Category: Blog

The exponential growth in technology we are currently experiencing heralds a radical restructuring of our societies, businesses and economies. One area where governments and citizens alike can expect technology to make an enormous impact is taxation.

As new technologies emerge and converge, new ways of accessing or applying those technologies are also appearing. From open source technology to the Creative Commons and shared economy apps, the shift is towards making more data more available to more people. It’s a bottom-up, technology-driven empowerment of the people that has already hugely changed creative industries, and is moving to embrace professional services and manufacturing too.

Once writing, sharing and printing your opinion was in the hands of a distant, qualified, expert elite; now everyone can blog, post comments, create webpages or news sites, share pictures, print out documents or leaflets in high quality at home. The advances in technology that made this possible are continuing apace, enabling citizens to do more and more themselves.

A huge range of home-grown services and products will include DIY energy through solar power, DIY healthcare through in-body sensors, DIY education through on-line courses, DIY insurance, even DIY real estate through 3D printing. As technologies ramp up and to scale, prices will fall within reach of more than just new adopters – already, a 2 000m2 3D-printed concrete build costs no more than 50 000 USD.

As individuals increasingly do so much more for and by themselves, roles in society as it stands will come into question as the responsibilities and duties of citizens, governments and businesses towards each other are reshaped. A data-based, more democratized society where more people create and produce rather than merely consume will lead to civic engagement and organization at the local level, empowering local communities. Shared economy apps will enable a similar or greater sense of well-being and purchasing power, but at a reduced cost within the traditional economic framework. This will have a knock-on effect of lowering prices in general, reducing the number of government employees – and resetting expectations in terms of the tax burden.

Any renegotiation of the taxation status quo will shake governments, creating serious debate or even protest, with power is at stake and the whole top-down dynamic under threat. Citizens will demand changes in how much tax is paid and how it should be spent to reflect better the new ordering of responsibilities and roles. The public use of algorithms, big data in the hands of the people, will force governments to be increasingly accountable for optimized spending, for transparency and justifiable levels of taxation.

Open data initiatives, cameras, sensors and drones will enable citizens and consumers to scrutinize the behavior of corporates and governments alike, establishing a fairer balance of power than the current asymmetric set up. So government must prepare for a transition to a smaller, more efficient role with a different scope, facilitating and enabling citizens rather than driving and organizing structures and solutions as at present.

In emerging markets, this can be of enormous benefit to governments able to skip over whole chunks of the evolutionary trajectory of developed markets towards swifter innovation, unencumbered by the deadweight of historic, increasingly redundant legislation, technologies or incumbents.

If governments must change to be more responsive to exponential change, in particular given radical shifts in civic engagement and the taxation base, then so must private sector organizations. New models for the new era involve dramatic decentralization of employees, crowdsourcing, flexibility and scalability of assets, data algorithms and collaborative, bottom-up approaches.

The big challenge lies in making organizations, whether corporate or public sector, exponential. That means responsive, flexible, transparent, decentralized, experimental and collaborative. It calls for engagement and involvement with and by citizens. It calls for a radical repositioning of the main stakeholders in society, government, business and individuals, with major economic implications including an overhaul of tax structures. The importance of going exponential will be my main message at the ITU Telecom World 2014Leadership Summit on the Future this December in Doha.

The world has changed, and so should our business theories, strategies and underlying assumptions. Easy to say, perhaps, not so easy to execute. But the basic premise, that stability is the norm and upheaval intense but brief and infrequent, no longer holds true. The periods of stability between punctuations have become dramatically shorter as technology develops, and we’re experiencing a permanent flux of change that calls for adaptability, flexibility, swift and agile responses.

Major geopolitical shifts opening up new markets and breaking North America’s hegemony in many industries, the rise of globalization enabling competition from pretty much anywhere, anytime, the freedom and flexibility of digitization: these are all factors behind the end of sustainable competitive advantage. Meaning it’s not enough anymore to be the best in your field and hold onto your market share. In the ICT sector, in particular, digitization and globalization mean not having to own your capex-heavy assets as a prerequisite to entering the market. Programmers can be based anywhere in the world, web capacity can be bought made-to-measure, servers leased as necessary.

Competition is opened up, no longer delineated by a single industry, but encompassing entire arenas of activity, breaking down traditional boundaries between sectors and blowing up silo walls.

Robert Goizueta of Coca Cola famously exemplified arena thinking with his aim for his particular brand of soft drink to increase its percentage of the average daily human intake of 64 fluid ounces. He was openly pitting his company’s soda against not just other soft drinks, but tea, coffee, juice, even water – the whole beverage arena, much more than one industry.

This blurring of boundaries has always been apparent in the ICT sector – its very name combines both information and communication technologies – but is increasing on a massive scale as technology advances and long-standing business models are threatened. Witness the rise of OTTs as ferocious competitors from the internet world; the convergence of broadcasting and broadband; how cars are becoming mere nodes on an information system; or how big data analytics are growing so effective that human insurance underwriters may soon be out of work in many instances.

And the advent of the Internet of Things is speeding up the process still further. Are washing machines technically-enhanced machines to wash clothes or complex computers with a clothes-washing function? Are smart grids the domain of ICTs, energy companies, consultants or systems integrators? Add in robotics and the merging of the digital and physical worlds, and we are truly in a new competitive era dominated by uncertainty.

Preparing for this uncertain future means moving away from older models, creating resilience to change and openness to new information. Mixing up the structure of a business may mean adopting a portfolio approach based on differing degrees of uncertainty in markets and technologies. Lower risk core business should be supplemented with fairly sure candidates for next generation core products and services. Investing wisely in higher-risk innovation for longer-term growth means getting smart at managing options, being willing to fail where necessary and kill a project, taking it as an experiment from which to learn, not an admission of defeat. Getting in early may mean investing in several competing new technologies before a clear winner is declared, automatically condemning several other options in order to reap the sizeable benefits of not waiting for the proven – therefore expensive – success of one.

This kind of agility and ability to reconfigure quickly is at the heart of the virtualization of network components and software defined networks that are beginning to radically alter the shape of the ICT industry. It calls for maximum flexibility and responsiveness across the whole system, at the expense of optimization of one task or element within that system.

It’s also a business mindset that government and industry leaders alike need to take on board to face the new fluid realities of change as the new norm – and it’s the basis of the new playbook for strategy I’ll be proposing at the Leadership Summit on The Future at ITU Telecom World 2014 in Doha this December.

Technology has an enormous role to play in solving the grand challenges of today, from geopolitical tensions and religious fanaticism to poverty, climate change and the endangerment of privacy and security.

Many threads of radical new technological developments and scientific disciplines are converging, or running in parallel, with an utterly unprecedented potential impact, including biotechnology, nanotechnology, neurotechnology, artificial intelligence, drones, sensors, 3D printing, and advanced solar energy. Over the next five to ten years, these and other technologies will become increasingly mainstream as they ramp up capability, cost, scale and competitive reach.

In healthcare, for example, bio tech sensors working with portable nano chips and cloud networks will allow the diagnosis of widespread diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis or malaria within the hour, more efficiently, easily and accurately. Advances in bio technology mean the cost of DNA sequencing has dropped at an astonishing rate from around a billion US dollars 13 years ago to less than 1 000 dollars today, when your personal profile can be produced within 90 minutes. Affordability and accessibility at this level will drive a range of services based on DNA profiling, from restaurant menus tailored to your individual tolerance of carbohydrates to personalized viral loads of medicines or individual cancer treatments increasing effectiveness and reducing side effects.

In artificial intelligence, developments in machine learning and deep learning are producing extremely powerful super computers able to recognize patterns and use algorithms to solve complex issues and problems without any human intervention. Within the next five years, robots will be equipped with perfect computer vision, object recognition, speech and language capabilities enabling them to utterly transform a multitude of vertical markets as costs are driven down, services and advertising highly personalized, security and disaster management improved.

The developments with the biggest immediate impact include sensors creating the Internet of Things, big data and deep learning algorithms, bitcoin currencies, drones and robotics, including robo-cars. Longer term, the commoditization of graphene will radically impact sectors from auto construction to consumer electronics, transportation and household appliances. A super material 200 times stronger and six times lighter than steel, graphene is highly conductive, energy efficient, sustainable, malleable and flexible – with the power to transform our physical reality to a large degree.

These are just a handful of examples of the tsunami of change coming our way. At the heart of all of this technology, as regulator, supporter, investor, user and beneficiary, sits government. Government, like finance, retail, media, energy or IT, is an information-enabled business, directly influenced by developments in artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning apps in particular. It is the reach of government into every area of our lives and societies that makes this so significant. Applications in tax collection, detection of fraud, policing, and predicting crime; avoiding or better preparing for calamities, pandemics, energy shortages or natural disasters; connecting different modalities and systems from education to health, security and transport – in all of these areas, algorithms allow governments to be more responsive, flexible and preventative.

All this technology can, of course, be used for good or for ill, to tackle our global grand challenges or to drive terrorism, criminality, hacking and disruption of cities or whole nations. Governments and businesses need to be aware of the dangers of using technology for surveillance – and of the backlash from citizens and consumers empowered to use drones, sensors and cameras to open up corporate and government powers to a more equal degree of scrutiny.

The enormous market for personalized products and services based on DNA profiling must be regulated responsibly to avoid discrimination or abuse by employers, governments or health insurance companies. And we need to talk in detail at international level, and very soon, to establish consensus on corporate governance and cross-government issues of cyber security and bio technology, just we did with the Montreal protocols on ozone levels thirty years ago.

We need to be prepared for a revolution at the level of government, business and society, altering established social and economic structures beyond recognition. That’s why I am taking part in the Leadership Summit on The Future at ITU Telecom World 2014. Because we need to be aware of the extent of these exponential changes in order to prepare for our future.

The challenges of embracing the digital era are bringing us into a perfect storm of change. Old systems designed for a pre-Internet world are reaching their limit, overwhelmed by massive economic, financial and political uncertainty, increasing complexity, major environmental pressures, and dramatic, disruptive developments across multiple fields of science and technology. As a result, business cycles are accelerating and shortening, governments are under growing pressure to respond and adapt, and individuals are facing disruption in every aspect of their lives, from job security and financial uncertainty to the reshaping of education and healthcare.

As an example of this drama at a personal level, we are already experiencing massive advances in human brain and body capabilities through implants, drugs and genetic enhancements that will extend life expectancy and create a different race of people, effectively half-computer, half-human. Within our own lifetimes, average life spans could well stretch to 100 or 120 years and life quality may be improved by a range of genetic treatments including, for example, eliminating rage or obesity. At the same time, life and employment prospects could be increased by chemicals that enhance our concentration and implants that expand our memory and cognitive capabilities.

Against this backdrop of radical change, literally every industry is being transformed by new technologies and business models. Embedded sensors are enveloping us and will form part of every conceivable object – generating an avalanche of data and creating the Internet of all Things. Manufacturing and commerce will be reshaped by robotics, synthetic biology 3D and 4D printing, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, and entirely new payment and charging systems.

Take synthetic biology, producing new materials, compounds, and potentially even new life forms through the creation and manipulation of matter at the level of genes and their constituent proteins. Bio-engineering could create new biological entities that could consume waste, turning it into useful new by-products; or absorb our currently dangerous atmospheric emissions in a form of environmental clean-up; or create new energy sources, replacement body parts or new plants and foods. Everything and anything may be possible. The opportunities opened up by synthetic biology, and indeed all new technologies, are breathtaking – as indeed are the potential risks and downsides for different sections of society.

Simply put, we don’t know what the mid- to long-term consequences of many of these new developments might be. Some suggest we are entering a period of abundance that could solve all our challenges through the exponential development rates and convergence of activity in the fields of nanotechnology, biology, information technology and the cognitive science. Others argue that we are creating unprecedented sources of existential risk. The social and ethical implications are immense and require enormous commitment and consideration from the scientific community, based around the principle that just because we can do something in science doesn’t mean we should. For governments, businesses and individuals, the challenge is to prepare ourselves for a society, and a world of work, that is going to be radically different from anything we have previously seen.

It’s evident, for example, that we probably can’t rely on big business for employment in the way we used to. Technology has already eliminated huge swathes of manufacturing and service jobs, and is now beginning to use robotics and advanced software to replace humans even in professional areas such as legal services, accounting and journalism. Current qualifications and job skills will be increasingly inadequate or irrelevant, and with the active workforce potentially including people of up to 100 years of age, we need to start preparing now for a radically different near-future.

We might not know today what jobs will be done or skills needed in 10-50 years from now, but we – governments, business and society – can start equipping ourselves with the basics. Learning how to learn, problem-solving, accelerated learning, pattern recognition, understanding complexity, design learning and scenario thinking are the types of underlying skills that will enable us to keep adding relevant skills, acquiring new knowledge, and preparing for a new era of multiple jobs and careers within an extended working life.

Encouraging entrepreneurship and providing training in setting up and running businesses will be vital to tomorrow’s economy. A vibrant small to medium enterprise (SME) sector will drive innovation, create jobs and keep society moving through the buying and selling of goods and services. It is a big challenge for governments to ensure greater numbers and more diverse groups of people are comfortable taking the risk of starting their own business, and creating new products, services and employment. This calls for investment in training at every level of entrepreneurship and for effective support mechanisms in areas such as marketing, human resources and financial skills. This also calls for ongoing long-term thinking on adult education focused on encouraging and facilitating genuinely life-long learning. Governments must act in a spirit of enlightened self-interest by investing now in education solutions for the future workplace – or face the potentially disastrous social, economic and personal consequences of long-term, large-scale unemployment.

This will form the core of my message to governments, regulators and industry leaders at ITU Telecom World 2014’s Leadership Summit on the Future – prepare for our future by investing in education now.

24 innovative minds are headed to Linz, Austria for the Future Innovators Summit, a project of Ars Electronica, ITU Telecom World, and Hakuhodo held between 4-8 September. This group represents a multidisciplinary melting pot of creative engineers, social entrepreneurs and social activists, scientists, artists, designers and tech innovators, including six former winners of the Young Innovators Competition. They will be working towards solving problems facing the world today, submitted on-site by the audience and selected by serendipity, and will be asked to find solutions in the form of concepts and maybe even new partnerships in a collaborative co-creation process.

In 2013, in the Lab at ITU Telecom World 2013 in Bangkok, a bag of stones was lifted high in the air. Its fall to the ground was controlled by Gravity Light. This system uses gravity, friction and a gear system to generate enough electricity to provide up to 30 minutes of light at a time, anywhere in the world. Though it started as an art installation, Gravity Light quickly became a product that has the potential to change lives for those who live without regular power supplies. This kind of thinking was the foundation of the relationship between Ars Electronica and ITU Telecom World, that art and design can inform technology and social change in powerful ways.

From this relationship came the Future Innovators Summit. There’s no way, of course, of knowing exactly what this unique and exciting mix of young people will bring about, but there is tremendous potential for dialogue, exchange of ideas, communal inspiration and co-creation across generations, nationalities and professional disciplines. They will work together in a collaborative process, alongside professional facilitators, future researchers and an impressive group of mentors, who will ensure just the right environment for ideas to take shape. All with the aim of turning technology to positive social ends.

Through a mixture of video documentation, real-time feedback from future researchers in each session, interactive displays, observations and social media monitoring, the participants and the audience onsite in Linz and online around the globe will form a broader collaborative community. All this aggregated data will be available as a live feed of interactive videos at https://www.aec.at/bienenstock/#/ for anyone interested in following the thought processes, evolution of ideas and engagement of contributors. We want to make the co-creation process real, witness change in the making, and involve as wide an audience as possible.

Using these different resources, we will be running an experiment in following, tracking and analysing the creative ideation processes involved in the meeting of minds from across different professional fields, different corners of the globe and different generations. We’re looking to map this thinking process, define the key takeaways of how offline co-creation works, and apply this knowledge to our online co-creation Challenges in the Young Innovators Competition. We will of course also present the concrete outcomes of the Future Innovators Summit, in the form of six creative solutions to six global challenges, in The Lab on the showfloor InnovationSpace at ITU Telecom World 2014 this December. This is where we hope to showcase some of the best young innovative talent being put to the best possible ends in the creation of social start-ups – so that we can see many more successful ideas such as Gravity Light changing lives at the most fundamental level.

Each group will be working independently and has its own additional hashtag:

For Group A, https://www.aec.at/c/future-innovators-group-a/ follow on #FISGA

For Group B, https://www.aec.at/c/future-innovators-group-b/ follow on #FISGB

For Group C, https://www.aec.at/c/future-innovators-group-c/ follow on #FISGC

For Group D, https://www.aec.at/c/future-innovators-group-d/ follow on #FISGD

For Group E, https://www.aec.at/c/future-innovators-group-e/ follow on #FISGE

For Group F, https://www.aec.at/c/future-innovators-group-f/ follow on #FISGF

You can follow all of the action at the summit through #FISummit on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr

And look for more information at: https://www.aec.at/c/en/future-innovators-summit/

Whether you live to work or work to live, for the vast majority of people throughout the world having a job of some sort is central to the way our lives are structured. So what happens when the drones and the robots take over?

This is not a facetious question, nor a piece of science fiction. The impact of artificial intelligence and smart devices is clear: many jobs as we know them will be taken over by advances in automation, in particular those repetitive, lower skilled or less creative tasks where human skills such as negotiation and creativity are not needed.

Increasingly intelligent machines are simply more efficient and cost-effective. If you can have hundreds of tireless robots uncomplainingly picking grapes 24/7, it is obvious that human labour will become redundant in many areas. And if the value of work such as is this is nothing, if work is performed for free, the path to structural unemployment through technology is clear.

The impact on our economic systems of the future may be dramatic. Within thirty or forty years, the concept of work and working for a living as we know it now will be over: toast.

In addition, developments in artificial intelligence are increasingly producing self-learning machines that simply need more processing power to continue advancing exponentially – possibly, and in the worst of scenarios, to a point beyond our control, where we as humans are merely troublesome, inefficient concepts in a machine world.

These are some of the larger and longer-term effects of artificial intelligence on the world of work. For the near future, it is enough to consider that anything that can be automated, will be automated, creating a huge shift in the labour market. Whereas hundreds of factory workers are involved in assembling one tablet today, within five years the job will be performed by just ten. Automation will profoundly impact all areas of mass production – and the workers involved.

So what will people do? What jobs will be left? The answer is mixed. Many new areas will open up in new or unpredictable niches, with titles we can only guess at at present: privacy managers, data scientists, digital curators, prediction auditors. Jobs for a digital world and a big data economy. Then there are all those areas where human soft skills are essential, such as negotiating, communicating, story-telling, therapy, creative design. Many lower-paid but intricate jobs (think electricians or plumbers) with too many variables may be too expensive to automate. And there will surely always be a premium for the human touch in some areas that could be automated – cooking or teaching, for example.

The Leadership Summit on the Future at ITU Telecom World 2014 in Doha this December is a chance to re-evaluate where we are and where we might be heading in the world of digitalization, of automation, human-machine interfaces and artificial intelligence. The role of work in terms of the structure of our societies is one major element. The opportunities are tremendous, but we also need to understand the possible side-effects of development. Technology is moving fast, and so must we.

The ITU Telecom World Young Innovators Competition in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) is looking for innovative ideas on how information and communication technologies (ICTs) can help smart cities to slow down or mitigate the effects of climate change for the benefit of global health.

Extreme weather events, spread of epidemic and endemic diseases, threats to food and water security, air pollution increasing the burden of non-communicable diseases – climate disruption is compromising the health and well-being of people around the world.

Small island states, developing communities and those living around large cities are on the frontline, increasingly vulnerable to immediate and long term health risks as a direct result of global warming.  There’s an urgent need to reduce human impact on the environment, focusing on preventative public health and a coordinated, multi-disciplinary and creative approach to mitigating the effects of climate change.

That’s where smart cities – and our latest Young Innovators Competition Challenge – come in.

Smart cities are focused on investing in human and social capital, transportation and communications infrastructure, and good management of natural resources to drive sustainable economic growth and high quality of life.

ICTs are the cornerstone of smart cities. By reducing emissions, improving environmental sustainability and using green technologies in innovative ways, smart cities can lead the way in improving public services in areas such as transportation, public spaces, education and, crucially, health.

The ITU Telecom World Young Innovators Competition Challenge on Smart Cities and Climate Change is held in partnership with the World Health Organization, who have long provided evidence, information and calls to action on the link between health and climate change, the topic of their upcoming Conference on Health and Climate Change, to be held on 27 – 29 August.  Together we are looking for innovative ideas on using ICTs in smart cities to mitigate the effects of climate change and improve the health of the world’s citizens everywhere.

This might involve using cutting-edge technologies, or combining existing technologies, services and systems involved in smart cities. The focus may be on monitoring climate change or mitigating its impact on society; or on using technology to green our communities. Innovations may centre around physical devices such as smart grids, software such as big data analytics or services such as community education.

The scope of the challenge is wide. And the rewards are high – the chance to have your ideas presented at the WHO conference, and the opportunity for two winners to join us at ITU Telecom World 2014 in Doha, Qatar, from 7 – 10 December, where they’ll be able to pitch to industry andgovernment leaders, participate in development workshops and mentoring sessions, and win up to USD5 000 in seed funding.

We think the best way of working on concepts and ideas for new social start-ups which directly address climate change is by working together, through a process of co-creation. So this challenge comes in three parts, starting with the Ideation phase, where you can research, post ideas and discuss smart cities and climate change on our crowdsourcing platform, collaborating in a rich and multi-party creative process. Our expert-facilitators will guide your collaboration and provide direction and further ideas. In the Collaboration phase, the concepts identified as having the greatest potential will be refined and completed, ready for evaluation. And in the final Selection phase, the experts in our Selection Committee will determine the two winners joining us in Doha.

The challenge opens today, 8 August, and runs until 7 October. That’s two months to get thinking, discussing, creating and collaborating on concrete, innovative ways to reduce the negative impact of climate change on our health through smart city technologies.  For the good of us all.

Affordable prosthetic limbs for Sudanese soldiers manufactured on 3D printers, grandmothers bringing the know-how on running solar electricity generators back to their remote villages, electric light powered by a bag of earth and gravity alone, powerful yet cheap batteries to power drones used in disaster management. Projects such as these may not be the most visible face of the dramatic growth of new technologies – but their impact on local communities across the developing world is nothing short of revolutionary.

New technologies are not just about rampant commercialism and the spectacular success of a handful of internet moguls. There’s also the less recognized, and arguably far more important, aspect of social change: making technology affordable and accessible to all, using technology to make a difference, to improve lives blighted by poverty or disability and the social exclusion that ensues. It is a new way of thinking about the business of technology that moves beyond developing the next get-rich-quick app to emancipating, empowering, and encouraging individuals throughout the world.

This is the powerful message of this year’s Ars Electronica Festival, held annually in Linz, Austria, and its inaugural Future Innovators Summit, held in conjunction with ITU Telecom Young Innovators. The Festival itself has been mixing technology, engineering, social entrepreneurship and art for 35 years, using the city and its buildings as an open stage to engage and communicate with as many people as possible, bringing the ideas of change through technology into the public space.

The Future Innovators Summit focuses strongly on the younger generation who are innovating for the future, and developing projects and ideas to change the worlds of business, design, applied technology and the arts. It’s a trans-disciplinary melting pot of creative engineers, young entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, social start-ups, designers and artists. Such a broad approach, breaking out of the traditional narrow boundaries of each field, opens up tremendous potential for dialogue across generations, professional communities and disciplines.

And the presence of the ITU Telecom Young Innovators, young social entrepreneurs with technological innovations aimed at improving lives all round the world, adds a truly global aspect, extending the exchange of ideas even further beyond the Festival participants in Linz and its online followers. The Young Innovators will form part of the 24-strong Future Innovators Summit, actively presenting their projects and prototypes, taking part in mentoring sessions with technology and business professionals, and sparking creative discussions and co-created ideas on how to turn technology to positive social ends.

It was the highly successful collaboration between Ars Electronica and ITU Telecom at ITU Telecom World 2013 last November in Bangkok on The Lab, a future-in-action interactive exhibition space and workshop, which inspired the Future Innovators Summit. The Lab enabled delegates at the wider World 13 debates, showfloor and networking sessions to experience first-hand products and projects at the edge of technology, art and society – and brought Ars Electronica into direct contact with the winning Young Innovators and their commitment to social  innovation and responsibility in areas such as disaster management, health care and inclusive education.

It’s a collaboration set to continue at this year’s event, too, with the Future Innovators Summit presenting findings, innovative projects, applications and technologies at ITU Telecom World 2014 in Doha, Qatar, in December. Artists, entrepreneur, engineers and developers will not just present, but will provide practical demonstrations and hands-on experience of creativity and innovation. More than an exhibition of stationary objects, it is a chance to explore new technologies, meet the makers, connect with creative sources – and hopefully come away enriched and inspired.

Because it is precisely this hybrid approach that is so potent. Hybridization of technology is the defining feature of our future: no longer telecommunications and information technology, but ICTs, the meeting of IT and telecommunications; no longer just a phone but a smart phone, a computer in your hand. Hybridization brings strength and breeds creativity in new directions; it is the hybridization of disciplines in the Future Innovators Summit and, later, in The Lab that promises to be so exciting.

From that innovative mix of experts, entrepreneurs and technologies will come ideas to change our world in a multitude of small yet vital ways, to iron out inequalities, to empower the disadvantaged. To enable the blind to engage with life-enhancing technology through tactile interfaces, to provide affordable clean water purified via solar energy, to create missing limbs for the victims of war and open up the advantages of cheap electricity to the energy-poor. This is what technology should also be about, after all.

We live in exciting times. Times full of the promise of progress, where the exponential pace of technological development is both visible and beneficial to ever more of the world’s population.  From e-medicine to digital education, next-generation transport systems to smart grid solutions, the near future looks to be healthier, smarter, greener, less wasteful of natural and financial resources.

But in the overwhelming commercial and governmental drive towards ubiquitous connectivity, the rush to develop, implement and monetize new technologies, it’s important not to overlook the very real dangers of over-connectivity.

Our addiction to or dependence on mobile devices, social networks, the internet in general is already eroding the concept of personal privacy, even before the onslaught of wearable technology and augmented humanity. We are already knowingly or blindly sacrificing our privacy for the ease and enjoyment of always on, always available services and information. Services and information which are free of charge, but which come at a price: our personal data.

We’re trading our data for the convenience of connectivity, and as technology moves inside us, as users and devices become integrated – from smart watches to health monitors to iris implants – the dangers are growing alongside the potential for collective good and wealth creation.

The technology is already there to lead us to becoming information ciphers, constant victims of marketing and surveillance, via ATM machines and mobile phones to drones, face recognition, policemen equipped with Google Glass. From instant recognition to the dystopian reality of your every action and decision predicted and judged on the basis of complex algorithms – without freedom or recourse.

As a result, privacy is fast on the way to becoming a paid-for product, such as the hotels charging a premium to ensure guests are truly unavailable and unconnected; encrypted mail services; or the private networks arising outside of the mainstream telco operators.  It’s a growing and lucrative niche market. But how fair is this? Should the world be divided by default in into those who can afford privacy and the majority who are stripped digitally naked?

And as awareness of the failure of privacy – the disbenefit of big data – grows, there is a very real danger of a retrenchment, of people withdrawing from the internet and its advanced products, applications and services, destroying the enormous potential of universal good through lack of universal participation.

Add to that the deepening in the near future of the divide between the digital haves and have-nots. If you think not having access to a mobile phone is a major disadvantage, imagine how great the inequality when you can’t afford the technological implants your colleague or neighbour has, the immediate access to information, communication and contacts.  It’s a whole new slant on the class system: the digitally augmented human versus the limited human-only human.

Technology itself, of course, has no ethics. And it’s no good leaving regulation of technology and its unintended consequences to the commercial world. Connectivity is big business, a giant money-making machine of equipment, services, advertising, analysis, products, an integrated and potentially enormous business system. Good for consumers, good for business, good for GDP.

It’s a set of complex scenarios that we cannot help to solve at the level of the individual user. The use and abuse of data needs urgent collective action, at governmental and intergovernmental level. It is down to governments to look beyond the benefits of connectivity to the downside of digital obesity: protecting its people from dangers and threats as far as possible is the duty of government, implicit in its contract with the governed.  Technology, like nuclear power, has tremendous potential for good, yet can also cause harm on an enormous scale.  Dealing with technology in the near future also calls, like nuclear power, for international standards or consensus, a digital bill of rights or citizens’ agenda to protect us from being over-connected or digitally naked.

Beyond the money and the perpetual spiral of technological advancement, we need to cleave to the principle of collective good. We need to see the human purpose beyond and above the scramble for monetization. Just because we can produce it and make money from it does not make technology good for people.

Increasing awareness of these factors, building understanding of the great new world of opportunity technology is opening up for us – and the need to be careful, to consider the consequences, to act collectively, to regulate fairly, wisely and in a timely manner – this is what the Leadership Summit on the Future at ITU Telecom World 2014 in Doha this December is all about.

I look forward to seeing you there!

More than 200 entries from 48 countries worldwide, hundreds of ideas, comments and unique perspectives on the creation of local digital content, many hours of serious consideration by our panel of judges – and the winners of the ITU Telecom Young Innovators Competition 2014 Challenge 1: Local Digital Content have been selected!

We were looking for the most promising tech start-ups aimed at inspiring the creation, aggregation or digitization of local content, whether through innovative technologies or a fresh angle on established technologies such as optical character recognition or translation software.

Demonstrating innovativeness, business potential and a clear social value proposition in meeting the Challenge, the winners chosen by our Selection Committee are:

• TeleMuseum – Lorna Okeng, Uganda
  Telemusuem aims to preserve and digitalize African local content, culture and history often traditionally passed on through the ancient informal education of storytelling. Local script content and analogue voice content from various sources will be aggregated and converted into fully independent, virtual cinema using a range of technologies from optical character recognition to abstract graphics algorithms. This is bringing storytelling to life – and preserving local history for generations to come.

• Incept – Safouan Ben Jha, Tunisia
  Incept provides an interactive, multilingual solution for museums, historical and archaeological sites via augmented reality, including language translation, interactive guided tours, and adaptive content – all through a standard smartphone. By presenting content in a highly attractive, interactive manner, it enables you to experience history as never before – such as translating ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics on tombs or pyramids into your own language via the smartphone in your hands, or watching the construction of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Explaining the motivation behind her start-up, Okeng said, “I worry that with no local content reservoir, two centuries from now, these traditional stories will be extinct. TeleMuseum aspires to redefine the way local content is accessed by aggregating local script and merging it into one big screening room. It embraces the concept of cinematography married with virtual reality, moulding each legend narrative into motion pictures all tied together to create a mini-film or documentary.”

Taking the boring out of history and making our past accessible, relevant and interesting for all is the drive behind Incept. According to Ben Jha, “We must learn from the past in order to know where our future is headed, but in order to make people excited about knowing the past, we have to present the content in a new manner.”

Both winners of this Challenge will attend ITU Telecom World 2014 in Doha, where they’ll benefit from seed funding, mentoring sessions, workshops, networking and showcasing opportunities before a high-profile audience from across the ICT ecosystem.

For Okeng, it’s an exciting prospect: “ITU Telecom Young Innovators Competition stimulates creativity and innovation and taps into the inner child. There is no doubt this is the type of platform I’ve been looking for, where technology marries art, a place where my background, young experience and skills can be put to use to make real things happen.”

Ben Jha has a clear idea of what Incept hopes to gain: ” Our team is made up of engineers, so our main goal now is to establish a solid business plan. We’re looking forward to gaining from the mentoring at ITU Telecom World, and meeting up with potential investors and partners. The only way to take our idea worldwide is by starting working immediately.”

Digital content, in the form of text, images, video, software or apps, is what drives the internet, empowering users to benefit from knowledge, opportunities and e services – and to generate their own content. So it’s critical that digital content is available to everyone, regardless of the language they speak or script they use. But only an estimated 5% of the over 7000 languages of the world are currently on the internet. The uphill battle to overcome this content divide is every bit as important as bridging the digital divide; access and content, supply and demand, are two sides of the same coin. That’s why this Challenge is so vital, and why it is so exciting to have found two winners of such high calibre to bring to the world stage at ITU Telecom World 2014 in Doha this December.

The second ITU Telecom Young Innovators Competition on Open Source Technologies for Disaster Management is open now – find out more here on how to take part!