What is the digital transition? I set off for this post aiming to l share some resources for thinking about the EU narratives on the digital transition - beyond the pages where this narrative is exposed: A Europe fit for the digital age | European Commission (europa.eu). The digital transition is at the same time a project and a phenomenon which is seen as key for the economy, society, sustainability, environment and climate. What kind of futures inform this view?
The ideal place to start would have been the Futurium - an on-line platform for constructing digital futures that was established by DG CNECT about a decade ago. However the platform has recently been archived (Your Voice, Our Future | Futurium (europa.eu). Hence, I thought I would create a post based on the 2014 contribution of the Futurium to the foresight towards the 2nd Strategic Programme of Horizon 2020 titled "the big disruptions are yet to come".
The Digital Transition: the big disruptions are yet to come
Modern electronic communications and online services, including e-government, are important economic sectors in their own right but they are also crucial levers of growth and productivity for the economy as a whole. Lower investment in and use of ICT in Europe, accounts for a large part of the labour productivity gap between the EU and the US. EU investment in state-of-the-art communications infrastructure is also lagging behind that of its main competitors, especially as regards mobile infrastructure. The average mobile data speed in the EU is half of that of the US,17 and Europe has only 6% of the world's 4G mobile subscriptions. In South Korea, 58% of households are connected by fibre to the home, but only 5% in Europe. 54% of European households have access to next generation networks, able to deliver 30 Mbps. In the new, data-based economy, European companies are almost absent from the value chain.
Our society, our lives and our economies are being transformed as precision agriculture increases productivity and environmental efficiency, robots continue to revolutionise industry but also mining and aquacultures, and advanced automation finds its way into services. Yet, there is a sense that we are only scratching the surface and the big changes are yet to come. This sense is enhanced when looking into the future contained in “the Futurium”.
There are two overlapping processes of integration driven by ICT that pose different sets of issues, challenges, threats and opportunities. The first is the integration of individual people and things in patterns of behaviour which transcend the boundaries of “organizations” as we know them in their legal and physical existence, as can be illustrated by the current on-line social networks. For some, this is only the beginning.
Looking into the Futurium, the vision illustrated by the movie "The Matrix" is no longer totally fictional. The internet will soon connect bits and atoms at the speed of light. Its algorithms will orchestrate zillions of smart objects, which will share zettabytes of data every day, thus bridging the physical and virtual worlds instantaneously. Prediction and decision will be easier and faster than ever, based on scientific evidence and people’s aspirations. The integration of individual people and things will evolve. People and objects will have a complete and accurate digital image in the virtual space incorporating all the senses and functions, while at the same-time it will be infinitely malleable, storable, copy-able etc. as digital objects are. The “matrix” as a social space would have massive implications for society in the physical world, for example, as digital communities form and may compete with, or reinforce, community relations based on physical social contact.
The second process of integration s between the virtual and the physical world. Interactions between the physical and the virtual world will be facilitated massively by advances in materials and biological sciences and the penetration of 3D printers in society. Human bodies may benefit from artificial parts. New materials may allow the production of soft robots with organic tissues. Artificial and human intelligence may combine and reinforce each-other with totally unpredictable results.
Kurzweil[1] argues that the rate of technological progress will grow exponentially. In a few decades, we could be able to enhance our cognitive and physical capabilities with bio-technological add-ons. Robots and cyborgs will perform complex tasks and could take over all routine jobs, from agriculture to construction, from office to industrial automation. The possibilities to apply pre-birth prevention and regenerate and repair organs as needed would enable us to live longer and healthier. We will be able to learn, work and play "from the cradle to the grave".
While these are seen as possible long term scenarios, they have massive disruptive potential, and some aspects of them are already visible. First, there is a dislocation of the person from their physical and social surroundings through on-line communities. Second, there are the various technological augmentations of the human body not necessarily confined to medical purposes but possibly extended to applications in leisure and sport, from prostheses to wearable systems. Third, there is the transformation in knowledge creation and creativity that results from the increasing automation of research and innovation. This automation increases massively the productivity of research (at least in terms of data production), changes the balance between labour and capital in the production of knowledge (on the one hand making science more dependent on infrastructures but on the other enabling individuals to generate much more knowledge with much less work than before), and there changes the thresholds of acceptable contributions to knowledge (on the one hand leading to the emergence of citizens-science and fully autonomous machine-creativity, on the other hand underpinning changes to education and scientific institutions). The development of sensors, for example, is already revolutionizing observation based sciences like biology and meteorology.
[1] Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, Penguin Group, 2005
