From: Elon-Pew’s Predicting the Best and Worst of Digital Life By 2035.

Stephen Downes, an expert with the Digital
Technologies Research Centre of the National Research Council of Canada,
wrote, “By 2035 two trends will be evident, which we can characterize
as the best and worst of digital life. Neither, though, is
unadulterated. The best will contain elements of a toxic underside and
the worst will have its beneficial upside.

• The best: Everything we need will be available online.
• The worst: Everything about us will be known; nothing about us will be secret.

“By 2035, these will only be trends, that is, we won’t have reached
the ultimate state and there will be a great deal of discussion and
debate about both sides.

“As to the best: As we began to see during the pandemic, the digital
economy is much more robust than people expected. Within a few months,
services emerged to support office work, deliver food and groceries,
take classes and sit for exams, perform medical interventions, provide
advice and counselling, shop for clothing and hardware and more, all
online, all supported by a generally robust and reliable delivery
infrastructure.

“Looking past the current COVID rebound effect, we can see some of
the longer-term trends emerge: work-from-home, online learning and
development, digital delivery services, and more along the same lines.
We’re seeing a longer-term decline in the service industry as people
choose both to live and work at home, or at least, more locally. Outdoor
recreation and special events still attract us, but low-quality crowded
indoor work and leisure leave us cold.

“The downside is that this online world is reserved,
especially at first, for those who can afford it. Though improving,
access to good and services is still difficult to obtain in rural areas
and less developed areas. It requires stable accommodations and robust
internet access. These in turn demand a set of skills that will be out
of reach for older people and those with perceptual or learning
challenges. Even when they can access digital services, some people will
be isolated and vulnerable; children, especially, must be protected
from mistreatment and abuse.

“The Worst: We will have no secrets. Every transaction we conduct
will be recorded and discoverable. Cash transactions will decline to the
point that they’re viewed with suspicion. Automated surveillance will
track our every move online and offline, with artificial intelligence
recognizing us through our physical characteristics, habits and patterns
of behaviour. The primary purpose of this surveillance will be for
marketing, but it will also be used for law enforcement, political
campaigns, and in some cases, repression and discrimination.

“Surveillance will be greatly assisted by automation. A police
office, for example, used to have to call in for a report on a license
plate. Now a camera scans every plate within view and a computer checks
every one of them. Registration and insurance documentation is no longer
required; the system already knows and can alert the officer to expired
plates or outstanding warrants. Facial recognition accomplishes the
same for people walking through public places. Beyond the cameras, GPS
tracking follows us as we move about, while every purchase is recorded
somewhere.

“Total surveillance allows an often-unjust differentiation of
treatment of individuals. People who need something more, for example,
may be charged higher prices; we already see this in insurance, where
differential treatment is described as assessment of risk. Parents with
children may be charged more for milk than unmarried men. The price of
hotel rooms and airline tickets are already differentiated by location
and search history and could vary in the future based on income and
recent purchases. People with disadvantages or facing discrimination may
be denied access to services altogether, as digital redlining expands
to become a normal business practice.

“What makes this trend pernicious is that none of it is visible to
most observers. Not everybody will be under total surveillance; the rich
and the powerful will be exempted, as will most large corporations and
government activities. Without open data regulations or sunshine laws,
nobody will be able to detect when people have been treated inequitably,
unfairly or unjustly.

“And this is where we begin to see the beginnings of an upside. The
same system that surveils us can help keep us safe. If child predators
are tracked, for example, we can be alerted to the presence of child
predators near our children. Financial transactions will be legitimate
and legal or won’t exist (except in cash). We will be able to press an
SOS button to get assistance wherever we are. Our cars will detect and
report an accident before we know we were in one. Ships and aircraft
will no longer simply disappear. But this does not happen without
openness and laws to protect individuals and will lag well behind the
development of the surveillance system itself.

“On Balance: Both the best and the worst of our digital future are
two sides of the same digital coin, and this coin consists of the
question: who will digital technology serve? There are many possible
answers. It may be that it serves only the Kochs, Zuckerbergs and Musks
of the world, in which case the employment of digital technology will be
largely indifferent to our individual needs and suffering. It may be
that it serves the needs of only one political faction or state in which
basic needs may be met, provided we do not disrupt the status quo. It
may be that it provides strong individual protections, leaving no
recourse for those who are less able or less powerful. Or it may serve
the interests of the community as a whole, finding a balance between
needs and ability, providing each of us enough with enough agency to
manage our own lives as long as it is not to the detriment of others.

“Technology alone won’t decide this future. It defines what’s possible. But what we do is up to us.”