Page 31 - May 2018 Disruption Report Flip Book

EXPONENTIAL CHANGE IN 2018 JANMUAAYRY20128018
EXPONENTIAL CHANGE IN 2018 Exponential changes for 2018
In his weekly newsletter, Exponential View, Azeem Azhar identified the following 18 exponential changes we can expect in 2018:
1. International relations, the political economy, and governance will desperately need new design patterns as we enter a new phase of the digital revolution. These should be developed in the public sphere with a wide range of participants. Three major themes to explore:
• The massive global platforms—Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the like—are defining a new political economy. Their corporate sovereignty will chafe with states’ own sovereignty. Those same nations will curry favor with the platforms to win the putative economic benefits provided by them. The large platforms know that governments will seek to
rein in their power through regulation or legislation. These firms will accelerate their efforts to secure platform advantage and raise the baseline from which their settlement will be judged in the years to come.
• National AI strategies will emerge from more countries. The result? More grounds for cooperation and more reason to argue about intellectual property, privacy, data, and license to operate.
• Silicon Valley’s political culture—and how that has been codified into software, corporate culture, and strategy—will continue to smell. The Valley will hire outsiders to fix these problems or, more likely, just for the optics. This will take years. And before we’ve tackled that smell, crypto whizzes will establish governance mechanisms on emerging blockchain networks. They will do so with a narrow, ideological framing that will threaten to hurt us in the coming decades,by which time these networks will mediate many of the resources we need. This matters because information technology systems affect how we build our understanding of the world; they affect how we perceive our set of choices; they affect how we act in that world. In short: they affect our understanding both of the “is” and the “ought.”
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