By: Jim Smith, Lynn St. Amour
18 Jan 2019
Today almost half of the world’s population are connected to the Internet, fifty years since it was invented and thirty since the creation of the World Wide Web. Regardless of whether we see this as a success story or terribly slow progress, the questions are: Where do we go from here? What is the digital future we need?
Countless volunteers, activists, entrepreneurs, businesses and governments made the Internet and the digital world it enables. A wave of new technologies, sensors embedded in physical products, machine learning and next generation networks allow us to gather, engage, process and act on information in real-time at global scale. Technology has the potential to transform how we stay healthy, how we travel, how we produce and consume goods and how we tackle environmental and development challenges.
It is one of the great ironies of the immense potential of digital technology that we are no longer dealing with just a question of technology – 60% of global GDP is expected to be digitized by 2022 and there is increasingly little distinction between the digital economy and the ‘real’ economy, between digital society and ‘real’ society. As a result, we must address larger issues that are forcing their way onto the global agenda.