The Digital Revolution Is Evolving

Emerging technologies, growing amounts of data and smarter ways of getting insights are changing the way people, businesses and governments interact. Across the globe, the pace of digital transformation is accelerating. The private sector continues to invest in disruptive technologies to get ahead of the competition. They adapt their business models to meet ever increasing customer expectations.

The pace of change continues to blur the boundaries of the physical and digital worlds and is redefining traditional industry sectors and the way we live and work. 

In the space of 50 years, the digital world has grown to become crucial to the functioning of society. The revolution has proceeded at breakneck speed, no technology has reached more people in as short a space of time as the Internet, and it has not finished yet. Two statistics tell the story:

• Cell phone subscribers: 4.78 billion or 62% of world population in 2020. 

• Internet users: 4.54 billion or  59% of world population in 2020.

Human history has been marked by a series of revolutions which helped shape us as modern individuals. Our whole concept of civilisation is determined by a succession of consecutive turning points for mankind. From the early Neolithic Revolution, occurring more than 12,000 years ago, and all the way through the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century and the Jet Age of the 1950s and 1960s, humanity has evolved enormously.

Today, humanity is going through a new type of revolution which has vastly changed our lifestyles, beliefs and thoughts. Digital revolution, as experts call it, changed how we behave, how we interact and redefined us as modern humans. We think differently, we work differently and our lives are intrinsically different when compared to 100 years before.
Digital Transformation

Across the globe, the pace of digital transformation is accelerating. The private sector continues to invest in disruptive technologies to get ahead of the competition. They adapt their business models to meet ever increasing customer expectations.

The pace of change continues to blur the boundaries of the physical and digital worlds. It is redefining traditional industry sectors and the way we live and work. Emerging technologies, growing amounts of data and smarter ways of getting insights are changing the way people, businesses and governments interact.

Technology affects the way individuals communicate, learn, and think. It helps society and determines how people interact with each other on a daily basis. It also plays an important role in society today.

One aspect of technology that has had a great impact on society is how it affects learning. It’s made learning more interactive and collaborative, this helps people better engage with the material that they are learning and have trouble with. Also, it gets you better access to resources. With the creation of the internet, it gives us access to information at a twenty-four-hour rate and you have access to almost anything online. In addition, it allows students to get work done easier. Students can take quizzes and exams more easily, and teachers being able to hold online classes can be very effective. It also expands the boundaries of the classroom, encouraging self-paced learning. People can access learning through YouTube and social media. This helps students learn better than sitting down for lectures and reading from textbooks. These technological advancements made learning more fun and convenient.

Google and Yahoo allow you to answer almost every question that pops into your head. Social media allows you to connect with like-minded individuals around the world. 

E-commerce allows you to sell products to a global marketplace. Information is freely available, people are instantly connected and markets are globally available. New opportunities and challenges are emerging every day, and entrepreneurship, teamed up with technology, are solving them all. In the next ten years we will see the effects of this, and they will be huge.

Until recently, the Internet as we know it had been in development and people were using it like a new toy.Today people have integrated technology into the fabric of their being. It’s hard to imagine a day or two without your smartphone, Wi-Fi or social media. People are rapidly connecting the dots with all this technology and finding new and transformational ways to make an impact in the world.

One thing we know for sure is whenever there are new and powerful ways to connect, they have a huge impact on business. Phones, commercial air travel, television, email and mobile computing have all shown us that the companies that adapt quickly get a jump on those that don’t.

It’s now possible for a seventeen-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom to start a group on Facebook for free. She can have thousands of followers and fans worldwide for free. She can talk to them all on video for free. She can write to them all for free. She can get them all excited about her idea, all without spending any of her money. Fifteen years ago, you would have needed thousands of pounds in marketing budget to achieve this. Already we are seeing people as young as twenty making six-figure incomes from their ideas. These teenagers aren’t attached to the idea that a business has to be the way it used to be. They don’t think a brand needs to cost a lot of money or that they need to live in a particular location in order to do business there.

That’s why they are succeeding: not because they are better at using the technology, but because they are better at letting go of the way things were done in the past, and probably because they were never attached to these ideas in the first place.

This new technology is no longer a toy, it’s in the fabric of humanity and it’s here to shake things up for the future.
From ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence to sensors in our homes and satellites in our skies, our modern communications infrastructure is an also surveillance infrastructure that is almost impossible to escape.

Such digital surveillance can certainly have beneficial effects for the economy and for security.

• Networked industrial plants can be monitored and controlled to only produce what is necessary to meet actual demand, which makes manufacturing environmentally friendlier. 

• The health condition of steel railway turnouts, their potential malfunctions and their material failures due to heavy mechanical stress can be measured, and their required maintenance can be predicted and more optimally scheduled.

However, monitoring and controlling objects and infrastructure is different from monitoring people, or at least, it should be. In legal terms, a person is a subject, a bearer of rights and legal obligations. We couch the monitoring of people in the euphemistic language of profiles, social credits and scores. But the analysed raw data of our lives produces a different image of a person, one that is an algorithmically furnished digital twin. 

The data economy reduces humans to mere data. What remains is merely the measurable and visible.
 

Nature:        BCTV:      Australian Digital Transformation Agency:      Chatham House:     KeyPersonOfInfluence: 

For analysis of how this is effecting your organisation please contact Cyber Security Intelligence.

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