The difficulty that citizens have in distinguishing between fake news (which will soon be compounded by “deep fakes”) and reliable sources of information creates what the United Nations Secretary-General describes as a “trust deficit disorder”. Over time, this can undermine the basis for shared values and tolerance in a society, tearing at the fabric of democracy itself. However, some of this is much more subtle and includes the way that AI algorithms segregate humanity into “bubbles” where dissenting views are no longer heard. Part of this has been made more manifest by propaganda that incites racism, conspiracy theories, violence and radicalization. The average person is now both consumer and creator of content and is able to share her or his perspective and world view from any connected village in any part of the globe.Īs the population shifts to a greater reliance on online sources, it becomes more susceptible to harmful content. News, information and entertainment are therefore no longer the sole provinces of traditional content creators and distributors. It is now characterized by a diffusion of power, which has given rise to citizen journalists, Facebookers, Tweeters, bloggers and vloggers. The disruption began in the communications sector, which had once been shaped exclusively by elites in the broadcasting and print industries. Technological convergence, which started some years before the pandemic, created the framework for this current transformation. The change is probably now irreversible, as many businesses, government agencies, universities, retailers and individuals have experienced the efficiency gains and cost reductions of a far more distributed way of operating. News, information, entertainment, medical advice and almost all other services became more prevalent online. The pandemic caused an astonishingly rapid migration to online teaching and education, working, meeting and conferencing, administration, shopping and socializing. So, it is important to take account of both the technical feasibility and the social acceptability of certain approaches.Įconomic choices are equally important. One particularly important issue is whether personal information is stored externally rather than on a person’s phone. The problem, however, is that this approach raises concerns over privacy, which is why it has had a mixed reception in Western democracies. A study conducted by Oxford University in April 2020 found that if just 56 per cent of a country's population used a tracking app, it could largely contain the COVID-19 epidemic. These include tracking possibly infected persons contact tracing the targeted delivery of health care and the ability to link across databases to elicit important patterns, such as health status and recent travel history.Ĭlearly, these measures can be effective. There is now a much wider understanding of the key role of advanced technologies such as informatics and artificial intelligence (AI) in delivering solutions for the management of pandemics. 1 Most countries failed to realize the significance of this point, however, and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic left them scrambling to develop track-and-trace applications. In 2012, the World Economic Forum observed that “by analysing patterns from mobile phone usage, a team of researchers in San Francisco is able to predict the magnitude of a disease outbreak half way around the world”. Opportunities and Benefits of Digital Transformation
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