Emergent Algorithm-Based Society by danliang

Yes, indeed. We have seen the reactions of citizens in the world's two largest economies - U.S. and China - towards government surveillance activities. According to a 2015 survey done by Pew Research Center, 52% of the Americans are "very concerned" or "somewhat concerned" about ongoing government surveillance of data and electronic communication.

The same goes for the Chinese netizens, where we have seen efforts to circumvent government's surveillance and censorship through VPN networks as well as linguistic techniques such as homophones and homographs. (See article from Georgia Tech's "Algorithmically Bypassing Censorship on Sina Weibo with Nondeterministic Homophone Substitutions" and Harvard's "How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression").

However, we are witnessing an increased concern about data companies' potential surveillance activities. For example, Pokémon Go, a phone game released by Niantic Labs and Nintendo, required its users to grant the company access to their entire Google account (for certain iOS users) and Contacts (See "Pokémon Go Privacy Settings: What you really need to know about the app permissions hype" published by Trusted Reviews). Just recently, we have also seen concerns about Whatsapp sharing their users' online information with Facebook (See "Facebook Ordered to Stop Collecting Data on WhatsApp Users in Germany" published by The New York Times.

As we go forward, higher resolution details will be required to provide a holistic and personalized experience for the citizens in a Smart Nation. The question remains how much information and privacy are the citizens willing to give, especially to private companies, in the upcoming Algorithmic Age? Furthermore, do they understand the implications of providing these data to companies, which could be exchanging users' data with each other?

• Although the maturity of AI technology is likely to improve tremendously over time (due to potential breakthroughs in areas such as deep learning and deep neural networks), human would remain relevant albeit a smaller role. That said, the AI would be independent in the sense that majority of the tasks could and would be automatically accomplished by the machines without direct human intervention by 2030.
• In fact, in the Finance sector, algorithmic trading systems is currently handling 75 per cent of the volume of global trades worldwide and this figure is predicted, by those in the industry, to grow steadily, according to a 2016 report by Thomson Reuters. On the social media front, an increasing number of companies, including Forbes and The Big Ten Networks are using software to write computer-generated stories. Even though these content may not be as well-written as a human journalist, the computer is able to piece fragments of information together and generate a coherent story in a much more timely manner.
• In 2030, Singapore may transform from one that is dependent on human resource to one that is dependent on effective algorithmic solutions in order to stay competitive in the global market.