50 Shades of Corporate - A State-Led Cyberocracy with Strong Corporate Influence by sidtharthanmanunethi

Halo RAHS,

My responses to your queries are as follows:

1. Are you suggesting that MNCs will be the only group with access to big data? The answer to this question would vary from country to country. MNCs will not be the only group with big data on them, but they will own a lot of the big data that actually matters and is needed to make policy decisions. A lot of what is considered as ‘life data’ is managed by the likes of WhatsApp, Facebook, Google, Apple, Singtel etc.
2. Do you anticipate that AI would have reached maturity by 2030? It depends on what kind of AI you are referring to. Estimates put singularity happening in around 2045, but by 2030 at the very least deep learning would have enabled AI sufficiently to support intelligent decision making. So, not quite Super AI, but general intelligence AI is definitely possible by 2030. Just take your current smartphone’s processing power, and double it every 18 months, till 2030. That’s a device that will be 512 times more powerful in 2030!
3. Do you think governments will suffer from an excess of data that might hinder the decision making process? I don’t think that will be a problem, so long as governments invest in the right people and technology to process the data to better inform them. Instead, governments will suffer from being over-dependent on data to make decisions, instead of taking into account other socio-qualitative aspects that may be equally important. The hardware needs to always be accompanied with the heartware.