Learning to Live in a Digital World

Image Source : Gerd Leonhard

Nicolas Negroponte, in his 1995 famous bestseller Being Digital [1], commented – “Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living”. The Internet was in its infancy then and predicting the future of technology and its impact on society was nothing short of putting one’s head on the chopping block. Remarkably however, many predictions made by Negroponte in his book came true with one of the most famous of those predictions getting dubbed as the Negroponte Switch.

 We are experiencing an unparalleled time in human history where digital technologies have become all pervasive and ubiquitous. Barring some hard core skeptics, most people would readily agree that there is hardly any sphere of life today that is not directly or indirectly digitally mediated. We are now at the cusp of an exciting era that is promising a new wave of information interchange which till a few years ago, was science fiction. One of the most exciting of these developments pushing the frontiers of our connected digital world is the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT is not a distant dream but a fast moving reality as private enterprises see significant opportunities in its emergence and growth.

 While the evolution of the digital world has been nothing short of being transformative, it has not been without significant concerns on safety, health, privacy, censorship, free speech and unemployment. Author Daniel Levitin discusses some of these issues in this article . With the evolution of information technology and it’s all pervasive infusion in our lives, new addictions are taking root and impacting human behaviour. The city of Antwerp in Belgium for example, has created a special lane on the road for Smartphone users who are addicted to texting while walking. Recently, studies conducted at the University of California Los Angeles and other schools have flagged many health concerns emanating out of constant consumption of digital technology.

With technology opening new possibilities, there are also deep concerns over individual privacy and liberty. Civil society organizations around the world have questioned privacy implications of supposedly benign and beneficial solutions created through digital networks.The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a US based non-profit organization that is actively engaged in advocacy and action against electronic surveillance and citizen rights to digital privacy and free speech. In India, similar concerns have been raised time and again on privacy issues related to Aadhar. Recently (May,2018), Mozilla, the maker of the open source browser Firefox in a blog post argued that exposure of Aadhar data might put Indians at significant privacy risk. Issues pertaining to maintaining sanctity of the Aadhar enrollment process, its impact on the Aadhar database and ultimately on people have been widely reported in the media (23rd July 2018). There is also considerable speculation around the world that  artificial intelligence will be replacing humans in many skill areas. 

So what’s the future of computing? Honestly it’s pretty hard to speculate what the world is going to be like in a few years from now given the rapid advancements in new and exciting technologies. What’s still more hard to predict however is how human beings will respond to the new wave of digital technologies that is about to hit us in the next few years. Colin Angel, founder of iRobot puts it rather optimistically when he says: “It's going to be interesting to see how society deals with artificial intelligence, but it will definitely be cool.”

What say reader?

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[1] Interested readers can access a few pages of this book by clicking on Look Inside at Amazon and also read selected excerpts from a book summary posted on the Stanford University website.

[2] A 2014 TED talk by Nicoloas Negorponte titled A 30 Year History of the future can be viewed here if you are interested. You can also view an awesome 1984 Ted Talk by Negroponte that predicted what will happen to computing in a few years.