DIGITAL
LIBERTY
Technology is reshaping society
Three themes, data, AI and society’s social graph, will combine to create a crisis in which our future will be forged. Together, they will challenge the very foundations of our open, liberal democracies. To navigate this crisis, we will need to look to the past, to the fundamental values of liberalism and adapt those lessons to a new context.
“We shape our tools, and then they shape us”
John McCalkin
Data is becoming ubiquitous
90% of the data that exists has been created in the last 2 years
We spend 40% of our waking lives online
AI IS BECOMING MORE CAPABLE
Your laptop will have more processing power than your brain by 2030
1 in 4 jobs are threatened by AI.
SOCIAL GRAPHS ARE REWIRING
83% of gen Z consume news from social media
The social graph is critical to opinion formation and our open societies.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.”
EDWARD O. WILSON
the new digital era
The wave of change has been gently accelerating since the invention of the earliest communication technology, the printing press. Its pace picked up during the earlier phases of the Internet’s evolution. Today, it's accelerating - exponentially faster.
As data becomes ubiquitous, AI becomes all-pervasive, and digital devices mediate our interactions with the physical world, we reach a tipping point. It’s a point at which we come to exist in a digital hall of mirrors, where our perception of the world and our actions are shaped by technology and the worldview coded into it. We are moving beyond simple machines being used as human tools; algorithms are becoming the lenses through which individuals see the world, and the transmission mechanism through which the actions of one individual will influence others.
The result will be more than the sum of the parts of individual humans and algorithms. Like it or not, we are a long way down the path toward creating systems of humans, machines and crowds that interact in complex and unpredictable ways. This tipping point heralds a period of great change, risk and opportunities.
