This was revealed in 2015 when details of the British secret service's "Karma Police" program became public, showing the comprehensive screening of everyone's Internet use. It is also increasingly clear that we are all in the focus of institutional surveillance. With consumers facing increasingly frequent credit checks and some online shops experimenting with personalized prices, we are on a similar path in the West. This kind of individual monitoring would include people’s Internet surfing and the behavior of their social contacts (see ”Spotlight on China”). According to recent reports, every Chinese citizen will receive a so-called ”Citizen Score”, which will determine under what conditions they may get loans, jobs, or travel visa to other countries. Beyond this, a kind of social control is also planned. It involves running so-called deep learning algorithms over the search engine data collected about its users. Recently, Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, invited the military to take part in the China Brain Project. What started as a program to protect its citizens from terrorism has ended up influencing economic and immigration policy, the property market and school curricula. Today, Singapore is seen as a perfect example of a data-controlled society. Very soon, some researchers imagined controlling the economy and society according to this basic principle, but the necessary technology was not available at that time. According to him, the behavior of systems could be controlled by the means of suitable feedbacks. In the 1940s, the American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) invented cybernetics. If we take the wrong decisions it could threaten our greatest historical achievements.
With this, society is at a crossroads, which promises great opportunities, but also considerable risks. We are experiencing the largest transformation since the end of the Second World War after the automation of production and the creation of self-driving cars the automation of society is next. One thing is clear: the way in which we organize the economy and society will change fundamentally. Technology visionaries, such as Elon Musk from Tesla Motors, Bill Gates from Microsoft and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, are warning that super-intelligence is a serious danger for humanity, possibly even more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Experts are starting to ring alarm bells. It can be expected that supercomputers will soon surpass human capabilities in almost all areas-somewhere between 20. 40% of today's top 500 companies will have vanished in a decade. This all has radical economic consequences: in the coming 10 to 20 years around half of today's jobs will be threatened by algorithms. News content is, in part, automatically generated.
Today 70% of all financial transactions are performed by algorithms. They are able to describe the contents of photos and videos. Algorithms can now recognize handwritten language and patterns almost as well as humans and even complete some tasks better than them.
Recently, Google's DeepMind algorithm taught itself how to win 49 Atari games. Artificial intelligence is no longer programmed line by line, but is now capable of learning, thereby continuously developing itself. In particular, it is contributing to the automation of data analysis. The field of artificial intelligence is, indeed, making breathtaking advances. Should we also expect these developments to result in smart nations and a smarter planet? Many companies are already trying to turn this Big Data into Big Money.Įverything will become intelligent soon we will not only have smart phones, but also smart homes, smart factories and smart cities. Then, the amount of data will double every 12 hours. It is estimated that in 10 years’ time there will be 150 billion networked measuring sensors, 20 times more than people on Earth. Soon, the things around us, possibly even our clothing, also will be connected with the Internet. These contain information that reveals how we think and feel. Every minute we produce hundreds of thousands of Google searches and Facebook posts. In other words: in 2016 we produced as much data as in the entire history of humankind through 2015. How will it change our world? The amount of data we produce doubles every year. Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” (1784) Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.” “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Editor’s Note: This article first appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft, Scientific American ’s sister publication, as “D igitale Demokratie statt Datendiktatur.”