The Morphing Architecture: Geopolitics, Vulnerabilities And Shifting Power Relations Within The Smart Universe
What does the shift from buying things to buying smart things imply for consumers and consumer protection law and policy?
“Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world”
Technological prowess is today perhaps the most uncanny transformative cold force in the globe, and its development has always been heavily shaped by political phenomena. In a way technology brings with it a new way of canalizing the human spirit for different ends. While technological development is an element that encourages growth in many disciplines, it would be unwise to think this technology will fix all of the modern state's problems. Indeed many problems will be dealt with in society management but let's not forget that every technological advancement brings their own new set of problems the State and the courts will have to engage and resolve within the next decades.
All technologies, even non-digital ones, must be understood as a technology that cuts both ways as they say, since they both provide benefits but they also limit or canalize human enterprise in a rigid manner. But any innovation necessarily also redefines how strategic competition with interconnectivity would enhance to a very deep degree the way economic and biopolitical power relations are shaped. For instance, advanced robotics and automation are making countless human operators obsolete in a numerical cost effective way. This process, which began decades ago with non-digital automatization machinery, will create massive unemployment amongst low-qualified workers, which in turn could impact the crime levels of a given city, it could also express itself in some form of socio-political discontent.
It's no surprise that since most of these technologies have been researched and developed for the military sector, geopolitical and strategic factors have historically been tied in with how technological development is channeled. Technology has always represented an advantage to society be it an agricultural technology, medical technology or a technology of war. Technologies are tools and sometimes help garner skills in humans to wage war, trade, grow things or communicate in ever more efficient ways.
What does the shift from buying things to buying smart things implies for consumers and consumer protection law and policy? The research wanted to show how States geopolitical plays set into motion the aspect of stealth invasions of privacy and other vulnerabilities within the smart universe of the Internet of Things. Releasing devices onto the market is nothing but a strategic push for big data, this signifies heavy surveillance and monitoring of the population for various circumstances but due to the history of coercion within our contemporary societies they usually deal with data protection law, privacy and loss of freedoms. Consumer law, too, needs to play a larger role as we move forwards as a civilization towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This can be done by protecting the interests of consumers, and maintaining a fair environment for consumers, providers of smart things and services, advertisers, and other parties. This investigation deals with human relationships in the Brave New Smart World that has finally arrived. Its silhouette is present here at last, yet unfathomable still, as we march along the road to the 2030 decade.
Ever Morphing Architecture of the Internet
The now famous Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is rightly managing to garner interest from quite a many policymakers, businessmen, statesmen and scholars on a global scale. It is correct to call the fusion of AI, IoT, Robotics as a Fourth Industrial revolution, for its unprecedented transformative potential is a very real power to reconstitute not only the digital realm, but how humans in the waking life do our work and activities. So in essence the integral implementation of these technologies represent a reshaping of both the virtual and the physical.
Other industrial sectors which have been flagged by superpowers as central to the 4IR like renewable energies, aerospace, FinTech, biotechnology, and nanotechnology are quite embedded with entanglements of the political, economic, commercial, financial and of course military dynamics. Technological changes taking place today are not separated from geopolitical issues. Indeed, geopolitical competition, especially among the world's most powerful states, is an important mover and shaker in the technological upheaval.
Superpower states have know 4IR was coming for some decades now, the more humble states began to understand their cyberpunk predicaments merely in the past 15 years. Latin American countries like El Salvador & Trinidad Tobago have understood that leadership in a tech-driven world translates into economic and political power and, therefore, into geopolitical power. Fierce competition drives states to invest in innovation and continues to play a critical role in the production and scope of smart technologies. No rational state wants to be left behind on the global stage which is the main reason why powerful states are becoming the heavy spenders on emerging technologies. For decades after World War II, for example, the US government spent billions of dollars on its scientific-technical research apparatus, training and educating its population into masters and doctorates out of the anxiety that lack of investment would result in losing its confrontation in the Cold War of old. This gargantuan apparatus, which served as a nexus for scientific research and entrepreneurial agency, allowed the US to enjoy a first-mover advantage throughout the Cold War. Now China has learned from the US and for the last 15 years the Asian nation has begun amassing graduates from various fields and creating thousands of technology jobs to build the necessary infrastructures in a frenzy to catch up and eventually surpass the American Big Tech industry.
AI is driven by the convergence and industrial maturity of three important scientific-technological instincts: big data (the ability to process large amounts of data produced by the human internet and the internet of things), machine learning (computer learning ability) and high-performance cloud computing. Even though Artificial Intelligence is a scientific and engineering discipline of several decades now, the current acceleration of the increases in computing power and the recent availability of massive stores and flows of digital data has made it a reality to deploy powerful solutions based on machine learning and IoT for the masses.
Big data, computing power, and IoT in fact form intricate socio-technical networks in which human beings are playing and will continue to play a prime role. Thus, it is not really a matter of AI but rather of symbiotic intelligence, involving increasingly massive, interdependent, and vibrant communities of consumers and citizens ready to reshape the power relations by engaging with the world.