technologies to evolve in ways that benefit corporate interests, with little possibility of meaningful public response. As such systems take in more data and make bigger decisions, people will be increasingly subject to the systems’ unaccountable decisions and non-auditable surveillance practices. Soshanna Zuboff’s term ‘surveillance capitalism’ describes this state of affairs.”

A well-known journalist, blog author and leading internet activist wrote, “The future of technology depends on our willingness to break up the digital monopolists and reinstate the antitrust measures that prevent predatory pricing, market-cornering and other anticompetitive actions. In particular, companies must not be able to convert their commercial preferences against ‘adversarial interoperability’ (when a competitor or toolsmith makes a tool that modifies their products and services to make them better for the users, without the service provider or manufacturer’s permission) into a legal right to invoke the state to punish competitors who engage in this conduct.”

An anonymous respondent said, “Neo-liberal economic policies are resulting in increasing inequality and are unsustainable. If current trends continue, we will be living in a frightening dystopia, where personal data is collected and monetized by a small number of giant companies.”

Sanjiv Das , a professor of data science and finance at Santa Clara University, responded, “Technological revolutions improve the world not because they offer cool new toys but because they improve lives with better use of information…. These systems implement control through inequalities in knowledge, which lead to inequalities in wealth. Advances in technology unaccompanied by enlightened politics may delay progress and create turmoil in the short run. It may take a mutiny by a tech elite to move things forward in the right direction.”

Larry Lannom , internet pioneer and vice president at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), an expert in digital object architecture, said, “I am an optimist and I hope all of these advances will, overall, be for the better. But I worry about the ownership and use of ubiquitous computing and network technologies – will they be used to control the masses for the benefit of the few or will the benefits apply to all? It will almost surely be a mix of the two and we should be working today to ensure that the balance of advances will go to improving the general welfare.”

Serge Marelli , an IT security analyst, predicted that the future will bring, “More porn, more advertising, less privacy, fewer users’-citizens’ rights (e.g., right to privacy), more money for big corporations. And politics and democracy will fall short.”

Joël Colloc , professor at Université du Havre Normandy University and author of “Ethics of Autonomous Information Systems: Towards an Artificial Thinking,” responded, “The internet is no more than a tool of business polluted by advertising, and internet users are seen as customers to target with CRM and the place of the trade. This evolution is irreversible. The internet has become a space without ethics where the user is subjected to predators in a lawless, wild world. The netiquette rules must be updated to protect the rights of users and protect them against business spamming, which has become a plague.”

Manoj Kumar , manager at Mitsui Orient Lines, responded, “Advancement of knowledge/information availability has not only empowered humanity; it has also bewildered it. Rights are being abused. Commercial aspects are being hijacked by few strong companies, depriving the rest of fair opportunities. At some point, government and the public will have to rethink the options and ways of limiting their reach. Amazon and Alibaba will need to become more decentralized, less encompassing and less pervasive than what they are today. Google will need to scale back its analytical reaches to provide the freedom of choices…. The proliferation of the services sector is leading to erosion of the infrastructural economy, which is not sustainable. The coming years will require correction to these uncontrolled advancements in the digital world. The excesses of free access, unchained commerce and capital-free digitalization must be checked and the human element enhanced to provide the balance of the digital with human growth so that they are sustainable in the coming century.”

Wangari Kabiru , author of the MitandaoAfrika blog, based in Nairobi, commented, “As we have more owners of democracy through the net … this will result in new super-powers being created – now not nations but individuals and corporations.”

An assistant professor of media studies at a major U.S. university commented, “So long as the political economy of the internet is shaped by surveillance and the extraction of personal data from users who have no recourse, any democratic potential of these new communication technologies will be squandered.”

A professor emeritus at a major U.S. university’s school of information responded, “I remain hopeful, yet I am pessimistic. The U.S. form of capitalism has ‘won’; variations of it have been adopted in virtually all nation-states. It has yielded extraordinary technical innovation and economic development, progress in health care and medicine and overall improvements in living standards. Yet the benefits of this economic infrastructure are unequally distributed among the global population, and currently this benefit inequality seems destined to widen. Without a revolution or upheaval in values and structures, we can posit that AI becomes increasingly embedded in existing corporate/government organizations. With this evolutionary movement, the emergent structures can continue to become more centralized. The increased centralization of power is likely to be manifest as the larger platforms (corporate or government, the boundary may become more porous or blurred) exercise their economic power with greater control of individual choice and behavior. The control might be exerted either through a ‘Big Brother’ model, with more personal intervention at the highest level or a more Kafkaesque model, with AI aiding governance systems to make decisions using complex and hidden algorithms whose origins and evolutionary paths are not evident and can’t be dissected and understood.”

An infrastructure engineer for a leading social network company commented, “The push to monetize every aspect of digital life will continue, potentially causing large disruptions in the way we live. Not all these disruptions will be for the positive, particularly in the areas of human dignity and worth. As humans increasingly rely on social networks to make decisions, they will find themselves unable to resist the ‘mob of the moment,’ which will cause political and social problems far beyond our current ability to manage. These problems may well be met with attempts to ‘regulate’ expression to prevent mob actions from occurring, which could, in turn, lead to less-free societies – the opposite of what was intended in the invention and fostering of these technologies. The law of unintended consequences is likely to show itself in many other aspects of our lives, from sexuality to social order. We are building highly complex systems for one purpose, and failing to realize that complex systems, and their social offshoots, have unintended consequences far larger than anything we can imagine. The backlash to these movements, once the unintended consequences set in, are far greater than imagined, as well. The initial goals are often mixed, causing both a gain and loss in human dignity; the backlash is often mixed, as well. Whether dignity ratchets up or down is an open question at this point, but right now we are seeing human dignity ratcheted down, with human life being devalued en masse. The problem of ‘content wants to be free’ will need to be resolved, as well; if content is free, then the human effort put into creating that content is useless. This would reverse the trend of thinking being more important than doing, and virtual products being more valuable than physical ones. Until the worth of human effort can be balanced against the ability to move and copy information freely, the problem of paying people to create will remain.”

Some express the hope that the troubled times they foresee coming over the next few decades will eventually be overwritten by new social, economic and political processes and forces.

Ian Peter , pioneer internet activist and internet rights advocate, said, “The internet, after a period of utopian visions for a form of media that enhanced freedom of expression and communication, and improved access to information has followed the pattern of most forms of mass media by becoming dominated by a few players. As part of this domination a new financial model has emerged where internet users are the commodity, with their free or cheap usage funded by the use of their personal data for a variety of commercial uses. It is hard to see a change to this model occurring in the near future, and the internet as we know it is likely to continue this pattern for the rest of its lifetime. However, the internet will in time become old media like radio and television: New forms of media will emerge, and they are likely to be disruptive changes rather than some type of incremental development.”

Yvette Wohn , director of the Social Interaction Lab and expert on human-computer interaction at New Jersey Institute of Technology, commented, “Despite the internet being a system that enables peer-to-peer interaction, in the past 50 years we have seen it enable the corporate broker in scales unprecedented. Amazon, Facebook, Spotify and Uber are just few examples of these brokers. The roles of these brokers will slowly change so that they have less power and decentralization will bring back individual and small businesses.”

Sasha Costanza-Chock , associate professor of civic media at MIT, said, “Here I’ll offer an edge-case optimistic scenario. In 50 years, very high-speed symmetrical network connectivity will be freely available to all humanity, served by a mix of satellite, municipal networks and community-controlled cooperatives. For-profit ISPs will be a thing of the past. In a similar vein, key platforms and features of the net will no longer be controlled by for-profit companies. The dominant search engine will be run by the Wikimedia Foundation, in partnership with the United Nations. Social networking sites will be predominantly decentralized, federated, interoperable and powered by F/LOSS (similar to the way email functions, with many different providers, or the option to host your own, that all communicate with one another). Important services that benefit from network effects will be controlled by municipalities; for example, OpenHail ridesharing standard will be mandated by most municipalities so that ride services are no longer controlled by one or two large firms. Airbnb will be largely replaced by OpenHouse home sharing/hostel standards that enable many players in the market. Most importantly, new applications and services, and improvements to existing applications, will largely be developed through co-design methods that include intended end users in all stages of the design process. Co-design, or design justice, will have long since become the standard best practice across all areas of technology design and development. All AI and algorithmic decision systems will be monitored through standing intersectional audits by independent third parties and/or state agencies to ensure equitable distribution of outcomes rather than the reproduction of bias.”

An anonymous respondent said, “It is my hope that platforms/giants like Facebook, Google and Apple take more responsibility for their intrusion into our lives.”

Digital experiences threaten authentic human interaction

A share of respondents envisioned a future for many humans of self-imposed isolation in virtual worlds or personalized online algorithm-avatar-based relationships that seem more attractive than real-world, in-person social interactions. Some are concerned that the many hours people spend in controlled digital environments will influence them in a negative manner.

Luke Stark , a fellow in the department of sociology at Dartmouth College and at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, wrote, “Increasingly ubiquitous digital systems will do a good job of cocooning individuals within personalized augmented reality bubbles, but a terrible job at facilitating durable connections between us. At the same time, those connections will be surveilled, measured, tracked and represented back to us in ways that will aim to make us more economically productive and socially pliant in the guise of ‘wellness’ and ‘community.’ These systems will increase social inequality through their dividuating effects and contribute to environmental degradation through their use of natural resources – a Philip K. Dick dystopia come to banal life.”

John Lazzaro , retired professor of electrical engineering and computer science, University of California, Berkeley, commented, “Fifty years from now, we will return to Steve Jobs’ original vision of computers as bicycles for the mind. As someone whose first job in technology was stocking shelves in a Radio Shack, years before the first personal computer appeared in the store, I am lucky enough to remember life before Steve articulated his vision. I then watched the vision’s ascent, and its current fall from grace. Today, as I walk down the street, and see people walking with their attention captured by their phone screen, I wonder how it all went so wrong. The only thing more depressing is the content that appears on their screen, and the cultural impact that the content has on us all. I believe the way forward starts with an acceptance of the human condition: We are an easily addicted species, and our evolutionary survival depended on prioritizing ‘thinking fast’ over ‘thinking slow’ in many contexts. Today, from the application user interface up to the economic ecosystem, platforms often exploit human foibles for profit, just as Marlboro Man and Virginia Slims billboards did in the 1970s. The first step in the journey of the next 50 years is reaching a consensus that an addictive approach to the digital world is not sustainable. And that the profit motive, like discipline, is a means to an end, and not an end to itself (to paraphrase Robert Fripp). Technology options can inform the journey’s second step. On the device level, Mark Weiser pointed us to the right direction with the concept of ubiquitous computing in 1988, and the many iterations of this concept in the decades since provide a good foundation for a world where a computer is not a cigarette. The mature mechanical devices (for example, venetian window blinds) and electro-mechanic devices (for example, electric shavers) in our lives do not foster addictive responses, and have benign business models. If we rethink the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of digital devices in our lives, we can remake them in the same positive way.”

Eliot Lear , principal engineer at Cisco, said, “On the whole the internet has proven to be a wealth of knowledge and entertainment. But it has also isolated us from our local communities.”

Ian Peter , pioneer internet activist and internet rights advocate, said, “We cannot dismiss two key factors in the current spread of internet usage: firstly the addictive and pervasive ‘always-on’ effect of unending access and multiple device usage, and secondly the effects on our capacity for critical thinking of having the ‘information’ we see determined by algorithms whose objective is not to inform us, but to capture or thoughts and minds. The decline of a capacity for critical thinking is a serious side effect of continued addictive internet usage that warrants more detailed scientific investigation.”

Evan Selinger , a professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, commented, “Half a century from now, one of the biggest challenges will be what, in our book ‘Re-Engineering Humanity,’ Brett Frischmann and I call the right to be ‘off.’ Currently, it’s extremely hard for many of us to unplug. Unplugging is simply a luxury that most of us can’t afford. As internet connectivity expands to more and more interconnected devices, a robust Internet of Things infrastructure will keep expanding. The expansion will be fueled by a desire to acquire more personal and collective data and the ideal of ubiquitous algorithms acting upon integrated and aggregated big data will become harder to decouple from smart living. In such a world, where will people find protected spaces for thinking critically about whether they are being programmed to behave in ways that diminish their agency and capacity to determine whose interests the unshakable, augmented intelligences really serve?”

Kostas Alexandridis , author of “Exploring Complex Dynamics in Multi-agent-Based Intelligent Systems,” a research assistant professor at the University of the Virgin Islands, said, “In the next 50 years digital integration will become closely integrated with almost every aspect of our lives, from our simple household infrastructure to our transportation systems to our economic infrastructure to our social systems. Digital integration will change norms and institutions the same way that industrialization and electricity was integrated to our societies and global infrastructure in the beginning of the 20th century. From smart devices to smart cars to smart wallets to digital commerce to digital democracies, it is very likely that newer generations of citizens will develop a strong and tightly integrated dependency with networked infrastructure.”

Alper Dincel of T.C. Istanbul Kultur University, Turkey, wrote, “Technology’s first purpose is creating benefits, so apps and programs helping people to consume more. In this point of view, companies are losing their reliability. And we are losing quality of our life. Our life will be like 1990s pop music (not 1980s) with the effects of digital age – less meaningful and more fast.”

Johanna Drucker , professor of digital humanities in the department of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said, “We will be shocked by the rapid acceleration of destabilizing influences and the rate at which civility can break down. Hopefully it can also be rebuilt with the same forces.”

Robert Bell , co-founder of Intelligent Community Forum, wrote, “I expect ubiquitous high-capacity connectivity in the rich and semi-rich worlds, and vast increases in it for the rest of the world’s people. Riding that connectivity will be learning algorithms that we integrate into our lives without a thought and deliver a vast range of services and information. Our interface with the network will evolve in ways that seem almost fantasy now. How well this turns out for us depends on getting a few things right. We must have a near bulletproof solution for security and identity online, and individual control over online privacy. Otherwise, the ‘pollution’ of cyberthreat, fraud and misinformation will choke off all progress. It is typically a crisis that forces us to confront the damage of such third-party effects as pollution. I have no idea what the crisis or crises will be, but as the network grows toward ubiquity, the potential damage of such a crisis grows with it. The great challenge that will come with all of this is to avoid being overwhelmed by the digital overlay of the physical world. We already see the early stages of it in daily life. I hope that humanity’s ability to adapt its environment to its own needs, rather than letting the digital environment control it, will continue to shield us from the worst effects. If we give people individual choice and the power to evolve rules to guide those choices in the right direction, we will manage to extract more benefit than harm from what we do.”

Dalsie Baniala , Telecommunications and Radiocommunications Regulator of Vanuatu, said, “Digital will divide lives (rich and poor). Rich people will interact with only rich people. Digital life for some people will also create artificial living and happiness. Digital life will cause no more human-to-human interactions but human machine-to-machine. Digital life creates no more human senses.”

Ross Stapleton-Gray , principal at Stapleton-Gray and Associates, an information technology and policy consulting firm, commented, “I suspect that the internet will evolve toward greater robustness and reliability through, in some ways, becoming more opaque, more like a ‘system of (system of systems)’ than the current ‘system of systems,’ and partly through increased demand (for some of this infrastructure) for authentication. I would not be surprised to see it genericize from ‘the Net’ or ‘cyberspace’ or ‘being online’ to just ‘connected,’ with an assumption that unless you were actively seeking to be ‘unconnected by choice,’ you’d always be connected/have connection. Like we plug things into any electrical socket without much caring how the electrons get there, we’ll assume connectivity. I’ve written some on how humans might relate to the Internet of Things , and that vision, that humans, like cars, or buildings, or any other object, will be seamlessly interacting with all of the other things, seems likely.”

Andrea Bonarini , a professor of AI and soft computing at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, said, “People will be less free and they will lose their ability to think and design, as we are already experiencing nowadays.”

Alistair Knott , an associate professor specializing in cognitive science and AI at Otago University, Dunedin, New Zealand, wrote, “AI systems that understand human language have potential for both good and bad impacts on society. The technologies are likely to be developed and used by large transnational companies with the aim of maximizing their profits. The likely effect of this is that people will increasingly fall into the role of ‘consumers’ of entertainment-like apps that encourage political apathy and discourage individualism.”

A professor emeritus expert on technology’s impacts on individuals’ well-being wrote, “Sadly I think we will find ourselves spending nearly all of our time immersed in internet-based activities. We are already spending, on the average, more than five hours a day using our smartphones and in 50 years smartphones will be replaced by smart devices, implants, etc. Relationships will suffer, as will our feelings of freedom. I already see the beginnings of an increased obsession to what is contained in the little box we carry with us 24/7/365 as opposed to the world that is right in front of us. It is Sherry Turkle’s dichotomy of SL (online life, or a ‘second life’) vs. RL (real life). SL appears to be winning already, and we are talking about what will happen in 50 years. It is happening now.”

A researcher and teacher of digital literacies and technical communication at a state university based in the U.S. Midwest responded, “In the future I expect to have network interactions embedded or subcutaneous on humans. We will have more interactions that are done in networked environments rather than in person. We may not even have to speak to a person for several days.”

Toby Walsh , a professor of AI at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and president of the AI Access Foundation, said, “By 2069, the real and virtual world will have blurred into one. It will be impossible to tell them apart. Whilst many will spend much of their time in this digital world, there will be an analog counterculture, celebrating a disconnected and old-fashioned existence.”

A digital accessibility consultant responded, “Augmented reality is likely to become part of the everyday experience. Transceivers in clothes or even under the skin will give people direct access to the internet all day every day wherever and whenever they find themselves. Thus, information will be available at all times and people will be able to control their environments through sending signals. It is unlikely that this will be done through thought alone for some time, but that is likely to come at some stage in the future. This is likely to lead to less interaction between people and certainly less personable interactions as people are likely to interact with information on the internet rather than each other. However, people with disabilities may gain somewhat as they will be able to gain access to information and services through the internet which they cannot do now because of the inaccessible nature of much of our current-day environments.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “Connections between people are going to change. I think people will work from home more, having virtual meetings that are presented in 3D. I think this will produce a general depression among people having a lack of connection to others. In general, people will thrive; they won’t have to spend time shopping, commuting and doing menial tasks. But I think we are going to lose our connection to each other.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “The internet will be more and more integrated in our daily lives. However, I see a problem developing. The ability to connect to people all around the world is actually splitting us into smaller groups, not uniting us.”

Constant data monitoring and surveillance is a condition of hyperconnectivity

Many survey respondents pointed out that people are already trading privacy for convenience and perceived security and said they expect this trend to be magnified.

Ken Birman , a professor in the department of computer science at Cornell University, responded, “In the coming 50 years we will surely mature and invest in the needed technology to make this connected world a safer world, too. But today, that deficit stands out, and historians will be harsh when they judge us relative to this one aspect. The harm to entire cultures that oppressive monitoring and surveillance can cause is frightening, and those future historians will be in a position to document that harm – harm that people are actively inflicting today for all sorts of reasons. But I think the good will easily outweigh this harm over long periods.”

A professor expert in cultural geography, American studies and gender and sexuality said, “Unless we soon make policies to regulate data collection, privacy and use as well as the policies and practices laden into algorithms (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and so on)…. I fear we may wind up with a very small elite controlling most of the population.”

A professor of sociology at a major U.S. university responded, “It seems likely that in 50 years there will be very few free spaces left for citizens to engage with one another without corporate or government sponsorship/surveillance. This will have implications for content and, I suspect, make it very difficult for individuals to avoid corporate advertising and government-sponsored messaging.”

Craig Burdett , a respondent who provided no identifying details, wrote, “The greatest challenge facing society is determining how much privacy and autonomy we are willing to cede in exchange for convenience and features. How much of our personal lives are we willing to share? Even in 2018 the internet is nearly ubiquitous in first world countries. Users happily allowed Uber to track them 24/7 in exchange for having a car nearby when they needed it. And we’ve learned that Uber is far from virtuous. New York’s LinkNYC kiosks make Wi-Fi available at no cost in exchange for ad displays. And New Yorkers happily agree to the terms, which include allowing select third parties to contact them ‘with … express … consent.’ What feature will CityBridge offer to entice that consent? By 2069 some form of the internet will be embedded in almost every aspect of modern life. Elon Musk is already showing us how our cars will be always connected and can be updated (or disabled) without notice. And Tesla owners are happily allowing that intrusion in exchange for his cars. Extend that concept to every appliance and device we touch, from our door locks to our refrigerators, and imagine what privacy we might be enticed to give up for a smidge more convenience or efficiency. What if your refrigerator could evaluate and pre-order items before they were depleted, communicating directly with the supplier using your online account? And your front door will automatically know which delivery person (or robot) to allow inside based on the products the refrigerator (or the washing machine) ordered. Imagine never running out of toilet paper, or never again scurrying to the market at 7 a.m. for eggs. Is that sufficient incentive to share that information? I imagine devices like tablets will cease to be primarily standalone appliances. Their functionality will be embedded in homes and offices. The wall of your entryway will have a tablet that automatically adjusts the home to match your individual preferences: from adjusting the temperature in your bedroom to turning the teapot on when you arrive. And your power company will know not only when, but specifically who, is home based on that information. Each of these affordances is available by virtue of making information about your habits available to the device manufacturers. The internet, in and of itself, is benign – like a handgun. But the companies and individuals behind the services are the greatest threat.”

Angelique Hedberg , senior corporate strategy analyst at RTI International, said, “Our digital footprints – intentional, unintentional and simulated – will create troves of data that will be used to model and predict our behavior and as such will be used to maximize product and control by one or more entities. At the individual level this may feel like a loss of control. At the community and relevant transnational levels it will make room for enlightenment. We will benefit from the data of individuals we have never met just as we will be questioned about our own potential because of persons who never existed. The term for the greater good will take on new meaning as we balance personal privacy with human good.”

David Brake , senior lecturer in communications at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, said, “It is very likely that the (relatively) free and open internet that flourished across much of the world in the internet’s early days will continue to be threatened and, I fear, all but overwhelmed by an oligopoly of powerful platforms that will have ‘captured’ the time and attention of most internet users most of the time. Whether they are aware of it or not, almost everyone will live their lives continually being sorted into different categories depending on their behavior, much of which will be in some way digitally recorded, processed and shared. Some will react by attempting to remain constantly ‘digitally vigilant’ but this is not achievable in the long term, particularly as you will remain traceable through your interactions with others. And of course even an absence of digital profile or a carefully curated one sends its own signals.”

Betsy Williams , a researcher at the Center for Digital Society and Data Studies at the University of Arizona, wrote, “Privacy will be largely a luxury of the rich, who will pay extra for internet service providers, services and perhaps separate networks that protect privacy and security.”

David Sarokin , author of “Missed Information: Better Information for Building a Wealthier, More Sustainable Future,” commented, “The world of 2069 will be dotted with ‘privacy spaces’ in our homes, workplaces and public areas. These will be rooms where people can be assured that their words and activities are not being tracked in any manner. Outside of such spaces, our current notion of ‘privacy’ will have essentially disappeared.”

Thad Hall , a research scientist and coauthor of “Politics for a Connected American Public,” wrote, “Privacy will diminish further and further as facial recognition becomes more prevalent and people can be tracked through shopping areas and other public places and their personal data from search is linked to their face persona. You walk down the street and you are presented with specialized ads on a small screen in stores as you look at a rack of clothes. Data are used to differentiate between the rich and poor, whites and nonwhites, and biases are built into every customer experience. A person’s ability to be anonymous will cease and ad intrusions will become very common. These trends are likely to have political ramifications. Employers, retailers and others will be able to infer people’s political behaviors – or lack of participation – from data and discrimination will occur, much as it did in the early to mid-1800s, but with greater impact.”

Amali De Silva-Mitchell , futurist, responded, “When they realize the implications of data collection and profiling and tracking under various uses, people will group together to adjust to their value and comfort levels in this regard. This clustering will impact the quality of data and the quality of outcomes using algorithms. We will see tweaking of algorithms and data all the time, but poor ethics or low-quality updates are a real issue. Mobile technology in the palm of everyone’s hand will result in the small minority without it living at a disadvantage although they may have a lot of privacy.”

Bart Knijnenburg , assistant professor of computer science active in the Human Factors Institute at Clemson University, said, “Put the computational power, sensors and connectivity of a modern smartphone into every single object in your life. This is where I think the Internet of Things will go: You can ‘ping’ any object to learn its location (where is my thermos?), its status (is it full or empty?), past interactions (when did I last use it?) and connections with other devices (what brand of coffee did I fill it with and which device brewed that coffee?). It has very powerful applications, but also severe implications for our privacy. Note though that privacy concerns will not stop this future from happening. Privacy concerns have never stopped anything from happening.”

Anirban Sen , a lawyer and data privacy consultant, based in New Delhi, India, wrote, “The next 50 years will have both fights over big data and privacy as well as people desiring to use new apps. How data in different jurisdictions can be used/relied will be a problem and technology will be used to also fight technology. Integration would be holistic, but it would be tough to live un-networked.”

The co-founder of an information technology civil rights program wrote, “The internet will become as ubiquitous as electricity. That means sensors will be everywhere. Governments will engage in surveillance. But the same surveillance capabilities will allow you to get immediate help from 911, for example, with the operators knowing exactly the context of the call and the situation in progress. Moreover, currently 80% of 911 calls are prank calls. That number will go down to zero. There are other examples: If your car goes off the road into a cliff and you’re unconscious, the car will likely inform emergency responders automatically.”

An anonymous respondent said, “Technology, and the evolution of technology, hews closely to long-standing human hegemonies, priorities and identities. We will probably be more dependent than ever on networked technologies (such as autonomous cars and mapping), but we may also be increasingly wary of invasions of privacy and the way that the data we have been donating to large tech firms can be used in service of those aforementioned hegemonies. We will be even more instantaneously connected, and machines will make more decisions for us for our convenience, but I expect that we will also have a ‘reckoning moment’ in which we decide that our digital footprint is as important and protectable – as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, for example.”

A principal researcher for one of the world’s top five technology companies commented, “The shape of the future could hinge on whether the world moves toward autocratic rule, as in China and Russia, and now with the U.S. and other governments considering that direction, or whether it extends democratic institutions to meet challenges in a world so complex that the public can’t engage meaningfully with many issues. In either case, privacy will be gone, with our lives visible to governments or corporations that – in the face of pushback such as GDPR – will raise the amount they pay us for full access. Only bad actors will refuse the offers they make; whether we will build systems to let bad actors operate with the current degree of cloaking is an open question.”

A professor of information science wrote, “When I’m feeling dystopian, I see a world that looks a little too much like ‘Mr. Robot’ or ‘Person of Interest,’ with government or private organizations knowing too much about us and having too much control over us. I’d like to believe that interconnectivity could, instead, provide us with more ubiquitous access to information and with the ability to establish connections and deliver services across space and time. I hope that increases in access to information and services will enable a fairer distribution of goods and one that allows those with fewer resources to achieve success in their endeavors.”

An anonymous respondent said, “The future will see our sacrifice of personal freedom as real-time surveillance becomes ubiquitous.”

A professor of artificial intelligence and cognitive engineering from a developing nation said, “There will be a loss of freedom, and anything you or your relatives did or said can be used against you. It cannot be predicted on what criterion you will be singled out for termination, purportedly to ‘save the planet.’”

Miguel Moreno-Muñoz , a professor of philosophy specializing in ethics, epistemology and technology at the University of Granada, Spain, expressed hope, writing, “Perhaps a more sophisticated culture of privacy will emerge.”

Misinformation and mistrust must be addressed for positive internet growth

A number of respondents worried over misinformation, security and other concerns. They said that current issues in internet evolution and what seems to be quite an uncertain future will call for new methods of building trust and security.

Benjamin Kuipers , a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, wrote, “We will take for granted that there will be AIs that know an enormous amount about each of us, and we will trust them to protect our individual interests, consistent with the ethical requirements of society. One of the great contrasts between the positive and the negative possible futures will be the extent to which we can trust that available knowledge, and to what extent we can trust those AI knowers. In my ideal future, within the next 50 years we will have found ways to ensure trustworthiness in the infrastructure of knowledge and AI knowers. We will understand that there are ethical principles governing the use of knowledge about each of us as individuals, and the respect we must all have for the collected general knowledge that is a resource for humanity. We will trust that those ethical principles will be followed by the vast majority of people, corporations, robots and states, and that there are mechanisms in place to detect violations, protect us from their effects and sanction the violators. The Founding Fathers of the United States of America were among the greatest systems engineers of all time, designing feedback systems, checks and balances to protect our government and our society from the failures of all-too-human leaders, holding power and hungry for more. We need a new generation of great systems engineers, to create new feedback systems to create and maintain a trustworthy society, even with the hugely powerful tools we are creating.”

Theodore Gordon , futurist, management consultant and co-founder of the Millennium Project, responded, “We will have Watson-like capabilities for data and analytic reasoning in our pockets. False or suspect news will be rejected or marked with a skull and bones. The internet seems likely to splinter into specialized networks that communicate with each other. Big data will be a given and important in determining epidemics in health and in ideas.”

Greg Shannon , chief scientist for the CERT Division at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, said, “Trust will be a critical social asset. Those communities that value and promote trust will have more life, liberty and happiness. AI and IT will allow communities to ensure varying degrees of security, privacy, resiliency and accountability in building trust. Being trustworthy all the time is stressful given that trust is based on competency, dependability, honesty, loyalty, boundaries and sincerity.”

A share of respondents discussed the challenges presented by the constant flow of misinformation and by the potential for massive misuses of data.

Thad Hall , a research scientist and coauthor of “Politics for a Connected American Public,” wrote, “The ability of the news media to report facts will be hampered by a cascade of alternate news, with different video and audio of the exact same event. Things as simple as what the president said in a meeting will be constantly up for debate as instant, real-time alternate feeds show something different, presenting a different worldview. There will be greater segmentation of the population and divisions that separate people. People are likely to become more polarized and tribal over the next 50 years. People will be pushed in different directions by advertisers, who will segment us in ways so that people will not even be aware of certain products others use (especially as online sites like Amazon continue to grow greatly). We will receive different news, again exacerbated by the prevalence of fake news that is exceedingly difficult to discern from reality.”

Alan Mutter , a longtime Silicon Valley CEO, cable TV executive and now a teacher of media economics and entrepreneurism at the University of California, Berkeley, said, “I hope internet users in the future will have more control over their data, interactions and the content pushed to them, but I fear that the platform companies – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Baidu and others – will take us in the opposite direction. A safe and satisfying user experience requires far more thought, work and time than the average user can muster. So, we will be at the mercy of the platforms, which have an asymmetrical ability to outwit and outmaneuver any government entities that try to rein them in. The internet will make lives both better and worse in the future. It will provide greater access to information to those who know how to use it well. At the same time, it will push horrific misinformation to people who lack the ability to critically discern what they are seeing, reading or hearing.”

Rik Farrow , editor of “;login:” a publication of the USENIX Association, predicted, “The problem of ‘fake news’ will be solved by news-providers providing digitally signed content, such as photos, recordings and videos, so that news can be trusted.”

A professor of psychology for a human-computer interaction institute commented, “It will be more and more difficult to determine the validity of sources of information, and people will have weaker tools to make judgments for themselves. Perhaps I am discouraged by recent political events, but to me they are a harbinger of more to come. We could look to the past: The National Socialists knew all about controlling information.”

An online communities researcher said , “We will continue to have problems of community and identity online, where malicious actors quite easily pose as others and manipulate people’s opinions.”

Security issues will be an ongoing obstacle

Assuring security in a constantly evolving human-technological system was mentioned by respondents as a moving-target challenge that will be a constant in years to come.

Llewellyn Kriel , CEO of TopEditor International, a media services company based in Johannesburg, South Africa, wrote, “Despite all the assurances security has become the biggest obstacle in the path of all forms of technology. We predicted this 10 years ago, but things have become worse than even we imagined. The Internet of Things will aggravate this many times. AI so far shows no signs of being able to address security – personal, corporate and national. We see this situation simply getting worse as criminal cartels, international terrorists and rogue governments exploit the thousands of loopholes.”

A professor of computing and digital media expert in in artificial intelligence and social computing predicted, “In 50 years we will have at least one large-scale internet-enabled attack against an entire country, lasting more than five days: power grids, banking, transportation, utilities. People will die. This will (at last) trigger a complete rethinking of the internet protocols, and they will be redesigned with security by design. It will become illegal to use nonconforming devices.”

Eugene H. Spafford , internet pioneer and professor of computing sciences at Purdue University, founder and executive director emeritus of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security, commented, “Crime and propaganda are going to be even bigger problems, as we have no good, global solutions to deploy as of yet. We need to come to some form of consensus on issues such as fact, primary sources and reliability of information. I see a future where there are more likely to be editorial and content controls, and continued Balkanization of the internet.”

Lou Gross , professor of mathematical ecology and expert in grid computing, spatial optimization and modeling of ecological systems at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, said, “I see entirely new options for theft and an ongoing battle across linked systems to maintain orderly operations. Because of the linkage of systems this ‘warfare’ has the potential to be highly destructive, and I see major opportunities for insurance companies to enter the fray and provide services to those willing to pay to allow them to maintain an interfaced-lifestyle while having a measure of safety.”

The chief marketing officer for a technology-based company said, “Security and privacy will become a very important and critical subject of discussion as individuals and societies at large realize that the benefits come at a severe cost to these freedoms. The EU is pushing and shaping this agenda with its latest effort for protecting from these technologies via GDPR. We will see how all of these play out. At the moment, key technology platforms do not seem to realize the power and the responsibility. The exchange between the European Union’s Guy Verhofstadt and U.S.’s Zuckerberg nailed this exact subject in their recent interaction . But the biggest problem and threat for humanity emanates from our historical insecurity and craving for power. As infrastructure is becoming more dependent on AI and the Internet of Things, so do weapons of mass destruction will become more focused on how to better attack them with digital weapons.”

Dan Geer , a respondent who provided no identifying details, commented, “This is a question of the whole being different than the sum of the parts. If one is, as I am, certain that only God is perfect, then a digitalized world that is ever-more optimized begs the question of optimized to what end, to whose benefit, to which criteria of perfection? As Donald Knuth said, ‘Premature optimization is the root of all evil,’ and there exist optimizations that are, or soon will be, within our reach yet will be forever premature. When you cannot believe what you hear, cannot believe what you see, cannot believe what you smell, taste or touch, what are you? Soon, my friend, soon.”

Climate change, the internet and the future of the human race

Several experts observed that this attempt to divine features of the future digital world is futile if the planet can no longer support life in 2069.

Judith Donath , author of “The Social Machine, Designs for Living Online” and faculty fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, commented, “Western civilization, pinnacle of individual liberty, has culminated in the reckless and wasteful consumption of the Earth’s natural resources: We’ve polluted the water, paved over the land, cut down the forests, strip-mined the mountains. Confronted with the apocalyptic specter of human-induced mass extinctions and disastrous climate change, we as a species appear to have chosen to do nothing – to continue on the same path that got us here, buying, burning and birthing as if tomorrow simply did not exist. If we – and the myriad other species we share this planet with – are to survive into the next century, the billions of us humans will need to radically change our behavior. It will take extraordinary measures over the next 50 years to get us to eat less, buy less, reproduce less. I see few signs of us moving in that direction in a serious fashion left to our own devices. But now imagine an artificially intelligent government, programmed to re-balance humans and the natural world as painlessly as possible. Though there would be no privacy from the machine government’s ceaseless sensing, it would be a pleasant world. We would enjoy an apparent wealth of choice – the illusion of liberty. In reality, personal agency would be quite minimal, our desires redirected and our behavior shaped by subtle, powerful nudges. It may be the only hope we have left.”

Divina Frau-Meigs , UNESCO chair for sustainable digital development, said, “Environmental issues will be the primary problem everybody will want to solve in the next 50 years. There is no planet B.”

Hank Dearden , executive director at ForestPlanet Inc., said, “My hope is that the more we explore the cosmos, the more we appreciate our precious and fragile planet, and as such use the Internet of Things to monitor and regulate all manner of metrics: oxygen, carbon dioxide, temperature, biomass (trees), trash levels in the oceans, etc.”

Brock Hinzmann , a partner in the Business Futures Network who worked 40 years as a futures researcher at SRI International, said, “I choose to remain optimistic, although I don’t expect there to be one future for everyone on the planet, and I expect there will be plenty of abuse of the technology to limit freedom. It could also be that many other concerns, resulting from climate change, global migration and geopolitical conflict, will overwhelm issues related to technology.”

Christine Boese , digital strategies professional, noted that the future development of burgeoning cloud technologies relies upon the electrical grid, commenting, “I believe this brilliant system – the internet – is more robust and persistent than anything else the world has created, barring a worldwide failure of electrical grid infrastructure (which is a real possibility). I am more skeptical that humanity will still be around in its present, literate form, to access it! It is carbon-based life forms which endanger the future networked and communicating computer. I have high hopes for blockchain technology, to be used for far more than cryptocurrency. I believe evolving XML schemas will continue to add important logic to our metadata for semantic parsing and sense-making. Aggregated data has promise, but the server farms required to support constant crawling, indexing and processing will require outsize electrical grid support, and human civilization’s declining literacy, its lack of ongoing infrastructure maintenance and disproportionate grid power draws by server farms could endanger the entire system within 50 years. We are becoming dumb, violent Eloi, without our engineering Morlocks.”

Thomas Streeter , a professor of sociology at the University of Vermont, said, “The next 50 years will be shaped by human social and political choices in the context of limited global resources. Whether life in 50 years is better or worse (and for whom) will not be determined by technology.”

The founder of a technology research firm wrote, “I always recommend ‘He, She, It’ by Marge Piercy for an understanding of where the internet could go, and she wrote it before the internet existed. I think cars won’t be the same and fully expect that we won’t be riding individual cars in 50 years. If we are still functioning as a planet and all this has to be contextualized within dramatic climate change as well as population increase and the resulting migrations flows, with their concomitant political disruptions. Digital life will leave more people behind as it is created for young people by young people, and in an aging planet, this will not serve us well.”

A British-American computer scientist commented, “I don’t think society in a recognizable form will survive climate change, increasing inequality and the centralization of essential systems to 2069. Increasing centralization of essential systems will reduce society’s resilience in the face of these problems, leading to societal collapse.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “It depends on what the overall state of the world will be then and whether one subscribes to the mantra of continuing progress. Those of us who take climate change seriously and see the continuing failures to deal with it must see the possibility of some very nasty changes, even down to the mass movement of populations and the contraction of natural resources including landmasses. In this vision of the future, fixed infrastructure may be a casualty and the local generation of electricity may be the difference between survival and not. One hopes that this pessimism will turn out to be unfounded but at the same time this sort of economic decline or even collapse cannot be ruled out and its impact on technology will be profound. Ad hoc networks might become the main game in town for example.”

An anonymous respondent said, “Global climate change will continue unabated as long as ignorance and capitalists are allowed to triumph over humanity.”

An anonymous respondent commented, “Climate change is going to have a very destabilizing effect on economies and societies worldwide, so it’s difficult to predict how long we will have the infrastructure to support rapid technological advances.”

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Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Dependence on Technology — The Impact of Technological Advancements on Everyday Life

The Impact of Technological Advancements on Everyday Life

• Categories: Dependence on Technology

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Published: Feb 12, 2024

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• Darby, S. J. (2017). Smart technology in the home: time for more clarity. Building Research & Information, 46(1), 140–147.
• Khan, A. A., Rehmani, M. H., & Rachedi, A. (2017). Cognitive-Radio-Based Internet of Things : Applications, Architectures, Spectrum Related Functionalities, and Future Research Directions. IEEE Wireless Communications, 24(3), 17–25.

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The Impact of Digital Technologies

Technologies can help make our world fairer, more peaceful, and more just. Digital advances can support and accelerate achievement of each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals – from ending extreme poverty to reducing maternal and infant mortality, promoting sustainable farming and decent work, and achieving universal literacy. But technologies can also threaten privacy, erode security and fuel inequality. They have implications for human rights and human agency. Like generations before, we – governments, businesses and individuals – have a choice to make in how we harness and manage new technologies.

A DIGITAL FUTURE FOR ALL?

Digital technologies have advanced more rapidly than any innovation in our history – reaching around 50 per cent of the developing world’s population in only two decades and transforming societies. By enhancing connectivity, financial inclusion, access to trade and public services, technology can be a great equaliser.

In the health sector, for instance, AI-enabled frontier technologies are helping to save lives, diagnose diseases and extend life expectancy. In education, virtual learning environments and distance learning have opened up programmes to students who would otherwise be excluded. Public services are also becoming more accessible and accountable through blockchain-powered systems, and less bureaucratically burdensome as a result of AI assistance.Big data can also support more responsive and accurate policies and programmes.

However, those yet to be connected remain cut off from the benefits of this new era and remain further behind. Many of the people left behind are women, the elderly, persons with disabilities or from ethnic or linguistic minorities, indigenous groups and residents of poor or remote areas. The pace of connectivity is slowing, even reversing, among some constituencies. For example, globally, the proportion of women using the internet is 12 per cent lower than that of men. While this gap narrowed in most regions between 2013 and 2017, it widened in the least developed countries from 30 per cent to 33 per cent.

The use of algorithms can replicate and even amplify human and systemic bias where they function on the basis of data which is not adequately diverse. Lack of diversity in the technology sector can mean that this challenge is not adequately addressed.

THE FUTURE OF WORK

Throughout history, technological revolutions have changed the labour force: creating new forms and patterns of work, making others obsolete, and leading to wider societal changes. This current wave of change is likely to have profound impacts. For example, the International Labour Organization estimates that the shift to a greener economy could create 24 million new jobs globally by 2030 through the adoption of sustainable practices in the energy sector, the use of electric vehicles and increasing energy efficiency in existing and future buildings.

Meanwhile, reports by groups such as McKinsey suggest that 800 million people could lose their jobs to automation by 2030 , while polls reveal that the majority of all employees worry that they do not have the necessary training or skills to get a well-paid job.

There is broad agreement that managing these trends will require changes in our approach to education, for instance, by placing more emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and maths; by teaching soft skills, and resilience; and by ensuring that people can re-skill and up-skill throughout their lifetimes. Unpaid work, for example childcare and elderly care in the home, will need to be better supported, especially as with the shifting age profile of global populations, the demands on these tasks are likely to increase.

THE FUTURE OF DATA

Today, digital technologies such as data pooling and AI are used to track and diagnose issues in agriculture, health, and the environment, or to perform daily tasks such as navigating traffic or paying a bill. They can be used to defend and exercise human rights – but they can also be used to violate them, for example, by monitoring our movements, purchases, conversations and behaviours. Governments and businesses increasingly have the tools to mine and exploit data for financial and other purposes.

However, personal data would become an asset to a person, if there were a formula for better regulation of personal data ownership. Data-powered technology has the potential to empower individuals, improve human welfare, and promote universal rights, depending on the type of protections put in place.

THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media connects almost half of the entire global population . It enables people to make their voices heard and to talk to people across the world in real time. However, it can also reinforce prejudices and sow discord, by giving hate speech and misinformation a platform, or by amplifying echo chambers.

In this way, social media algorithms can fuel the fragmentation of societies around the world. And yet they also have the potential to do the opposite.

THE FUTURE OF CYBERSPACE

How to manage these developments is the subject of much discussion – nationally and internationally – at a time when geopolitical tensions are on the rise. The UN Secretary-General has warned of a ‘great fracture’ between world powers, each with their own internet and AI strategy, as well as dominant currency, trade and financial rules and contradictory geopolitical and military views. Such a divide could establish a digital Berlin Wall. Increasingly, digital cooperation between states – and a universal cyberspace that reflects global standards for peace and security, human rights and sustainable development – is seen as crucial to ensuring a united world. A ‘global commitment for digital cooperation’ is a key recommendation by the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation .

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How artificial intelligence is transforming the world

Subscribe to the center for technology innovation newsletter, darrell m. west and darrell m. west senior fellow - center for technology innovation , douglas dillon chair in governmental studies john r. allen john r. allen.

April 24, 2018

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a wide-ranging tool that enables people to rethink how we integrate information, analyze data, and use the resulting insights to improve decision making—and already it is transforming every walk of life. In this report, Darrell West and John Allen discuss AI’s application across a variety of sectors, address issues in its development, and offer recommendations for getting the most out of AI while still protecting important human values.

Table of Contents I. Qualities of artificial intelligence II. Applications in diverse sectors III. Policy, regulatory, and ethical issues IV. Recommendations V. Conclusion

• 49 min read

Most people are not very familiar with the concept of artificial intelligence (AI). As an illustration, when 1,500 senior business leaders in the United States in 2017 were asked about AI, only 17 percent said they were familiar with it. 1 A number of them were not sure what it was or how it would affect their particular companies. They understood there was considerable potential for altering business processes, but were not clear how AI could be deployed within their own organizations.

Despite its widespread lack of familiarity, AI is a technology that is transforming every walk of life. It is a wide-ranging tool that enables people to rethink how we integrate information, analyze data, and use the resulting insights to improve decisionmaking. Our hope through this comprehensive overview is to explain AI to an audience of policymakers, opinion leaders, and interested observers, and demonstrate how AI already is altering the world and raising important questions for society, the economy, and governance.

In this paper, we discuss novel applications in finance, national security, health care, criminal justice, transportation, and smart cities, and address issues such as data access problems, algorithmic bias, AI ethics and transparency, and legal liability for AI decisions. We contrast the regulatory approaches of the U.S. and European Union, and close by making a number of recommendations for getting the most out of AI while still protecting important human values. 2

In order to maximize AI benefits, we recommend nine steps for going forward:

• Encourage greater data access for researchers without compromising users’ personal privacy,
• invest more government funding in unclassified AI research,
• promote new models of digital education and AI workforce development so employees have the skills needed in the 21 st -century economy,
• create a federal AI advisory committee to make policy recommendations,
• engage with state and local officials so they enact effective policies,
• regulate broad AI principles rather than specific algorithms,
• take bias complaints seriously so AI does not replicate historic injustice, unfairness, or discrimination in data or algorithms,
• maintain mechanisms for human oversight and control, and
• penalize malicious AI behavior and promote cybersecurity.

Qualities of artificial intelligence

Although there is no uniformly agreed upon definition, AI generally is thought to refer to “machines that respond to stimulation consistent with traditional responses from humans, given the human capacity for contemplation, judgment and intention.” 3  According to researchers Shubhendu and Vijay, these software systems “make decisions which normally require [a] human level of expertise” and help people anticipate problems or deal with issues as they come up. 4 As such, they operate in an intentional, intelligent, and adaptive manner.

Intentionality

Artificial intelligence algorithms are designed to make decisions, often using real-time data. They are unlike passive machines that are capable only of mechanical or predetermined responses. Using sensors, digital data, or remote inputs, they combine information from a variety of different sources, analyze the material instantly, and act on the insights derived from those data. With massive improvements in storage systems, processing speeds, and analytic techniques, they are capable of tremendous sophistication in analysis and decisionmaking.

Artificial intelligence is already altering the world and raising important questions for society, the economy, and governance.

Intelligence

AI generally is undertaken in conjunction with machine learning and data analytics. 5 Machine learning takes data and looks for underlying trends. If it spots something that is relevant for a practical problem, software designers can take that knowledge and use it to analyze specific issues. All that is required are data that are sufficiently robust that algorithms can discern useful patterns. Data can come in the form of digital information, satellite imagery, visual information, text, or unstructured data.

Adaptability

AI systems have the ability to learn and adapt as they make decisions. In the transportation area, for example, semi-autonomous vehicles have tools that let drivers and vehicles know about upcoming congestion, potholes, highway construction, or other possible traffic impediments. Vehicles can take advantage of the experience of other vehicles on the road, without human involvement, and the entire corpus of their achieved “experience” is immediately and fully transferable to other similarly configured vehicles. Their advanced algorithms, sensors, and cameras incorporate experience in current operations, and use dashboards and visual displays to present information in real time so human drivers are able to make sense of ongoing traffic and vehicular conditions. And in the case of fully autonomous vehicles, advanced systems can completely control the car or truck, and make all the navigational decisions.

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Applications in diverse sectors

AI is not a futuristic vision, but rather something that is here today and being integrated with and deployed into a variety of sectors. This includes fields such as finance, national security, health care, criminal justice, transportation, and smart cities. There are numerous examples where AI already is making an impact on the world and augmenting human capabilities in significant ways. 6

One of the reasons for the growing role of AI is the tremendous opportunities for economic development that it presents. A project undertaken by PriceWaterhouseCoopers estimated that “artificial intelligence technologies could increase global GDP by $15.7 trillion, a full 14%, by 2030.” 7 That includes advances of $7 trillion in China, $3.7 trillion in North America, $1.8 trillion in Northern Europe, $1.2 trillion for Africa and Oceania, $0.9 trillion in the rest of Asia outside of China, $0.7 trillion in Southern Europe, and $0.5 trillion in Latin America. China is making rapid strides because it has set a national goal of investing $150 billion in AI and becoming the global leader in this area by 2030.

Meanwhile, a McKinsey Global Institute study of China found that “AI-led automation can give the Chinese economy a productivity injection that would add 0.8 to 1.4 percentage points to GDP growth annually, depending on the speed of adoption.” 8 Although its authors found that China currently lags the United States and the United Kingdom in AI deployment, the sheer size of its AI market gives that country tremendous opportunities for pilot testing and future development.

Investments in financial AI in the United States tripled between 2013 and 2014 to a total of $12.2 billion. 9 According to observers in that sector, “Decisions about loans are now being made by software that can take into account a variety of finely parsed data about a borrower, rather than just a credit score and a background check.” 10 In addition, there are so-called robo-advisers that “create personalized investment portfolios, obviating the need for stockbrokers and financial advisers.” 11 These advances are designed to take the emotion out of investing and undertake decisions based on analytical considerations, and make these choices in a matter of minutes.

A prominent example of this is taking place in stock exchanges, where high-frequency trading by machines has replaced much of human decisionmaking. People submit buy and sell orders, and computers match them in the blink of an eye without human intervention. Machines can spot trading inefficiencies or market differentials on a very small scale and execute trades that make money according to investor instructions. 12 Powered in some places by advanced computing, these tools have much greater capacities for storing information because of their emphasis not on a zero or a one, but on “quantum bits” that can store multiple values in each location. 13 That dramatically increases storage capacity and decreases processing times.

Fraud detection represents another way AI is helpful in financial systems. It sometimes is difficult to discern fraudulent activities in large organizations, but AI can identify abnormalities, outliers, or deviant cases requiring additional investigation. That helps managers find problems early in the cycle, before they reach dangerous levels. 14

National security

AI plays a substantial role in national defense. Through its Project Maven, the American military is deploying AI “to sift through the massive troves of data and video captured by surveillance and then alert human analysts of patterns or when there is abnormal or suspicious activity.” 15 According to Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, the goal of emerging technologies in this area is “to meet our warfighters’ needs and to increase [the] speed and agility [of] technology development and procurement.” 16

Artificial intelligence will accelerate the traditional process of warfare so rapidly that a new term has been coined: hyperwar.

The big data analytics associated with AI will profoundly affect intelligence analysis, as massive amounts of data are sifted in near real time—if not eventually in real time—thereby providing commanders and their staffs a level of intelligence analysis and productivity heretofore unseen. Command and control will similarly be affected as human commanders delegate certain routine, and in special circumstances, key decisions to AI platforms, reducing dramatically the time associated with the decision and subsequent action. In the end, warfare is a time competitive process, where the side able to decide the fastest and move most quickly to execution will generally prevail. Indeed, artificially intelligent intelligence systems, tied to AI-assisted command and control systems, can move decision support and decisionmaking to a speed vastly superior to the speeds of the traditional means of waging war. So fast will be this process, especially if coupled to automatic decisions to launch artificially intelligent autonomous weapons systems capable of lethal outcomes, that a new term has been coined specifically to embrace the speed at which war will be waged: hyperwar.

While the ethical and legal debate is raging over whether America will ever wage war with artificially intelligent autonomous lethal systems, the Chinese and Russians are not nearly so mired in this debate, and we should anticipate our need to defend against these systems operating at hyperwar speeds. The challenge in the West of where to position “humans in the loop” in a hyperwar scenario will ultimately dictate the West’s capacity to be competitive in this new form of conflict. 17

Just as AI will profoundly affect the speed of warfare, the proliferation of zero day or zero second cyber threats as well as polymorphic malware will challenge even the most sophisticated signature-based cyber protection. This forces significant improvement to existing cyber defenses. Increasingly, vulnerable systems are migrating, and will need to shift to a layered approach to cybersecurity with cloud-based, cognitive AI platforms. This approach moves the community toward a “thinking” defensive capability that can defend networks through constant training on known threats. This capability includes DNA-level analysis of heretofore unknown code, with the possibility of recognizing and stopping inbound malicious code by recognizing a string component of the file. This is how certain key U.S.-based systems stopped the debilitating “WannaCry” and “Petya” viruses.

Preparing for hyperwar and defending critical cyber networks must become a high priority because China, Russia, North Korea, and other countries are putting substantial resources into AI. In 2017, China’s State Council issued a plan for the country to “build a domestic industry worth almost $150 billion” by 2030. 18 As an example of the possibilities, the Chinese search firm Baidu has pioneered a facial recognition application that finds missing people. In addition, cities such as Shenzhen are providing up to $1 million to support AI labs. That country hopes AI will provide security, combat terrorism, and improve speech recognition programs. 19 The dual-use nature of many AI algorithms will mean AI research focused on one sector of society can be rapidly modified for use in the security sector as well. 20

Health care

AI tools are helping designers improve computational sophistication in health care. For example, Merantix is a German company that applies deep learning to medical issues. It has an application in medical imaging that “detects lymph nodes in the human body in Computer Tomography (CT) images.” 21 According to its developers, the key is labeling the nodes and identifying small lesions or growths that could be problematic. Humans can do this, but radiologists charge $100 per hour and may be able to carefully read only four images an hour. If there were 10,000 images, the cost of this process would be $250,000, which is prohibitively expensive if done by humans.

What deep learning can do in this situation is train computers on data sets to learn what a normal-looking versus an irregular-appearing lymph node is. After doing that through imaging exercises and honing the accuracy of the labeling, radiological imaging specialists can apply this knowledge to actual patients and determine the extent to which someone is at risk of cancerous lymph nodes. Since only a few are likely to test positive, it is a matter of identifying the unhealthy versus healthy node.

AI has been applied to congestive heart failure as well, an illness that afflicts 10 percent of senior citizens and costs $35 billion each year in the United States. AI tools are helpful because they “predict in advance potential challenges ahead and allocate resources to patient education, sensing, and proactive interventions that keep patients out of the hospital.” 22

Criminal justice

AI is being deployed in the criminal justice area. The city of Chicago has developed an AI-driven “Strategic Subject List” that analyzes people who have been arrested for their risk of becoming future perpetrators. It ranks 400,000 people on a scale of 0 to 500, using items such as age, criminal activity, victimization, drug arrest records, and gang affiliation. In looking at the data, analysts found that youth is a strong predictor of violence, being a shooting victim is associated with becoming a future perpetrator, gang affiliation has little predictive value, and drug arrests are not significantly associated with future criminal activity. 23

Judicial experts claim AI programs reduce human bias in law enforcement and leads to a fairer sentencing system. R Street Institute Associate Caleb Watney writes:

Empirically grounded questions of predictive risk analysis play to the strengths of machine learning, automated reasoning and other forms of AI. One machine-learning policy simulation concluded that such programs could be used to cut crime up to 24.8 percent with no change in jailing rates, or reduce jail populations by up to 42 percent with no increase in crime rates. 24

However, critics worry that AI algorithms represent “a secret system to punish citizens for crimes they haven’t yet committed. The risk scores have been used numerous times to guide large-scale roundups.” 25 The fear is that such tools target people of color unfairly and have not helped Chicago reduce the murder wave that has plagued it in recent years.

Despite these concerns, other countries are moving ahead with rapid deployment in this area. In China, for example, companies already have “considerable resources and access to voices, faces and other biometric data in vast quantities, which would help them develop their technologies.” 26 New technologies make it possible to match images and voices with other types of information, and to use AI on these combined data sets to improve law enforcement and national security. Through its “Sharp Eyes” program, Chinese law enforcement is matching video images, social media activity, online purchases, travel records, and personal identity into a “police cloud.” This integrated database enables authorities to keep track of criminals, potential law-breakers, and terrorists. 27 Put differently, China has become the world’s leading AI-powered surveillance state.

Transportation

Transportation represents an area where AI and machine learning are producing major innovations. Research by Cameron Kerry and Jack Karsten of the Brookings Institution has found that over $80 billion was invested in autonomous vehicle technology between August 2014 and June 2017. Those investments include applications both for autonomous driving and the core technologies vital to that sector. 28

Autonomous vehicles—cars, trucks, buses, and drone delivery systems—use advanced technological capabilities. Those features include automated vehicle guidance and braking, lane-changing systems, the use of cameras and sensors for collision avoidance, the use of AI to analyze information in real time, and the use of high-performance computing and deep learning systems to adapt to new circumstances through detailed maps. 29

Light detection and ranging systems (LIDARs) and AI are key to navigation and collision avoidance. LIDAR systems combine light and radar instruments. They are mounted on the top of vehicles that use imaging in a 360-degree environment from a radar and light beams to measure the speed and distance of surrounding objects. Along with sensors placed on the front, sides, and back of the vehicle, these instruments provide information that keeps fast-moving cars and trucks in their own lane, helps them avoid other vehicles, applies brakes and steering when needed, and does so instantly so as to avoid accidents.

Advanced software enables cars to learn from the experiences of other vehicles on the road and adjust their guidance systems as weather, driving, or road conditions change. This means that software is the key—not the physical car or truck itself.

Since these cameras and sensors compile a huge amount of information and need to process it instantly to avoid the car in the next lane, autonomous vehicles require high-performance computing, advanced algorithms, and deep learning systems to adapt to new scenarios. This means that software is the key, not the physical car or truck itself. 30 Advanced software enables cars to learn from the experiences of other vehicles on the road and adjust their guidance systems as weather, driving, or road conditions change. 31

Ride-sharing companies are very interested in autonomous vehicles. They see advantages in terms of customer service and labor productivity. All of the major ride-sharing companies are exploring driverless cars. The surge of car-sharing and taxi services—such as Uber and Lyft in the United States, Daimler’s Mytaxi and Hailo service in Great Britain, and Didi Chuxing in China—demonstrate the opportunities of this transportation option. Uber recently signed an agreement to purchase 24,000 autonomous cars from Volvo for its ride-sharing service. 32

However, the ride-sharing firm suffered a setback in March 2018 when one of its autonomous vehicles in Arizona hit and killed a pedestrian. Uber and several auto manufacturers immediately suspended testing and launched investigations into what went wrong and how the fatality could have occurred. 33 Both industry and consumers want reassurance that the technology is safe and able to deliver on its stated promises. Unless there are persuasive answers, this accident could slow AI advancements in the transportation sector.

Smart cities

Metropolitan governments are using AI to improve urban service delivery. For example, according to Kevin Desouza, Rashmi Krishnamurthy, and Gregory Dawson:

The Cincinnati Fire Department is using data analytics to optimize medical emergency responses. The new analytics system recommends to the dispatcher an appropriate response to a medical emergency call—whether a patient can be treated on-site or needs to be taken to the hospital—by taking into account several factors, such as the type of call, location, weather, and similar calls. 34

Since it fields 80,000 requests each year, Cincinnati officials are deploying this technology to prioritize responses and determine the best ways to handle emergencies. They see AI as a way to deal with large volumes of data and figure out efficient ways of responding to public requests. Rather than address service issues in an ad hoc manner, authorities are trying to be proactive in how they provide urban services.

Cincinnati is not alone. A number of metropolitan areas are adopting smart city applications that use AI to improve service delivery, environmental planning, resource management, energy utilization, and crime prevention, among other things. For its smart cities index, the magazine Fast Company ranked American locales and found Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and New York City as the top adopters. Seattle, for example, has embraced sustainability and is using AI to manage energy usage and resource management. Boston has launched a “City Hall To Go” that makes sure underserved communities receive needed public services. It also has deployed “cameras and inductive loops to manage traffic and acoustic sensors to identify gun shots.” San Francisco has certified 203 buildings as meeting LEED sustainability standards. 35

Through these and other means, metropolitan areas are leading the country in the deployment of AI solutions. Indeed, according to a National League of Cities report, 66 percent of American cities are investing in smart city technology. Among the top applications noted in the report are “smart meters for utilities, intelligent traffic signals, e-governance applications, Wi-Fi kiosks, and radio frequency identification sensors in pavement.” 36

Policy, regulatory, and ethical issues

These examples from a variety of sectors demonstrate how AI is transforming many walks of human existence. The increasing penetration of AI and autonomous devices into many aspects of life is altering basic operations and decisionmaking within organizations, and improving efficiency and response times.

At the same time, though, these developments raise important policy, regulatory, and ethical issues. For example, how should we promote data access? How do we guard against biased or unfair data used in algorithms? What types of ethical principles are introduced through software programming, and how transparent should designers be about their choices? What about questions of legal liability in cases where algorithms cause harm? 37

The increasing penetration of AI into many aspects of life is altering decisionmaking within organizations and improving efficiency. At the same time, though, these developments raise important policy, regulatory, and ethical issues.

Data access problems

The key to getting the most out of AI is having a “data-friendly ecosystem with unified standards and cross-platform sharing.” AI depends on data that can be analyzed in real time and brought to bear on concrete problems. Having data that are “accessible for exploration” in the research community is a prerequisite for successful AI development. 38

According to a McKinsey Global Institute study, nations that promote open data sources and data sharing are the ones most likely to see AI advances. In this regard, the United States has a substantial advantage over China. Global ratings on data openness show that U.S. ranks eighth overall in the world, compared to 93 for China. 39

But right now, the United States does not have a coherent national data strategy. There are few protocols for promoting research access or platforms that make it possible to gain new insights from proprietary data. It is not always clear who owns data or how much belongs in the public sphere. These uncertainties limit the innovation economy and act as a drag on academic research. In the following section, we outline ways to improve data access for researchers.

Biases in data and algorithms

In some instances, certain AI systems are thought to have enabled discriminatory or biased practices. 40 For example, Airbnb has been accused of having homeowners on its platform who discriminate against racial minorities. A research project undertaken by the Harvard Business School found that “Airbnb users with distinctly African American names were roughly 16 percent less likely to be accepted as guests than those with distinctly white names.” 41

Racial issues also come up with facial recognition software. Most such systems operate by comparing a person’s face to a range of faces in a large database. As pointed out by Joy Buolamwini of the Algorithmic Justice League, “If your facial recognition data contains mostly Caucasian faces, that’s what your program will learn to recognize.” 42 Unless the databases have access to diverse data, these programs perform poorly when attempting to recognize African-American or Asian-American features.

Many historical data sets reflect traditional values, which may or may not represent the preferences wanted in a current system. As Buolamwini notes, such an approach risks repeating inequities of the past:

The rise of automation and the increased reliance on algorithms for high-stakes decisions such as whether someone get insurance or not, your likelihood to default on a loan or somebody’s risk of recidivism means this is something that needs to be addressed. Even admissions decisions are increasingly automated—what school our children go to and what opportunities they have. We don’t have to bring the structural inequalities of the past into the future we create. 43

AI ethics and transparency

Algorithms embed ethical considerations and value choices into program decisions. As such, these systems raise questions concerning the criteria used in automated decisionmaking. Some people want to have a better understanding of how algorithms function and what choices are being made. 44

In the United States, many urban schools use algorithms for enrollment decisions based on a variety of considerations, such as parent preferences, neighborhood qualities, income level, and demographic background. According to Brookings researcher Jon Valant, the New Orleans–based Bricolage Academy “gives priority to economically disadvantaged applicants for up to 33 percent of available seats. In practice, though, most cities have opted for categories that prioritize siblings of current students, children of school employees, and families that live in school’s broad geographic area.” 45 Enrollment choices can be expected to be very different when considerations of this sort come into play.

Depending on how AI systems are set up, they can facilitate the redlining of mortgage applications, help people discriminate against individuals they don’t like, or help screen or build rosters of individuals based on unfair criteria. The types of considerations that go into programming decisions matter a lot in terms of how the systems operate and how they affect customers. 46

For these reasons, the EU is implementing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018. The rules specify that people have “the right to opt out of personally tailored ads” and “can contest ‘legal or similarly significant’ decisions made by algorithms and appeal for human intervention” in the form of an explanation of how the algorithm generated a particular outcome. Each guideline is designed to ensure the protection of personal data and provide individuals with information on how the “black box” operates. 47

Legal liability

There are questions concerning the legal liability of AI systems. If there are harms or infractions (or fatalities in the case of driverless cars), the operators of the algorithm likely will fall under product liability rules. A body of case law has shown that the situation’s facts and circumstances determine liability and influence the kind of penalties that are imposed. Those can range from civil fines to imprisonment for major harms. 48 The Uber-related fatality in Arizona will be an important test case for legal liability. The state actively recruited Uber to test its autonomous vehicles and gave the company considerable latitude in terms of road testing. It remains to be seen if there will be lawsuits in this case and who is sued: the human backup driver, the state of Arizona, the Phoenix suburb where the accident took place, Uber, software developers, or the auto manufacturer. Given the multiple people and organizations involved in the road testing, there are many legal questions to be resolved.

In non-transportation areas, digital platforms often have limited liability for what happens on their sites. For example, in the case of Airbnb, the firm “requires that people agree to waive their right to sue, or to join in any class-action lawsuit or class-action arbitration, to use the service.” By demanding that its users sacrifice basic rights, the company limits consumer protections and therefore curtails the ability of people to fight discrimination arising from unfair algorithms. 49 But whether the principle of neutral networks holds up in many sectors is yet to be determined on a widespread basis.

Recommendations

In order to balance innovation with basic human values, we propose a number of recommendations for moving forward with AI. This includes improving data access, increasing government investment in AI, promoting AI workforce development, creating a federal advisory committee, engaging with state and local officials to ensure they enact effective policies, regulating broad objectives as opposed to specific algorithms, taking bias seriously as an AI issue, maintaining mechanisms for human control and oversight, and penalizing malicious behavior and promoting cybersecurity.

Improving data access

The United States should develop a data strategy that promotes innovation and consumer protection. Right now, there are no uniform standards in terms of data access, data sharing, or data protection. Almost all the data are proprietary in nature and not shared very broadly with the research community, and this limits innovation and system design. AI requires data to test and improve its learning capacity. 50 Without structured and unstructured data sets, it will be nearly impossible to gain the full benefits of artificial intelligence.

In general, the research community needs better access to government and business data, although with appropriate safeguards to make sure researchers do not misuse data in the way Cambridge Analytica did with Facebook information. There is a variety of ways researchers could gain data access. One is through voluntary agreements with companies holding proprietary data. Facebook, for example, recently announced a partnership with Stanford economist Raj Chetty to use its social media data to explore inequality. 51 As part of the arrangement, researchers were required to undergo background checks and could only access data from secured sites in order to protect user privacy and security.

In the U.S., there are no uniform standards in terms of data access, data sharing, or data protection. Almost all the data are proprietary in nature and not shared very broadly with the research community, and this limits innovation and system design.

Google long has made available search results in aggregated form for researchers and the general public. Through its “Trends” site, scholars can analyze topics such as interest in Trump, views about democracy, and perspectives on the overall economy. 52 That helps people track movements in public interest and identify topics that galvanize the general public.

Twitter makes much of its tweets available to researchers through application programming interfaces, commonly referred to as APIs. These tools help people outside the company build application software and make use of data from its social media platform. They can study patterns of social media communications and see how people are commenting on or reacting to current events.

In some sectors where there is a discernible public benefit, governments can facilitate collaboration by building infrastructure that shares data. For example, the National Cancer Institute has pioneered a data-sharing protocol where certified researchers can query health data it has using de-identified information drawn from clinical data, claims information, and drug therapies. That enables researchers to evaluate efficacy and effectiveness, and make recommendations regarding the best medical approaches, without compromising the privacy of individual patients.

There could be public-private data partnerships that combine government and business data sets to improve system performance. For example, cities could integrate information from ride-sharing services with its own material on social service locations, bus lines, mass transit, and highway congestion to improve transportation. That would help metropolitan areas deal with traffic tie-ups and assist in highway and mass transit planning.

Some combination of these approaches would improve data access for researchers, the government, and the business community, without impinging on personal privacy. As noted by Ian Buck, the vice president of NVIDIA, “Data is the fuel that drives the AI engine. The federal government has access to vast sources of information. Opening access to that data will help us get insights that will transform the U.S. economy.” 53 Through its Data.gov portal, the federal government already has put over 230,000 data sets into the public domain, and this has propelled innovation and aided improvements in AI and data analytic technologies. 54 The private sector also needs to facilitate research data access so that society can achieve the full benefits of artificial intelligence.

Increase government investment in AI

According to Greg Brockman, the co-founder of OpenAI, the U.S. federal government invests only $1.1 billion in non-classified AI technology. 55 That is far lower than the amount being spent by China or other leading nations in this area of research. That shortfall is noteworthy because the economic payoffs of AI are substantial. In order to boost economic development and social innovation, federal officials need to increase investment in artificial intelligence and data analytics. Higher investment is likely to pay for itself many times over in economic and social benefits. 56

Promote digital education and workforce development

As AI applications accelerate across many sectors, it is vital that we reimagine our educational institutions for a world where AI will be ubiquitous and students need a different kind of training than they currently receive. Right now, many students do not receive instruction in the kinds of skills that will be needed in an AI-dominated landscape. For example, there currently are shortages of data scientists, computer scientists, engineers, coders, and platform developers. These are skills that are in short supply; unless our educational system generates more people with these capabilities, it will limit AI development.

For these reasons, both state and federal governments have been investing in AI human capital. For example, in 2017, the National Science Foundation funded over 6,500 graduate students in computer-related fields and has launched several new initiatives designed to encourage data and computer science at all levels from pre-K to higher and continuing education. 57 The goal is to build a larger pipeline of AI and data analytic personnel so that the United States can reap the full advantages of the knowledge revolution.

But there also needs to be substantial changes in the process of learning itself. It is not just technical skills that are needed in an AI world but skills of critical reasoning, collaboration, design, visual display of information, and independent thinking, among others. AI will reconfigure how society and the economy operate, and there needs to be “big picture” thinking on what this will mean for ethics, governance, and societal impact. People will need the ability to think broadly about many questions and integrate knowledge from a number of different areas.

One example of new ways to prepare students for a digital future is IBM’s Teacher Advisor program, utilizing Watson’s free online tools to help teachers bring the latest knowledge into the classroom. They enable instructors to develop new lesson plans in STEM and non-STEM fields, find relevant instructional videos, and help students get the most out of the classroom. 58 As such, they are precursors of new educational environments that need to be created.

Create a federal AI advisory committee

Federal officials need to think about how they deal with artificial intelligence. As noted previously, there are many issues ranging from the need for improved data access to addressing issues of bias and discrimination. It is vital that these and other concerns be considered so we gain the full benefits of this emerging technology.

In order to move forward in this area, several members of Congress have introduced the “Future of Artificial Intelligence Act,” a bill designed to establish broad policy and legal principles for AI. It proposes the secretary of commerce create a federal advisory committee on the development and implementation of artificial intelligence. The legislation provides a mechanism for the federal government to get advice on ways to promote a “climate of investment and innovation to ensure the global competitiveness of the United States,” “optimize the development of artificial intelligence to address the potential growth, restructuring, or other changes in the United States workforce,” “support the unbiased development and application of artificial intelligence,” and “protect the privacy rights of individuals.” 59

Among the specific questions the committee is asked to address include the following: competitiveness, workforce impact, education, ethics training, data sharing, international cooperation, accountability, machine learning bias, rural impact, government efficiency, investment climate, job impact, bias, and consumer impact. The committee is directed to submit a report to Congress and the administration 540 days after enactment regarding any legislative or administrative action needed on AI.

This legislation is a step in the right direction, although the field is moving so rapidly that we would recommend shortening the reporting timeline from 540 days to 180 days. Waiting nearly two years for a committee report will certainly result in missed opportunities and a lack of action on important issues. Given rapid advances in the field, having a much quicker turnaround time on the committee analysis would be quite beneficial.

Engage with state and local officials

States and localities also are taking action on AI. For example, the New York City Council unanimously passed a bill that directed the mayor to form a taskforce that would “monitor the fairness and validity of algorithms used by municipal agencies.” 60 The city employs algorithms to “determine if a lower bail will be assigned to an indigent defendant, where firehouses are established, student placement for public schools, assessing teacher performance, identifying Medicaid fraud and determine where crime will happen next.” 61

According to the legislation’s developers, city officials want to know how these algorithms work and make sure there is sufficient AI transparency and accountability. In addition, there is concern regarding the fairness and biases of AI algorithms, so the taskforce has been directed to analyze these issues and make recommendations regarding future usage. It is scheduled to report back to the mayor on a range of AI policy, legal, and regulatory issues by late 2019.

Some observers already are worrying that the taskforce won’t go far enough in holding algorithms accountable. For example, Julia Powles of Cornell Tech and New York University argues that the bill originally required companies to make the AI source code available to the public for inspection, and that there be simulations of its decisionmaking using actual data. After criticism of those provisions, however, former Councilman James Vacca dropped the requirements in favor of a task force studying these issues. He and other city officials were concerned that publication of proprietary information on algorithms would slow innovation and make it difficult to find AI vendors who would work with the city. 62 It remains to be seen how this local task force will balance issues of innovation, privacy, and transparency.

Regulate broad objectives more than specific algorithms

The European Union has taken a restrictive stance on these issues of data collection and analysis. 63 It has rules limiting the ability of companies from collecting data on road conditions and mapping street views. Because many of these countries worry that people’s personal information in unencrypted Wi-Fi networks are swept up in overall data collection, the EU has fined technology firms, demanded copies of data, and placed limits on the material collected. 64 This has made it more difficult for technology companies operating there to develop the high-definition maps required for autonomous vehicles.

The GDPR being implemented in Europe place severe restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. According to published guidelines, “Regulations prohibit any automated decision that ‘significantly affects’ EU citizens. This includes techniques that evaluates a person’s ‘performance at work, economic situation, health, personal preferences, interests, reliability, behavior, location, or movements.’” 65 In addition, these new rules give citizens the right to review how digital services made specific algorithmic choices affecting people.

By taking a restrictive stance on issues of data collection and analysis, the European Union is putting its manufacturers and software designers at a significant disadvantage to the rest of the world.

If interpreted stringently, these rules will make it difficult for European software designers (and American designers who work with European counterparts) to incorporate artificial intelligence and high-definition mapping in autonomous vehicles. Central to navigation in these cars and trucks is tracking location and movements. Without high-definition maps containing geo-coded data and the deep learning that makes use of this information, fully autonomous driving will stagnate in Europe. Through this and other data protection actions, the European Union is putting its manufacturers and software designers at a significant disadvantage to the rest of the world.

It makes more sense to think about the broad objectives desired in AI and enact policies that advance them, as opposed to governments trying to crack open the “black boxes” and see exactly how specific algorithms operate. Regulating individual algorithms will limit innovation and make it difficult for companies to make use of artificial intelligence.

Take biases seriously

Bias and discrimination are serious issues for AI. There already have been a number of cases of unfair treatment linked to historic data, and steps need to be undertaken to make sure that does not become prevalent in artificial intelligence. Existing statutes governing discrimination in the physical economy need to be extended to digital platforms. That will help protect consumers and build confidence in these systems as a whole.

For these advances to be widely adopted, more transparency is needed in how AI systems operate. Andrew Burt of Immuta argues, “The key problem confronting predictive analytics is really transparency. We’re in a world where data science operations are taking on increasingly important tasks, and the only thing holding them back is going to be how well the data scientists who train the models can explain what it is their models are doing.” 66

Maintaining mechanisms for human oversight and control

Some individuals have argued that there needs to be avenues for humans to exercise oversight and control of AI systems. For example, Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence CEO Oren Etzioni argues there should be rules for regulating these systems. First, he says, AI must be governed by all the laws that already have been developed for human behavior, including regulations concerning “cyberbullying, stock manipulation or terrorist threats,” as well as “entrap[ping] people into committing crimes.” Second, he believes that these systems should disclose they are automated systems and not human beings. Third, he states, “An A.I. system cannot retain or disclose confidential information without explicit approval from the source of that information.” 67 His rationale is that these tools store so much data that people have to be cognizant of the privacy risks posed by AI.

In the same vein, the IEEE Global Initiative has ethical guidelines for AI and autonomous systems. Its experts suggest that these models be programmed with consideration for widely accepted human norms and rules for behavior. AI algorithms need to take into effect the importance of these norms, how norm conflict can be resolved, and ways these systems can be transparent about norm resolution. Software designs should be programmed for “nondeception” and “honesty,” according to ethics experts. When failures occur, there must be mitigation mechanisms to deal with the consequences. In particular, AI must be sensitive to problems such as bias, discrimination, and fairness. 68

A group of machine learning experts claim it is possible to automate ethical decisionmaking. Using the trolley problem as a moral dilemma, they ask the following question: If an autonomous car goes out of control, should it be programmed to kill its own passengers or the pedestrians who are crossing the street? They devised a “voting-based system” that asked 1.3 million people to assess alternative scenarios, summarized the overall choices, and applied the overall perspective of these individuals to a range of vehicular possibilities. That allowed them to automate ethical decisionmaking in AI algorithms, taking public preferences into account. 69 This procedure, of course, does not reduce the tragedy involved in any kind of fatality, such as seen in the Uber case, but it provides a mechanism to help AI developers incorporate ethical considerations in their planning.

Penalize malicious behavior and promote cybersecurity

As with any emerging technology, it is important to discourage malicious treatment designed to trick software or use it for undesirable ends. 70 This is especially important given the dual-use aspects of AI, where the same tool can be used for beneficial or malicious purposes. The malevolent use of AI exposes individuals and organizations to unnecessary risks and undermines the virtues of the emerging technology. This includes behaviors such as hacking, manipulating algorithms, compromising privacy and confidentiality, or stealing identities. Efforts to hijack AI in order to solicit confidential information should be seriously penalized as a way to deter such actions. 71

In a rapidly changing world with many entities having advanced computing capabilities, there needs to be serious attention devoted to cybersecurity. Countries have to be careful to safeguard their own systems and keep other nations from damaging their security. 72 According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a major American bank receives around 11 million calls a week at its service center. In order to protect its telephony from denial of service attacks, it uses a “machine learning-based policy engine [that] blocks more than 120,000 calls per month based on voice firewall policies including harassing callers, robocalls and potential fraudulent calls.” 73 This represents a way in which machine learning can help defend technology systems from malevolent attacks.

To summarize, the world is on the cusp of revolutionizing many sectors through artificial intelligence and data analytics. There already are significant deployments in finance, national security, health care, criminal justice, transportation, and smart cities that have altered decisionmaking, business models, risk mitigation, and system performance. These developments are generating substantial economic and social benefits.

The world is on the cusp of revolutionizing many sectors through artificial intelligence, but the way AI systems are developed need to be better understood due to the major implications these technologies will have for society as a whole.

Yet the manner in which AI systems unfold has major implications for society as a whole. It matters how policy issues are addressed, ethical conflicts are reconciled, legal realities are resolved, and how much transparency is required in AI and data analytic solutions. 74 Human choices about software development affect the way in which decisions are made and the manner in which they are integrated into organizational routines. Exactly how these processes are executed need to be better understood because they will have substantial impact on the general public soon, and for the foreseeable future. AI may well be a revolution in human affairs, and become the single most influential human innovation in history.

Note: We appreciate the research assistance of Grace Gilberg, Jack Karsten, Hillary Schaub, and Kristjan Tomasson on this project.

The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit organization devoted to independent research and policy solutions. Its mission is to conduct high-quality, independent research and, based on that research, to provide innovative, practical recommendations for policymakers and the public. The conclusions and recommendations of any Brookings publication are solely those of its author(s), and do not reflect the views of the Institution, its management, or its other scholars.

Support for this publication was generously provided by Amazon. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment. 

John R. Allen is a member of the Board of Advisors of Amida Technology and on the Board of Directors of Spark Cognition. Both companies work in fields discussed in this piece.

• Thomas Davenport, Jeff Loucks, and David Schatsky, “Bullish on the Business Value of Cognitive” (Deloitte, 2017), p. 3 (www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/deloitte-analytics/articles/cognitive-technology-adoption-survey.html).
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• PriceWaterhouseCoopers, “Sizing the Prize: What’s the Real Value of AI for Your Business and How Can You Capitalise?” 2017.
• Dominic Barton, Jonathan Woetzel, Jeongmin Seong, and Qinzheng Tian, “Artificial Intelligence: Implications for China” (New York: McKinsey Global Institute, April 2017), p. 1.
• Nathaniel Popper, “Stocks and Bots,” New York Times Magazine , February 28, 2016.
• Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (New York: Norton, 2015).
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• Executive Office of the President, “Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy,” December 2016, pp. 27-28.
• Christian Davenport, “Future Wars May Depend as Much on Algorithms as on Ammunition, Report Says,” Washington Post , December 3, 2017.
• John R. Allen and Amir Husain, “On Hyperwar,” Naval Institute Proceedings , July 17, 2017, pp. 30-36.
• Paul Mozur, “China Sets Goal to Lead in Artificial Intelligence,” New York Times , July 21, 2017, p. B1.
• Paul Mozur and John Markoff, “Is China Outsmarting American Artificial Intelligence?” New York Times , May 28, 2017.
• Economist , “America v China: The Battle for Digital Supremacy,” March 15, 2018.
• Rasmus Rothe, “Applying Deep Learning to Real-World Problems,” Medium , May 23, 2017.
• Eric Horvitz, “Reflections on the Status and Future of Artificial Intelligence,” Testimony before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, November 30, 2016, p. 5.
• Jeff Asher and Rob Arthur, “Inside the Algorithm That Tries to Predict Gun Violence in Chicago,” New York Times Upshot , June 13, 2017.
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• Paul Mozur and Keith Bradsher, “China’s A.I. Advances Help Its Tech Industry, and State Security,” New York Times , December 3, 2017.
• Simon Denyer, “China’s Watchful Eye,” Washington Post , January 7, 2018.
• Cameron Kerry and Jack Karsten, “Gauging Investment in Self-Driving Cars,” Brookings Institution, October 16, 2017.
• Portions of this section are drawn from Darrell M. West, “Driverless Cars in China, Europe, Japan, Korea, and the United States,” Brookings Institution, September 2016.
• Yuming Ge, Xiaoman Liu, Libo Tang, and Darrell M. West, “Smart Transportation in China and the United States,” Center for Technology Innovation, Brookings Institution, December 2017.
• Peter Holley, “Uber Signs Deal to Buy 24,000 Autonomous Vehicles from Volvo,” Washington Post , November 20, 2017.
• Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Pedestrian in Arizona, Where Robots Roam,” New York Times , March 19, 2018.
• Kevin Desouza, Rashmi Krishnamurthy, and Gregory Dawson, “Learning from Public Sector Experimentation with Artificial Intelligence,” TechTank (blog), Brookings Institution, June 23, 2017.
• Boyd Cohen, “The 10 Smartest Cities in North America,” Fast Company , November 14, 2013.
• Teena Maddox, “66% of US Cities Are Investing in Smart City Technology,” TechRepublic , November 6, 2017.
• Osonde Osoba and William Welser IV, “The Risks of Artificial Intelligence to Security and the Future of Work” (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corp., December 2017) (www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE237.html).
• Ibid., p. 7.
• Dominic Barton, Jonathan Woetzel, Jeongmin Seong, and Qinzheng Tian, “Artificial Intelligence: Implications for China” (New York: McKinsey Global Institute, April 2017), p. 7.
• Executive Office of the President, “Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence,” October 2016, pp. 30-31.
• Elaine Glusac, “As Airbnb Grows, So Do Claims of Discrimination,” New York Times , June 21, 2016.
• “Joy Buolamwini,” Bloomberg Businessweek , July 3, 2017, p. 80.
• Mark Purdy and Paul Daugherty, “Why Artificial Intelligence is the Future of Growth,” Accenture, 2016.
• Jon Valant, “Integrating Charter Schools and Choice-Based Education Systems,” Brown Center Chalkboard blog, Brookings Institution, June 23, 2017.
• Tucker, “‘A White Mask Worked Better.’”
• Cliff Kuang, “Can A.I. Be Taught to Explain Itself?” New York Times Magazine , November 21, 2017.
• Yale Law School Information Society Project, “Governing Machine Learning,” September 2017.
• Katie Benner, “Airbnb Vows to Fight Racism, But Its Users Can’t Sue to Prompt Fairness,” New York Times , June 19, 2016.
• Executive Office of the President, “Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy” and “Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence.”
• Nancy Scolar, “Facebook’s Next Project: American Inequality,” Politico , February 19, 2018.
• Darrell M. West, “What Internet Search Data Reveals about Donald Trump’s First Year in Office,” Brookings Institution policy report, January 17, 2018.
• Ian Buck, “Testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Technology,” February 14, 2018.
• Keith Nakasone, “Testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Technology,” March 7, 2018.
• Greg Brockman, “The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence,” Testimony before U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, November 30, 2016.
• Amir Khosrowshahi, “Testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Technology,” February 14, 2018.
• James Kurose, “Testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Technology,” March 7, 2018.
• Stephen Noonoo, “Teachers Can Now Use IBM’s Watson to Search for Free Lesson Plans,” EdSurge , September 13, 2017.
• Congress.gov, “H.R. 4625 FUTURE of Artificial Intelligence Act of 2017,” December 12, 2017.
• Elizabeth Zima, “Could New York City’s AI Transparency Bill Be a Model for the Country?” Government Technology , January 4, 2018.
• Julia Powles, “New York City’s Bold, Flawed Attempt to Make Algorithms Accountable,” New Yorker , December 20, 2017.
• Sheera Frenkel, “Tech Giants Brace for Europe’s New Data Privacy Rules,” New York Times , January 28, 2018.
• Claire Miller and Kevin O’Brien, “Germany’s Complicated Relationship with Google Street View,” New York Times , April 23, 2013.
• Cade Metz, “Artificial Intelligence is Setting Up the Internet for a Huge Clash with Europe,” Wired , July 11, 2016.
• Eric Siegel, “Predictive Analytics Interview Series: Andrew Burt,” Predictive Analytics Times , June 14, 2017.
• Oren Etzioni, “How to Regulate Artificial Intelligence,” New York Times , September 1, 2017.
• “Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems,” unpublished paper. IEEE Global Initiative, 2018.
• Ritesh Noothigattu, Snehalkumar Gaikwad, Edmond Awad, Sohan Dsouza, Iyad Rahwan, Pradeep Ravikumar, and Ariel Procaccia, “A Voting-Based System for Ethical Decision Making,” Computers and Society , September 20, 2017 (www.media.mit.edu/publications/a-voting-based-system-for-ethical-decision-making/).
• Miles Brundage, et al., “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence,” University of Oxford unpublished paper, February 2018.
• John Markoff, “As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential,” New York Times, October 24, 2016, p. B3.
• Economist , “The Challenger: Technopolitics,” March 17, 2018.
• Douglas Maughan, “Testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Technology,” March 7, 2018.
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Artificial Intelligence

Governance Studies

Center for Technology Innovation

Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative

Joshua Turner, Nicol Turner Lee

September 27, 2024

John Villasenor

September 24, 2024

Kevin A. Bryan, Florenta Teodoridis

Essay on Do We Rely On Technology Too Much

Students are often asked to write an essay on Do We Rely On Technology Too Much in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Do We Rely On Technology Too Much

Is our dependence on technology too high.

We use technology for almost everything. From the moment we wake up, we check our phones, turn on lights, and use microwaves. At school, we learn with computers and tablets. Our parents work with the help of technology too. It seems like we can’t do much without it.

Technology in Daily Life

Think about how we talk to friends far away or find places without maps. We use apps and GPS. Even for fun, we play video games or watch shows online. Without these tech tools, we might feel lost.

Can We Live Without Technology?

It’s hard to imagine life without machines and gadgets. They make things easier and faster. But sometimes, they break or distract us. It’s important to learn how to do things on our own too, like solving math without a calculator.

Technology Balance

Using technology is not bad, but we should not forget to do things without it. Playing outside, reading books, and talking face to face are also important. Finding a balance is the key to not depending too much on technology.

250 Words Essay on Do We Rely On Technology Too Much

Our dependence on technology.

Let’s look at our daily routines. Many of us would be lost without our phones. They are not just for talking or texting anymore; they are our calendars, our cameras, and even our maps. When we want to know something, we don’t ask a person; we ask the internet. This shows how much we depend on technology for even the smallest tasks.

Technology in Schools

Schools are also filled with technology. Instead of chalkboards, many classrooms now have digital whiteboards. Books are often replaced by tablets or laptops. This can make learning more fun and interactive, but it also means students might not learn how to do things the old-fashioned way, like using a paper map or doing math without a calculator.

Is It Too Much?

So, do we rely on technology too much? It’s hard to say. Technology makes life easier and helps us do things faster. But it’s important to remember not to let it take over our lives. We should still know how to do things without it. Maybe sometimes, we should try to put the screens away and enjoy the world around us without any gadgets.

In conclusion, technology is a big part of our lives, but it’s good to take a break from it and make sure we can still do things on our own.

500 Words Essay on Do We Rely On Technology Too Much

Introduction to our use of technology.

In today’s world, technology is everywhere. From the moment we wake up until we go to bed, we use different kinds of gadgets and machines. Many people wonder if we depend on technology too much. This essay will look at various parts of our lives where technology plays a big role and discuss whether our reliance on it is too great.

Technology at Home

Technology in school.

In schools, tablets and computers are common tools now. They help students learn in new and exciting ways. But what happens when these devices are not available? Some students might find it hard to learn without them because they are used to having information at their fingertips. It is important for students to also learn how to find information without the internet and to solve problems without a calculator.

Technology at Work

Workplaces have also changed a lot because of technology. Computers help us do our jobs faster and keep in touch with coworkers from around the world. This can be a good thing because it lets people work together even if they are far apart. But, when technology fails, work can come to a stop. This shows that many businesses rely heavily on technology and may struggle without it.

Technology for Fun

Health and technology.

Technology has done amazing things for health care. It helps doctors diagnose and treat illnesses better than ever before. But some people worry that we trust technology too much for our health. They think we should also focus on eating healthy, exercising, and living a balanced life to stay well.

In conclusion, technology has a big role in our lives and can be very helpful. But it is true that we might rely on it too much sometimes. It’s important to remember how to do things without technology, to keep a good balance in our lives, and to make sure we can handle situations when technology is not available. By doing this, we can enjoy the benefits of technology without letting it control our lives.

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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Technology and Its Impact in the World Essay

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Introduction

Technology impacts, works cited.

Technology is defined as the use of tools, techniques and methods of organization in solving real world problems, which aims at performing specific tasks.

Technology has a profound root in the society; this is because today’s world relies on the advances in technology. These advances in technology in today’s world has sped people’s lives and made the world a smaller place to live in as it makes different locations closer to one another.

In addition, the fact that technology has become omnipresent in the world today due to its widespread use, is vital because it helps people in carrying out their chores in their daily livelihood. It is therefore important that the technology that exists be easily adaptable and able to solve the current world issues as human progress rate is increasing at an alarming rate (Oak 1).

The advances in technology have brought huge changes in the world today. Some of the areas where technology has brought important changes are as follows. First, technology has enabled the world in automating its critical processes in industries and households. The automobile industry has evolved from mechanical to automated automobiles simply because of the driving force that is technology.

Technology is applicable in performing tasks that are not accessible to man and are vital in automating crucial industrial processes. The technologies that are applicable when performing these crucial tasks include the use of robotics and artificial intelligence in carrying out challenging tasks such as space exploration and mining (Oak 1).

Another positive effect of technology is that it has changed the manner of communication. This has been made possible through the use computer technology; computers have the ability to process huge chunks of data at one go. Information digitization has proved to be a vital technology platform since it has made it possible in storing information and helps in enriching the information quality.

The advances in technology enable harnessing of water from natural sources to homes through robust transmission systems. Technology has brought the discovery of electricity that is important in lighting up the world. Electricity is easily generated by using renewable energy resources.

On the other hand, with all the advances in technology, it is unimaginable that technology has its side effects in the society even when the world is at the epitome of technology. In the medical technology world, technology can affect and also harm patients in cases where it involves a machine that has radiation rays.

On environmental technology, there is a lot of waste in terms of chemicals, which directly go back to the environment. Lastly, technology has a negative impact on people since they tend to be lazy and rely mostly on technology (Oak 1).

In conclusion, the advances brought about by technologies, which are the Internet, cell phones, and notebook computers are vital necessity for daily living. Due to these advances, it is easy for us to forget about those who suffer while attempting to provide for their basic needs, such as clean water, food and health care.

It is a good gesture by the developed world to make use of their technologies to help the underprivileged groups of people in the society. Through the continuous use of these technologies, there are advances that targets medical services, improved economy based on the Internet, emerging technologies in information systems sector, advanced farming methods and industrial sectors.

More importantly, educational needs for the people are taken into consideration by these technologies, since they help them become prosperous nations who do not require help from others but are able to get their own resources. Moreover, transferring technology from the developed world to the developing world has various benefits. There will be improvement in living standards, production efficiency and become a base for economic growth (Oak 1).

Oak, Manali. “ Positive Effects of Technology on Society .” Buzzle. 2011. Web.

• The Evolution of the Automobile & Its Effects on Society
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• The Evolution of Electricity
• Electricity Is the Most Important Invention
• Technical Evolution of Automobiles
• How Computers Affect Our Lives
• Nanotechnology and its Perspectives in Connecticut
• Purchasing or Leasing Computer Equipment: Advantages and Disadvantages
• Ethical and Illegal Computer Hacking
• Autonomous Controller Robotics: The Future of Robots
• Chicago (A-D)
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