Hope Springs from Technology
T he so-called internet bubble burst twenty years ago. On one hand, it became clear that what we were facing was a true economic revolution – however overused the term may be, in that case it was fully justified. On the other, this revolution did not, contrary to a variety of insane investment fantasies, repudiate the economic balance. It goes without saying that today, there isn’t a single technology – be it manufacturing, services, or social communication – where digital components are not essential, or at the very least significant. The river runs ever wider, deeper and faster. This is an element we have been trying to comprehend, harness, and use to our advantage for over two decades.
Many of our civilisational, global challenges have been bred by one industrial revolution after another. The climate is a good example today, hugely important and current in equal measure. While we have unquestionably achieved amazing progress in exchange, our tab is growing and the cost is overwhelming.
The digital revolution may have been the first one to reorganise the world differently: in harmony with the economy, it has enabled cost reductions, including environmental and social costs. Facilitating a sound response to various challenges, it has also brought a slew of assorted benefits – or allowed us to keep the ones we had already achieved. It has breathed hope into technologies. There is no going back to the pre-industrial era. While suitably learning moderation and restraint, we abhor radical downturns in life quality or standards. Necessarily, however, we are gaining an increasingly more profound understanding of the fact that development cannot be destructive – the profit and loss statement for the world or mankind cannot only take into account a short-term view, or comprise numbers alone. State-of-the-art technologies are the only compromise imaginable, harnessed to resolve problems, including those we have created ourselves. This is why digitisation spells both opportunity and hope. And yet (predictably) it has a dark side, too: risks and assorted threats, not necessarily to the climate, but to social life or freedom and democracy, even. These threats are completely different today. Well aware of their existence, we can attempt to control, curb or eliminate them. We have to be wise before events take place. The digital world can be a place of optimism and hope – but we will have to work hard for both. ©℗
Materiał chroniony prawem autorskim - wszelkie prawa zastrzeżone.
Dalsze rozpowszechnianie artykułu za zgodą wydawcy INFOR PL S.A. Kup licencję.