Some of these expert respondents wrote of their hope that digital interactions and tools will be essential parts of global efforts to tackle grand challenges such as climate change, defending human rights and addressing pandemics. They often foresee – or advocate for – changes in the way knowledge is generated and applied.
Marcus Foth, professor of informatics at Queensland University of Technology, exclaimed, “My biggest hope is that eventually global social and environmental crises such as COVID-19 and climate change will create enough stimulus for strategic essentialism, that is, for humankind to forget about its petty differences and come together to tackle the wicked problems that are at stake, urgent and pressing. COVID-19 is not so much just a health challenge, it’s a political challenge. Climate change is not so much just a science challenge, it’s an economic challenge. While the world at large and national leaders are still putting most of their hope into the STEM field, the real challenges cannot be tackled whilst maintaining an ideological belief in technological solutionism. The underlying issue – as old as humankind – at the core of our chronic inability to really shine and build the scale of ingenuity needed to face what’s coming for us, is governance. Perhaps there are some weak signals at the internet’s 2035 horizon that point to new models and approaches of more-than-human governance that are more collaborative, fair, just, ethical, inclusive and able to care for our planetary health and well-being.”
Greg Sherwin, an active leader in digital experimentation with Singularity University who earlier engineered many startups, including CNET and LearnStreet, said, “The challenge of digital life is that information is increasing exponentially and our ability to process it fails to scale. This leads to gross oversimplifications of people, their conditions, their ideas, their perspectives. Nobody has time to listen when a billion people are asking to be listened to. I envision the creation of 3D and exploratory worlds that help people build better presence, understanding and empathy, aimed at small subsets of people whom we listen to in order to dig deeper. This could never be done at scale, however. Worlds like this could result in better engaging with humanitarian aid in response to an international crisis of climate change and/or global migration in a faraway territory. But it would require participants to focus on themselves and filter everyone else out, unlike the modern temptation to go viral and expose as many as possible to as little as can be understood as possible.”
AI systems have the potential to provide better management of resources. AI systems can help us to produce and transport things more efficiently and with fewer environmental consequences.
Rich Ling, a professor of media technology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore
Rich Ling, a professor of media technology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, responded, “There are two critical areas we need to address. Digital mediation and digital technology can be used to address these. The first is the environment and the second is social/racial divides. My sense is that digital technology and AI can contribute to solving climate change. AI can help to provide the resources we need in a more environmentally sustainable way. AI systems have the potential to provide better management of resources. AI systems can help us to produce and transport things more efficiently and with fewer environmental consequences. Similarly, I think that digitally-mediated communication can help to reduce social barriers. We have seen how social media has been used to fan the flames of racism and hate over the past few years. I have the hope that social media will also become a tool with which to reduce these barriers. Its use in the educational system during the pandemic has shown that social media can be used in the project of social development. It is clear that face-to-face education has its advantages. However, supplementing this with remote education increases the reach of the system. Education is known as one of the ways to reduce intolerance. Thus, the growth of remote education can be a positive force in the reduction of social/racial divides.”
Jonathan Grudin, principal human-computer design researcher at Microsoft and affiliate professor at the University of Washington, wrote, “Seventy-five years ago, in my public school in a small rural village, we learned about the United Nations, a significant institution covered regularly in the news. We collected money for UNICEF and devoted much of one year to the International Geophysical Year. Today, attention to such global cooperation is minimal. There is no reason not to reestablish such a consciousness, and, forced by climate change consequences that put us on a long list of endangered species, we must. We must, and digital technology will be central, informing and engaging young and old much more directly and effectively than was done through print media 75 years ago. The digital space will not be difficult to design, finding solutions will be challenging and reaching consensus on enacting them will be the most difficult in a contentious era. We could do it now if Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden, the European Parliament and others decided it was time. They haven’t or can’t, but they or their successors will. You can bet on it, because if they don’t there will be no one to collect your losing bet.”
Brian Southwell, director of the Science in the Public Sphere Program at RTI International, wrote, “By 2035, we could be experiencing the richness of human connection in a sustainable way that avoids the worst excesses of fossil fuel use. We could use technology to raise up important voices that wouldn’t be otherwise heard. We could discover possibilities for vibrant community development in areas of the world that currently are struggling economically.”
Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, wrote, “The digital world would be much improved if we could prioritise human rights as an overarching principle and consult the public using careful, respectful and rights-respecting mechanisms. My focus is primarily on children’s rights in a digital world and I urge that it is time for adults to listen to the voices and experiences of children, as they committed to do when all countries worldwide except the U.S. ratified the United Nations Convention on Rights of the Child. Children are independent rights holders, agents in a digital world, and their views challenge the lazy assumptions of adults in ways that demand and deserve attention. Their input already improves the digital world and would improve its governance if only we didn’t routinely ignore, marginalise, speak for, neglect or postpone attention to children. They account for a third of the world’s population, and a third of its internet users. Stop talking as if ‘people’ are all ages 18 and older.”
A tech CEO, founder and digital strategist said, “I suspect we will continue to see global improvement associated with pervasive network access. We will see ongoing improvements in collaborative capability, distribution of information, effective monitoring of global natural and technical systems, etc. At the same time, we have urgent issues that have so far not been well addressed: e.g., climate change, global health challenges (potential pandemics) and the uneven management and distribution of resources. A better world online depends on how well we address these issues. By 2035, I would hope to see increasingly effective collaboration to address these and other challenges, with increased widespread digital literacy and emphasis on critical thinking. This is my ‘expansive’ thought: We can remedy the misuse of social media and email to spread falsehoods and practice cultural manipulation and we could have smarter and better uses of social media – support for our best efforts and intentions – versus the current fog of ignorance and polarizing conflict.”
Imagine if a community organizer in, say, Bangalore could discover a solution that had worked for a problem in Baltimore, discover and interact with those who’d made it happen and figure out how to adapt it to their local issue … all of this despite language and culture difficulties.
James Hendler, Director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications and the Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
James Hendler, Director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications and the Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, wrote, “Imagine if a community organizer in, say, Bangalore could discover a solution that had worked for a problem in Baltimore, discover and interact with those who’d made it happen and figure out how to adapt it to their local issue (with appropriate cultural changes). All of this despite language and culture difficulties. It is well within the realm of possibility to do this sort of thing today as one-offs, as domain-specific solutions in certain areas, or with significant resources – but not easily, not cheaply and not at the local level. The creation of such ‘social machine’ software is a vision that has been around for a while. It is motivating research work and is likely to be available in the next decade.”
Annalie Killian, vice president for strategic partnerships at sparks & honey, based in France, commented, “Health interventions and food supply chains could be hugely transformed through improvements in digitization. Algorithmic doctors online could diagnose and treat common ailments or provide maternal care, pediatric counselling and eldercare all from the comfort of home and, through a series of referrals, combine house visits by community physicians on an as-needed basis whilst also plugging patients into communities of care and social support – often the thing people need most. As far as industrial farming is concerned, imagine how smart sensors and smart demand/supply projections could manage food supply chains on a much more local scale in which supply and demand is better matched, there is less travel to distant domains, the process is less wasteful and less damaging to soil and water, and we could reclaim industrial farmland and restore forests to sequester carbon emissions.
“Given the climate change crisis, by 2035 the acceleration of digital interaction should, in theory, allow for a lot less friction in terms of moving ideas, people and goods in a global economy and it should democratize access to education, health and economic participation for millions of people in underdeveloped countries, whilst also bringing the costs down of things like health care in developed countries (in theory, if the incumbents in the system were to cooperate rather than trying to maintain their fiefdoms). I wonder if Digital Life/Lives is the right term. We will remain human, with physical needs connected to our emotional and spiritual needs, so our lives will not be entirely digitized, but much of our interactions with the world will be. I think this will give rise to the premiumization of the physical. It will be more expensive and less accessible and become the new luxury.”
A professor based in Australia wrote, “With global warming looming as a severe destabilising influence in the world, it is a very high priority to use advances in the tools available on the internet and IoT to provide fine-grained, timely information on the state of microenvironments.”
A researcher working in the field of global humanitarianism shared this 2035 scenario: “Knowledge economies are emerging and growing more rapidly in the Global South than anyone predicted back in 2021. Refugees and migrants are able to safely and effectively access information and operate online along their journeys, supported by a rise in peer-to-peer networking that also facilitates a global crackdown on human trafficking and sexual and labor exploitation and enslavement. As fossil fuel use rapidly declines in the Global North, the use of smart-home systems exponentially increases per-capita energy efficiency. A major percentage of households in the Global North are now contributing energy to the grid and have backup energy storage capacity to support both household and communitywide resilience to disasters and blackouts. The Global South is benefitting directly from its production and use of energy-efficient, low-water and low-waste technologies, while also experiencing greater levels of stability due to the limitations placed on information weaponization, cyberattack and other digital war-making activities through the Fifth Geneva Convention. Global corruption and organized crime are no longer as able to move money, as human trafficking ceases to be such an exploitable venue. The new blockchain and digital currency regulations make dark money harder to hide and serve to rein in the rampant mining of e-currency.”
Gary A. Bolles, chair for the future of work at Singularity University, said, “Imagine this: When they are young, every citizen participates in tech-enabled community activities that enable heterogenous groups of youth to solve community problems. They do the same with youth from other countries. As young adults, every citizen participates in a digitally-enabled year of public service, requiring them to meet others outside their current community and support problem-solving for an affected population in that other community. When they are older, every citizen in every community uses collaborative tools to involve and empower others to identify and solve community challenges, support others with personal challenges and gain support from others. Community-anchored meetups bring people together from across the socio-economic spectrum who might never have met otherwise. Families collaborate to share strategies for solving problems ranging from enabling their children to go to college to prioritizing community issues to be solved. And communities across the country and around the world share their effective strategies. These tools exist today, but they are not widely known, easily transferable or readily scalable. But these are all solvable problems.”
John Battelle, co-founder and CEO of Recount Media, wrote, “[By 2035] we will have choices for engagement at scale that do not depend on platforms as we understand them today.”
We need to move toward defining Digital Rights and compile them into a Universal Declaration of Digital Rights (UDDR). This document would act as a technical reference for future technologists, the next generation of human and digital rights defenders, so that technology is designed and implemented in ways that proactively minimize digital harms by 2035.
Raashi Saxena, project officer at The IO Foundation and scientific committee member at We, The Internet
Raashi Saxena, project officer at The IO Foundation and scientific committee member at We, The Internet, urged, “We need to embed human rights in our infrastructures. Being able to define a clear list of digital harms is the first step. We need to move toward defining Digital Rights and compile them into a Universal Declaration of Digital Rights (UDDR). This document would act as a technical reference for future technologists, the next generation of human and digital rights defenders, so that technology is designed and implemented in ways that proactively minimize digital harms by 2035. As data becomes an increasingly powerful economic, political and social force, programmers are emerging as the next generation of human and digital rights defenders. The big missing piece in our digital lives is to ensure, to the very least, the same degree of protections that we enjoy in our real-life interactions. This is not possible now due to the nature of the current implementation of infrastructures, products and services. For example, laws are enacted aimed at protecting citizens and their data, but they are not structured in a way that ensures their compliance in a transparent, burden-free and standardized manner.”
A veteran investigative reporter for a global news organization said, “People of like minds, experiences and identities have always used the internet to create micro-communities of interest. I expect them to continue to be able to use it to find one another; that is one of the great legacies of the rise of the online world. There will be fora for constructive engagement and strategies for combatting climate change, endemic corruption and inequality. Encryption will never be broken despite all attempts of repressive and ignorant politicians to do so. I hope that ‘healthy’ online activities are not forced underground. If that happens, there will be much more serious global challenges. Online censorship and surveillance will not go away, but the next digital generation will at least be more conscious of how to circumvent them.”
An anonymous respondent said, “There will be real-time matching of displaced people with housing.”
Timothy L. Haithcoat, deputy director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence, said, “I hope for unbiased AI/ML used to compile health, income, economic, ethnic, age, gender and other inequity indices so that society could move on from arguing whose data is better to addressing the facts and discussion of real ways of mitigation for society to move forward.”
A strategist, business analyst and project manager based in the Caribbean chose to make a doleful prediction: “In 2035, worldwide, governments are attempting to break encryption to follow and punish criminals, but simultaneously opening people up to hounding for their public commentary. Authoritarian governments are leaning toward the Russia/China style of localised, firewalled ‘internet,’ which is not actually connected to the rest of the world and is more like a local wide-area network. Platforms are fighting, winning and ignoring the reasons they are having to deal with antitrust cases while limiting the entry of meaningful competitors by monopolising computer resources. The cost of access will skyrocket worldwide as the economic dislocation following the COVID-19 pandemic ravages poorer countries and as large wealthy countries drain human resources. When Facebook launches its own currency, numerous small countries will collapse economically. All of the above and cancel culture will lead to further offline radicalisation.”
