We’ve already seen how information has impacted behaviour by interrupting and inundating us. The technology has affected so many of the changes we’ve talked about so far. In this chapter, we’ll look into the future to see the changes coming over the horizon. You’ll recognize the pattern by now. We face potentially two super-positioned outcomes. The first is innovation, where we’ll see wonderful new developments that will benefit our communities, extend our lives, make them more fulfilling and allow us greater efficiencies.

Equally, we’ll see how these will be used to cause great changes which have the potential to be negative. In banking and finance the technology change is likely to result in significant restructuring. On top of this, the technology could be used as a social control, to monitor and report on us and to invade our privacy.

The inception of these new technologies could also be matched by a growing fear and incapacity as depicted in Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake. In this docudrama film, an unemployed, technologically illiterate man with health problems is confronted with a welfare system that only uses technology. The story covers Blake’s frustration and alienation with a world that seems to have left him behind.

We will gallop through a number of imminent technologies to give an overview of the depth and breadth of change. This is what we will cover:

The rise of the robots?
The Internet of Things
Introducing the Data Sphere
Artificial intelligence (AI)
The bodyNET
Autonomy
Drones
Energy and batteries
A new currency
Green stuff replaced by not very green stuff
Super computing
The dark web
Model citizens?
Peer group ratings
Human qualities
The end of the affair?
Conclusions

The rise of the robots?

The future has always been in need of better PR. Popular dystopian depictions include everything from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis through to Westworld, The Stepford Wives, Terminator and Bladerunner. Why? Because change is always perceived as a threat to the community and therefore makes a great story. Fear sells.

The truth is more prosaic, of course. Just look at the miracles all around you, robots for example. You’re likely to have already interacted with a robot without even realizing it. Google uses software robots, so does Facebook and many sources of online help. They’re already here.¹ You can see them in the form of ‘chatbots’, which are simply AI-led programs that interact with messaging applications. They do this by maintaining a database of likely input questions that are matched to output answers. They use AI and fuzzy logic and computational linguistics to read the questions and interpret meaning.

Chatbots, backed by machine-learning technology, can remember conversations and learn from new ones, building up data over time to respond to a range of queries. A common application, for instance, is with Twitter bots which appear like normal identities but pick up on key phrases to respond to or retweet messages. ‘Just in terms of engaging audiences who can’t handle complex user experiences, they’re brilliant,’ says Pete Trainor,² who is director of human-centred design at Nexus, a digital agency that created an AI assistant called Luvo for RBS bank. Chatbots on Facebook Messenger and other apps are unashamedly artificial and focused entirely on providing information and/or completing tasks for the humans they interact with.

Perhaps the best known of all chatbots is Amazon’s Alexa app. This voice-activated robot is being used in conjunction with other technologies that, for instance, can control many domestic applications such as heating, security, shopping and so on.

The Internet of Things

Most people have begun to experience the Internet of Things (IOT) through the network of physical devices, vehicles, home appliances and other items connected to the internet. These are embedded into electronics, software, sensors, actuators and other connectivity that enable devices to connect and exchange data. This might be how you use a health app such as Fitbit to measure your heartbeat or steps. Or the way your smartphone connects your car to the internet. Or how you control your heating and ventilation via an app.

IOT devices are two-way. Your kettle makes hot water but it can also broadcast the fact that you are boiling water. It may also broadcast your conversations as you drink your coffee. Some devices keep a record of your conversations; for instance, in 2017, an Amazon Echo was subpoenaed in an Arkansas murder trial because it was a witness.³ IOT devices are now everywhere. Some fridges now deploy Tizen, which is software that permits the interior cameras to gather information about the contents and independently assess whether you need more milk.⁴ Some fridges will even automatically alert you, so that you can order more.⁵

IOT can also be used with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, which are tags built into clothing, for instance, that use electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track objects.⁶ The tags contain electronically stored information. Naturally, all these data are going to end up somewhere.

Introducing the Data Sphere

We’re entering a new dimension where everything is connected, virtualized and triangulated. For example, in the Data Sphere, it will soon be nearly impossible to lie about your whereabouts. Consider the man who claimed to have been elsewhere when his house burnt down. The pacemaker in his heart gave away his location. It also revealed what was happening to his heart as he splashed gasoline around and set his home alight. The prosecutors triangulated upon him using the Data Sphere. Your smartphone tracks your walking gait and this reveals many things about your health, your state of mind and your location.⁷ Cameras increasingly populate every environment. After the Houston hurricanes in 2017, insurance firms that deployed drones were quickly able to detect fraudulent claims because they could see the damage. The cameras and sensors at the shopping mall, in the walls of your office space, on public transport, in your clothes and in the home will capture everything, including transactions, actions and emotional reactions.

Artificial intelligence (AI)

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are the glue that brings these technologies together. It connects the dots, gathers data from IOT and other sensors and then drives algorithms that make the choices in our lives. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, says we are in the golden age of AI: ‘it is a horizontal enabling layer, it will empower and improve every business, government organization, every philanthropy … there is no institution in the world that cannot be improved with machine learning.’⁸

AI was employed by online retailer shoes.com early on in November 2015 to create personalization on its website on a scale never seen before.⁹ Using AI technology around visual perceptions and natural language processing, it allowed customers to interact with products and features. The brand could then create personalized interactions to enhance the customers’ experience.

Today in China, Alibaba’s Taobao¹⁰ delivers mass personalization at scale. In 2016, on its annual online shopping bonanza Double 11 (or Single’s Day), 6.7 billion personalized shopping pages were generated. This resulted in a 40 per cent increase in year-on-year sales. AI knows what the customers want before they do. It can uncover customer insights and trends to deliver predictive service. Netflix is also a good example of this, serving us refined content recommendations based on our usage behaviour.

In advertising, AI can personalize advertising to change parts of it, depending on the audience, to include different music or other content. Technologies that deliver appropriate advertising for specific customer types will become even more sophisticated. Programmatic creative platforms will allow brands to change content to target different user demographics, resulting in an unprecedented precision.

One of the main issues here isn’t lack of data. It’s making sense of them. In Salesforce’s study of 3,500 marketing leaders (‘“State of Marketing” Report – Marketing Embraces the AI Revolution’¹¹), high-performing brand leaders are twice as likely to be using AI. Further, the majority of marketing leaders plan to use AI in the next two years, the highest among all other technological tools. Leaders recognize that AI could bring value to consumers by anticipating future needs. We’ve seen this before. iTunes, Netflix and Uber all changed the way we consumed the product. The perception is that brands follows consumers. For the successful brands, it’s the other way around.

The Washington Post is using an AI software system called Heliograf,¹² which has published hundreds of news articles for them since 2016. Wired magazine calls this ‘the most sophisticated use of artificial intelligence in journalism to date’. Those stories will feed into automated polling systems and reveal that the politician in question has just lost a large percentage of their voters’ support.

AI will know you were the person in seat 12A at the cinema and connect it to the analysis of your emotional reactions to the film. Your phone, your Alexa, your automatic vacuum cleaner, your IOT fridge and kettle and the RFID chips that are in your clothes will all broadcast data. The Data Sphere is already able to know your sexual orientation before you do.¹³ This is how Target figured out that a teenage girl was pregnant before her father knew, back in 2012.¹⁴ Banks today use data analysis and algorithms to assess the spending patterns in a family. Small purchases here or there by spouses begin to reveal that there is trouble at home. The Data Sphere automatically issues the instructions for the algorithms to reduce the credit balance of the lower-earning partner. The bank knows you are about be divorced¹⁵ before you do. It acts before you know your life is about to change. The Data Sphere knows more about you than you do, whether you are an individual, a community, a company, a family or a country.

Sophie Hackford¹⁶ at Wired describes this as: ‘Perfect information – you can access any information about anything, at any time, in real time.’¹⁷ This is almost a new dimension fuelled by the most valuable commodity in the world, data – ‘the new oil’.¹⁸ Instead of being grounded in a physical location, data exist in a new dimension. It is almost as if we are entering a fourth dimension which has its own geography. This is not a continuation of the old 20th-century ‘black box’ approach to mathematical modelling. That approach was linear, opaque and usually assumed that there was a single correct answer to any given question. A 21st-century leader needs to understand how the Data Sphere heightens transparency and vastly improves clarity. The holographic data-filled dimension of reality is literally more accurate than reality itself. Leaders will need to learn how to conjure forth answers from this more crystal-clear approach to data. The answers won’t be black and white or binary any more. Instead, the Data Sphere will give us a rainbow of scenarios and options that are constantly dynamic and permanently tested. This mirror image of reality will also reveal us to the world more precisely. You will see but also be seen.

The bodyNET

The bodyNET is another part of the Data Sphere which allows communications from devices in your body, from pacemakers to hip replacements to ingested pill-sized robotics and brain prosthetics. This may sound far-fetched, but these so-called haptic technologies are already with us. Elon Musk is so sure of it that he has launched a firm called Neuralink, which aims to implant electrodes into humans so that they don’t need screens or devices to communicate. Instead of speaking or typing into a phone or computer, we will be able to simply project our thoughts directly onto the internet.

In the future, wearables will be merged with our bodies. We will have elastronic sensors¹⁹ made from stretchy, flexible circuits that move with our bodies and both receive and convey information.²⁰ We already have biomedical tattoos that permit monitoring and the delivery of data to the body.²¹ Ingestible origami-like robotics can now perform targeted surgeries inside the human body.²² The first such surgery on the human eye was successfully undertaken in the UK in 2016.²³

We have computer chips that can take human DNA and process it on a microchip²⁴ to cure diseases that were never curable before.²⁵ This is why we see nations racing to beat each other in coming up with a cure for cancer.²⁶ A synthetic synapse will process information millions of times faster than an organic brain, but use less energy. Furthermore, we will be able to just print them.²⁷

Neurology is also already part of the bodyNET. In addition to Neuralink’s efforts, brain prosthetics are emerging to help Alzheimer’s patients.²⁸ Knowledge itself may soon be ingestible. We already have digital biometric data that allow a doctor to administer medicines remotely. Johnny Matheny of Port Richey, Florida, lost his arm to cancer and is now the first person to have a mind-controlled robotic arm.²⁹ Science is now looking at memories to establish if they are chemical sequences that we can edit³⁰ or even implant.

Perhaps the most astonishing development, and another that shows how the internet is disintermediating human relationships, is the rise of teledildonics.³¹ The Fourth International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots was held in 2018.³² David Levy, its founder, is also the author of Love + Sex with Robots. He says that the first human–robot marriages will occur by 2050.³³ The Congress also showcased some new gadgets. These included the ‘Teletongue’, a pair of ear-shaped lollipops programmed to react to the user’s licking sounds. There was also a device named Kissenger, which connected two mobile phones for a ‘real-time Internet Kiss Communication Interface’. Its creator, Emma Yann Zhang, explained that such haptic devices helped convey feelings and emotions to evoke a sense of presence in a remote environment. According to her, the importance of physical interaction to the quality of our relationships is still grossly underestimated. Ghislaine Boddington is Creative Director of an interactive design collective in the East End of London and Reader at The University of Greenwich. She says that so-called ‘body technologies’ have potential to connect people romantically, emotionally, physically and sexually. She coined the term ‘Internet of bodies’ to describe the way that such devices could eventually enable us to network our responses. ‘Physical intimacy goes way beyond sex, or even romance’, she said. ‘It’s rather about attachment, and this includes how we feel about each other, our environment and all the objects that surround us. What excites me now is actually the convergence of these technologies and bringing them into our bodies to create new types of intimacy and hyper-enhanced sensualities.’

Autonomy

With AI, suddenly, the idea of a truck without a driver makes sense. We can comprehend that this might mean lower pollution, safer roads, fewer car owners, fewer cars and car accidents, and less energy consumption. Some estimates³⁴ say that the overall volume of cars will decline to a tenth of what they are today. But none of this really captures what is happening. Driverless cars are just electronic sensors. They are nodes in the Data Sphere that send data and pull them down from this new world.

The changes will be dramatic. Ford, Mercedes, BMW and Tesla have already released self-driving features. According to a briefing paper by BI Intelligence, there will be nearly 10 million cars with some degree of autonomy within the next 10 years.³⁵ The biggest benefits of self-driving cars are that they will help to make roads safer and people’s lives easier. In the UK, KPMG³⁶ estimates that self-driving cars will lead to 2,500 fewer deaths by 2030. It will herald the end of the designated driver. People on a night out will be able to just call their car or car club from a smartphone.

By 2021, Ford will be mass producing cars without a steering wheel, accelerator pedal or brake pedal. The company believes that the future of the market lies in producing vehicles where a driver is not even required. It has announced a $1 billion (£800 million) investment in Argo AI, an artificial intelligence company that will produce the software needed for a new generation of self-driving cars.³⁷ This will have profound effects on car design; for instance, the occupants will no longer have to face the same way. All four seats will face each other in the new generation of Ford people carriers. Ford says it expects to profit not only from having its own autonomous car on the road in 2021, but also by licensing the technology to other companies, including rival manufacturers. Ford believes that the cost of owning, maintaining and parking a car in a city means that people will look for an alternative way of getting around, and that is where its vision comes in.³⁸ Leaders should seek out this sort of transformational change and ask how it applies to their businesses.

In June 2017, General Motors (GM) announced that it had completed 10 self-driving test vehicles of its Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle (EV). GM believes the achievement could position the company at the head of the autonomous car race. ‘The autonomous vehicles you see here today are purpose-built, self-driving test vehicles’, GM’s chairman and CEO Mary Barra says. GM has the platform and the technology to back up its claim: it’s the first car manufacturer to mass produce self-driving vehicles.³⁹

Autonomous vehicles are still a niche market but some studies show the market could grow to $87 billion by 2030.⁴⁰ The data that these cars throw off about each of us individually, and all of us collectively, can hardly be estimated, but they will clearly be valuable for road maintenance, insurance, weather and so on.

Drones

Drones are remote-controlled aerial robots. Today, most are toys. We’re just beginning to deploy drones for industrial tasks. Goldman Sachs estimates that the global drone market is set to reach $100 billion.⁴¹ Drones will generate extraordinary cost savings. They can detect and deter attacks on oil pipelines that today result in hundreds of days lost to shutdowns and loss of oil and gas assets. They can help manage toxic waste from mining sites and keep the logistics at building sites under control. They can be used to survey aquaculture and to manage the migrations of animals and even human refugees. Drones will probably not be used for delivery very much, despite the hype. Amazon made a big splash with their drones for delivery announcement. It’s clear, however, that no-one wants a cold pizza or to have packages dropped on the heads of children and dogs playing in suburban neighbourhoods. Regulators are increasingly uneasy if they fly near people or buildings or a thousand feet above the legal height limit (usually 400 feet) and in the way of aircraft. This can be easily fixed with code that prevents drones from bypassing the legal height and distance laws. Drones will, however,increasingly deploy the ever more sophisticated cameras and sensors that fill the Data Sphere with information.⁴²

Energy and batteries

Closely correlated with the development of autonomous vehicles is battery development and renewable energy. Solar roads are on their way.⁴³ Cochin airport⁴⁴ in India is entirely powered by solar energy: it has 46,150 solar panels spread over the equivalent of 25 football fields. Wind farms are generating ever more of the power on national grids worldwide. Energy storage is advancing fast, too. On 14 December 2017, the coal-powered energy plant at Loy Yang in Australia had a sudden loss of 560 megawatts of power at 1:59 am.⁴⁵ Luckily, Elon Musk had already built the Hornsdale Power battery system, which is the world’s largest battery. It was 620 miles away and only just completed some two weeks before the event. It shot 7 megawatts into the grid, which led to the restoration of electricity to the 170,000 homes that had been affected.⁴⁶

Leaders need to think about a world that might not be dependent on oil and gas. Norway is Europe’s biggest energy producer and has earned so much that it now has the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. The government used oil and gas to create a trillion-dollar public entity called the Government Pension Fund Global. It owns 1 per cent of all global equities. It rocked the energy and equity world by announcing in late 2017 the sale of all its oil and gas stocks.⁴⁷

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia seems to be taking a similar view. It is seeking to diversify away from energy sources, investing in other kinds of energy production. The Kingdom announced a commitment of $7 billion for renewable energy projects in 2018.⁴⁸ It is now planning for at least 10 per cent of its energy needs to be met by renewables within only five years.⁴⁹ It is well documented that the Kingdom is also planning to float Saudi Aramco⁵⁰ to raise funding for other ventures. This, too, is another form of diversification.

A new currency

As we learnt in Chapter 2, we live in inflationary times. Historically, the response to this has been to introduce inflation or a new currency. Or both. We’ve seen it many times in history, most recently with decimalization of sterling in 1971 and the euro in 1999.

With Bitcoin, the lack of intermediaries such as governments, banks and other third parties will drive down the cost and transaction time of business. Furthermore, because the technology is available on any mobile device, no-one ever need go into any bank again. This limits the banks’ ability to sell further added-value financial products. This is likely to lead to more retail banking outlet closures and less real-estate occupancy.

At the height of the banking crisis, in January 2009, a man claiming to be called Santoshi Nakamoto⁵¹ (he was never seen again) published a paper entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. He then released the first Bitcoin software, which launched the network and the first units of the Bitcoin.⁵² New Bitcoins are issued every 10 minutes and the supply is limited, so there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins, a hard-money rule like the gold standard. Bitcoin is here, it’s real and it works. It will make a major difference to financial transactions in the future, making them faster, more secure and less costly. It could entirely replace the security, safety and trust role of the banks, which in any case were badly damaged by the financial crisis. This will affect every aspect of organizational life because it will address many of the rogue elements of technology, such as identity theft and security breach.

Bitcoin shows how a new, decentralized, automated financial system works. It provides the currency, the transaction and the regulatory framework (essentially an in-built audit). At present, there’s a low transaction volume when compared to conventional payment systems, but the public interest in them has risen almost as fast as the price. Bitcoin is only one of more than 1,000 different cryptos. Others worthy of note include Ethereum, Ripple, Stellar, NEM, NEO and EOS. Bitcoin is just the most robustly tested of them all so far.

The underlying technology, blockchain, is even more significant than the currencies themselves. Blockchain software allows a set of transactions to be built up in a series of links. Each of them validates the previous one and provides a key which is encrypted. Blockchains can be established in finance, property or stock markets. The implications are profound. It allows peer-to-peer, one-to-many or many-to-one transactions which are instant, secure and need no intermediary. This will do to the banks what the internet did to music. It will shift wealth from publishers to the tech companies. Under that model, the artists made less money than ever. Ironically, blockchain raises the prospect of new artists being able to garner wealth directly without having to do a record deal of any sort. 50cent, the rap artist (aka Curtis Jackson), proved this in 2017 when he was paid some $8 million for his 2014 album Animal Ambition. He agreed to accept Bitcoins, which were worth $657 at that time, giving him sales worth about $460,000 at the time. By late 2017, the value of his Bitcoin had leapt to nearly $8 million.⁵³

These new forms of accounting, money and property were all made possible by the Cloud, which Microsoft⁵⁴ defines as, ‘ … the delivery of computing services – servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics and more over the Internet’.⁵⁵ Blockchain is simply an automated accounting ledger in the Cloud which allows individual transactions to be verified using cryptography. Everything is digitally recorded, chronologically and incorruptibly. The data are then uploaded into blocks. Each contains a timestamp and a cryptographic hash mark of the previous block, so all data are tied together. Since each block is verified by the blockchain community, nobody can go back and alter it. It is worth, however, remembering that there are people, leaders included, who still have not quite worked out what the Cloud is, let alone properly understood blockchain.

Green stuff replaced by not very green stuff

Today our use of cash is declining rapidly. In 2015, cashless payments accounted for the majority of transactions. The use of cash is set to decline by a further 30 per cent over the next 10 years, according to The Payments Council.⁵⁶ The first cash to disappear will be coin. From 2014 to 2017, Victoria Cleland, Director for Banknotes and Chief Cashier of the Bank of England, said there was a 46 per cent increase of notes in circulation.⁵⁷ Combine blockchain with crypto and mobile telephone systems and there’s no need for banks or currencies. Mobile phone payment networks already move money around without intermediaries. This is permitting many of the world’s poor to join the world economy, for example.

For instance, in Shanghai, street hawkers and beggars routinely accept electronic payments using apps such as Alipay which has 520 million users in China alone.⁵⁸

Cryptos, it turns out, are energy intensive. Wired magazine said that measuring this is complicated but equals the energy consumption of a ‘medium sized country’.⁵⁹

For this reason, some 81 per cent of the world’s Bitcoins have been mined in China, primarily because the price of energy is so cheap there. The country has ordered banks to stop financing crypto operations and trading for this and other reasons.⁶⁰ It’s not environmentally friendly and it facilitates capital flight.

The question is whether moving to blockchain and e-money will improve public and private finances. Governments will be able to tax transactions at the exact moment they occur. This will improve every government’s cash flow positively and permanently. They will, however, also force governments to reveal far more about how they spend and what they waste.

Super computing

Fast computing is the power station that fuels AI. As we discovered in Chapter 1, we’re experiencing a data explosion. The accumulation of data is rising at the rate of almost 400 per cent per annum. By the year 2020, we will have gathered 44 zettabytes. By 2025, we will have gathered another 180 zettabytes.⁶¹ This is what is known as ‘big’ data. Even this is becoming passé as it is replaced by ‘fast’ data.⁶² The monumental scale of data is such that they can only be digested by AI. Yes, we’re acquiring more data, but we’re also getting more powerful processors. In addition to the sensors described above, organizations are acquiring data from multiple sources: customer relationship management (CRM), transactional data, websites, marketing and social media. AI can ingest all these data using machine learning and algorithms to segment customers. This can then be used to show predictive data, uncovering new insights and trends to reach these consumers more comprehensively.

All this takes massive processing power, which is why the new space race is for quantum computers. The Russians currently are leading the field with a 51-qubit quantum computer. China is building the world’s largest quantum facility. When complete, it will have a million times the computational power of the entire planet today.⁶³

Qubits are quantum bits that underpin this new technology. A normal computer has a memory made up of bits and bytes. Each bit is represented by either a one or a zero. A quantum computer maintains qubits which can be represented as a one, a zero, or a super-position of two qubit states. The upshot is that they are exponentially faster.

They provide something other computers can’t handle because a qubit can be in both states at the same time.

The dark web

We still have parallel web universes, such as Tor (‘The Onion Router’), which are like the Wild West of the internet. Tor is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the protection of personal privacy, as well as the freedom and ability to conduct confidential communication. Ironically, the bulk of the funding for Tor’s development came from the US military, specifically from The Office of Naval Research and The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). For this reason, attacks against Tor are welcomed because they improve the security of the network. Tor is now frequently used by criminal organizations for illegal activities, for example to gain access to censored information, to organize political activities or to circumvent laws against criticism of heads of state. It channels user traffic through a free, volunteer network consisting of more than 7,000 relays or layers (hence onion). This hides the user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. It protects the user’s personal identity and privacy, as well as their freedom and ability to communicate confidentially by keeping their internet activities in the dark. For instance, someone might want to edit their own Wikipedia entry without revealing the identity of the author. Of course, Wikipedia has added Tor blockers to prevent this.

There are no reliable figures for the user numbers of Tor but it is heavily used. In theory, the access is anonymous. In practice, regulators have software that counters that.⁶⁴ It is endorsed, however, by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other civil liberties groups as a method for whistleblowers and human rights workers to communicate with journalists.

This means that if someone believes they are whistleblowing, they can take confidential data and leak them with impunity and anonymity. Tor can therefore be used for just about anything: anonymous defamation, unauthorized news leaks of sensitive information, copyright infringement, distribution of illegal sexual content, selling controlled substances, weapons and stolen credit card numbers, money laundering, bank fraud, credit card fraud, identity theft and the exchange of counterfeit currency.

Model citizens?

The Data Sphere is also a scoring mechanism. Of course, we score people now.

Credit scores have been around since Bill Fair and Earl Isaac invented credit scores (Fair Isaac Company) in 1956. Today, FICO scores are used to determine many financial decisions, including the interest rates on mortgages and loan approvals. But what if this information was linked to other social media sources? Supposing these data could be aggregated so that governments could rate behaviour as either positive or negative to create a template of a model citizen? This could create a Citizen Score and tell everyone about your creditworthiness for a mortgage or a loan. Some governments have already developed social credit systems (SCSs) to rate citizens.

Governments around the world are using these data, for instance in travel security. In 2015, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) proposed expanding the PreCheck background checks to include social media records, location data and purchase history. This expansion of credit scoring into ‘life scoring’ could lead to what Kevin Kelly in his book The Inevitable⁶⁵ called ‘coveillance’. This is where participants in such schemes are also allowed to see the algorithms used to monitor them.

In an era of big data, this will go further. A person’s own social score could also be affected by what friends say and do, beyond their own contact with them. If they’re connected to negative online posts, their own score could also be dragged down. This is why transparency on the methods is important. Why would people sign up for a publicly endorsed government surveillance system? For the same reason they sign up to loyalty schemes or low-risk drivers’ premiums – cost and benefit.

China has introduced a national credit scoring system and believes that citizen scores are much needed. This is because China suffers from a lightly regulated market where the sale of counterfeit and substandard products is a problem.⁶⁶ The OECD says the majority of all fake goods, from watches to handbags to baby food, originate from China.⁶⁷ China’s trust system is working well and having consequences. In February 2017, the Supreme People’s Court said 6 million citizens had been banned from taking flights so far because of social misdeeds.⁶⁸ This, though, is still very much at an early stage. The benefits of the SCS are, for instance, cheaper loans, car rentals and use of the VIP check-in at Beijing Airport. By 2020, everyone in China will be enrolled in this database.

Professor Wang Shuqin⁶⁹ refers to ‘China’s Social Faithful System’. She points out that because half of signed contracts are not honoured, doing business in China is risky: ‘Given the speed of the digital economy it’s crucial that people can quickly verify each other’s creditworthiness’, she says. ‘The behaviour of the majority is determined by their world of thoughts. A person who believes in socialist core values is behaving more decently.’

Social credit systems reflect a paradigm shift. In an increasingly materialistic and connected society, gamifying obedience is an easier alignment tool than ‘top-down’ control. It’s possible these systems may become subject to illicit or unwanted ways of gaming the data in the same way that Facebook likes and Twitter followers can be bought.

Peer group ratings

Employers are already used to anonymous rating services such as Glass Door and Checkatrade, but what if this was applied to everyone, irrespective of their employment status? Peeple is an app launched in March 2016, which has been described as a Yelp for humans.⁷⁰ It allows you to rate and review everyone you know – friends, family, neighbours, doctors, bosses and even former partners. The app rates you with a ‘Peeple Number’ based on all the feedback and recommendations you receive. This has proved controversial, not least because once you’re on the system, you can’t get off.

QUICK TIP Imagine a world where everything is a data-gathering node? How could leaders use this? How could this be used against leaders?

Human qualities

Humans are being weighed and measured, sized up and assessed by the Data Sphere all the time. This is producing data that result in scores and opinions and real outcomes. However, perhaps leaders need to ask what is happening to our humanness in this new Data Sphere. It is not only that humans are going to become more robotic through various implants and prosthetics. Are humans becoming less humane and being treated less humanely? Are we using all the data to find efficiencies at the expense of other qualities that are worth protecting and preserving, such as community building, empathy and compassion? We may be entering a new dimension of knowledge, but the old mob mentality may follow us into the Data Sphere and try to digitally lynch people. The Data Sphere will give us new identities, but it can also take them away. It will rank us and give us all social credit scores based on our social behaviour but not value our humour or our kindness.

Leaders need to learn to use this sophisticated tool, but that is not enough. They must also decide where we are navigating to.What kind of society will result from the directional choices leaders make?

QUICK TIP Technology creates profound opportunities but also vulnerabilities. Leaders need to ask how they would work without the most fundamental components. What if we lost power? Or data? They need the imagination to prepare for failure.

The end of the affair?

The love affair with technology is beginning to slow as awareness of its dark side develops. In 2018, former employees⁷¹ of Google and Facebook, alarmed over the ill-effects of social networks and smartphones, are challenging the companies they helped build. The Center for Humane Technology plans an anti-tech addiction lobbying effort together with an ad campaign targeted at 55,000 public schools in the United States. Entitled The Truth About Tech, it will be funded with $7 million from non-profit media watchdog Common Sense Media. It’s aimed at educating students, parents and teachers about the dangers of technology, including the depression that can come from heavy use of social media. The group says that: ‘Our society is being hijacked by technology. What began as a race to monetize our attention is now eroding the pillars of our society: mental health, democracy, social relationships, and our children.’ Its goal is to move away from technology that extracts attention and erodes society, towards technology that protects our minds and replenishes society.

It says that ‘Humane Design’, which protects the vulnerable from getting overwhelmed, stressed or outraged, is the goal. The group points out that we are vulnerable to micro-targeted persuasion using ‘messages that use our personality and traits against us’. It points out how we are vulnerable to the expectation of being available to each other 24/7.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff⁷² offered up an analogy to treat social media like a health issue, similar to tobacco and sugar. ‘I think that you do it exactly the same way that you regulated the cigarette industry. Here’s a product: Cigarettes. They’re addictive, they’re not good for you’, Benioff told CNBC in 2018. ‘I think that for sure, technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and that product designers are working to make those products more addictive and we need to rein that back.’

Conclusions

If we thought the changes so far were substantial, then we must prepare for more of the same. We’re likely to see technology become more pervasive and more joined up to the point that the data generated constitute an entirely new and more accurate dimension of reality than reality itself. It will be possible to know and analyse everything and learn new insights into our behaviour.

Our enemies are fear and prejudice. Our weapons are understanding and familiarity. Leaders can make this happen by ensuring their teams feel the technology is serving them, rather than the other way around. This means the leader must encourage an attitude that experiments and anticipates new ideas and looks for ways to apply it.

It is typical of humans to think of new technology in terms of old ideas. We remain wedded to the notion of cars and drones and kettles. But, increasingly these are all just electronic nodes in the Data Sphere. As technology changes, so must our way of thinking about it.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that the future of technology has always been viewed darkly. It usually turns out to be wrong. The emerging Data Sphere offers extraordinary opportunities, but leaders must understand the conflicting forces at work.

Fear of the new can drive us into an incapacitated state, unable to make decisions and fearful of the future. Familiarity and awareness of the opportunities could have the opposite effect. This could also be a moment of inception, holding up a lantern above a darkened pathway that leads to a more enlightened future. This is where we must rekindle our curiosity and imagination. Learning and leading must go hand in hand.