problems technology could solve

14 Major Tech Issues — and the Innovations That Will Resolve Them

Members of the Young Entrepreneur Council discuss some of the past year’s most pressing technology concerns and how we should address them.

The past year has seen unprecedented challenges to public-health systems and the global economy. Many facets of daily life and work have moved into the digital realm, and the shift has highlighted some underlying business technology issues that are getting in the way of productivity, communication and security.

As successful business leaders, the members of the  Young Entrepreneur Council understand how important it is to have functional, up-to-date technology. That ’ s why we asked a panel of them to share what they view as the biggest business tech problem of the past year. Here are the issues they ’ re concerned about and the innovations they believe will help solve them.

Current Major Technology Issues

• Need For Strong Digital Conference Platforms
• Remote Internet Speed and Connections
• Phishing and Data Privacy Issues
• Deepfake Content
• Too Much Focus on Automation
• Data Mixups Due to AI Implementation
• Poor User Experience

1. Employee Productivity Measurement

As most companies switched to 100 percent remote almost overnight, many realized that they lacked an efficient way to measure employee productivity. Technology with “ user productivity reports ”  has become invaluable. Without being able to “ see ”  an employee in the workplace, companies must find technology that helps them to track and report how productive employees are at home. — Bill Mulholland , ARC Relocation

2. Digital Industry Conference Platforms

Nothing beats in-person communication when it comes to business development. In the past, industry conferences were king. Today, though, the move to remote conferences really leaves a lot to be desired and transforms the largely intangible value derived from attending into something that is purely informational. A new form or platform for industry conferences is sorely needed. — Nick Reese , Elder Guide

3. Remote Internet Speed and Equipment

With a sudden shift to most employees working remotely, corporations need to boost at-home internet speed and capacity for employees that didn ’ t previously have the requirements to produce work adequately. Companies need to invest in new technologies like 5G and ensure they are supported at home. — Matthew Podolsky , Florida Law Advisers, P.A.

4. Too Much Focus on Automation

Yes, automation and multi-platform management might be ideal for big-name brands and companies, but for small site owners and businesses, it ’ s just overkill. Way too many people are overcomplicating things. Stick to your business model and what works without trying to overload the process. — Zac Johnson , Blogger

5. Phishing Sites

There are many examples of phishing site victims. Last year, I realized the importance of good pop-up blockers for your laptop and mobile devices. It is so scary to be directed to a website that you don ’ t know or to even pay to get to sites that actually don ’t  exist. Come up with better pop-up blockers if possible. — Daisy Jing , Banish

6. Data Privacy

I think data privacy is still one of the biggest business tech issues around. Blockchain technology can solve this problem. We need more and more businesses to understand that blockchains don’t just serve digital currencies, they also protect people’s privacy. We also need Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. to understand that personal data belongs in the hands of the individual. — Amine Rahal , IronMonk Solutions

7. Mobile Security

Mobile security is a big issue because we rely so much on mobile internet access today. We need to be more aware of how these networks can be compromised and how to protect them. Whether it ’ s the IoT devices helping deliver data wirelessly to companies or people using apps on their smartphones, we need to become more aware of our mobile cybersecurity and how to protect our data. — Josh Kohlbach , Wholesale Suite

8. Deepfake Content

More and more people are embracing deepfake content, which is content created to look real but isn ’ t. Using AI, people can edit videos to look like someone did something they didn ’ t do and vice versa, which hurts authenticity and makes people question what ’ s real. Lawmakers need to take this issue seriously and create ways to stop people from doing this. — Jared Atchison , WPForms

9. Poor User Experience

I ’ ve noticed some brands struggling with building a seamless user experience. There are so many themes, plugins and changes people can make to their site that it can be overwhelming. As a result, the business owner eventually builds something they like, but sacrifices UX in the process. I suspect that we will see more businesses using customer feedback to make design changes. — John Brackett , Smash Balloon LLC

10. Cybersecurity Threats

Cybersecurity threats are more prevalent than ever before with increased digital activities. This has drawn many hackers, who are becoming more sophisticated and are targeting many more businesses. Vital Information, such as trade secrets, price-sensitive information, HR records, and many others are more vulnerable. Strengthening cybersecurity laws can maintain equilibrium. — Vikas Agrawal , Infobrandz

11. Data Backup and Recovery

As a company, you ’ ll store and keep lots of data crucial to keeping business moving forward. A huge tech issue that businesses face is their backup recovery process when their system goes down. If anything happens, you need access to your information. Backing up your data is crucial to ensure your brand isn ’ t at a standstill. Your IT department should have a backup plan in case anything happens. — Stephanie Wells , Formidable Forms

12. Multiple Ad and Marketing Platforms

A major issue that marketers are dealing with is having to use multiple advertising and marketing platforms, with each one handling a different activity. It can overload a website and is quite expensive. We ’ re already seeing AdTech and MarTech coming together as MAdTech. Businesses need to keep an eye on this convergence of technologies and adopt new platforms that support it. — Syed Balkhi , WPBeginner

13. Location-Based Innovation

The concentration of tech companies in places like Seattle and San Francisco has led to a quick rise in living costs in these cities. Income isn ’ t catching up, and there ’ s stress on public infrastructure. Poor internet services in rural areas also exacerbate this issue. Innovation should be decentralized. — Samuel Thimothy , OneIMS

14. Artificial Intelligence Implementation

Businesses, especially those in the tech industry, are having trouble implementing AI. If you ’ ve used and improved upon your AI over the years, you ’ re likely having an easier time adjusting. But new online businesses test multiple AI programs at once and it ’ s causing communication and data mix-ups. As businesses settle with specific programs and learn what works for them, we will see improvements. — Chris Christoff , MonsterInsights

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10 Experts on the Biggest Problems Tech Needs to Solve

U201cwhat is one problem you would use technology to fixu201d with technology playing a key role in advancing our world today, here are 10 experts’ responses on the biggest problems tech needs to solve..

By Milan Shetti, CEO Rocket Software

In the past year, we have experienced a global pandemic, social justice trials, political reforms and much more. As business leaders, we are usually concerned with finding solutions to answer our companies’ specific problems. We often don’t take a minute to look at the bigger picture of how we can aid today’s biggest global challenges through digital technology. At Rocket Software, we are led by our core values of empathy, humanity, trust, and love. These values guide us in trying to make the world a better place through technology.

On our podcast, Digital: Disrupted , we host a wide range of tech professionals every week. A question we like to ask each guest is, “What is one problem you would use technology to fix?” With technology playing a key role in advancing our world today, here are 10 experts’ responses on the biggest problems tech needs to solve.

Andrew Winston, Winston Eco-Strategies

Problem: Misinformation

Andrew is the co-author of Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take and the founder of Winston Eco-Strategies where he advises companies on managing today’s mega-trends. Winston says a problem he wishes tech could solve is the misinformation caused by technology.

“Misinformation is making all of today’s problems worse and we are at a time in history where we need to come together like never before.”

Bob Friday, Mist

Problem: Connectivity

Bob is an entrepreneur focused on developing wireless technologies and is currently the VP and CTO of Mist, a Juniper Company. Friday says a problem he wishes tech could change is connectivity.

“The more people that know about each other, the better off they are.”

Shirish Nadkarni, Serial Entrepreneur and Author

Problem: Climate change

Shirish started his career at Microsoft where he engineered the acquisition of Hotmail and launched MSN.com and has since created and sold multiple consumer businesses that have scaled to tens of millions of users worldwide. Most recently, he wrote the book, Startup to Exit – An Insider’s Guide to Launching and Scaling Your Tech Business . Nadkarni says a problem he wishes tech could solve is climate change.

“I did not think that climate change would happen in my lifetime, but it already is, and I believe with technology we can make advancements before it’s too late.”

Gary Chan, Alfizo

Problem: Healthcare

Gary runs Alfizo, a consultancy company helping businesses build and transform their information security programs. Chan says a problem he wishes tech could solve is healthcare. “I wish technology would be able to scan someone to find and fix their problem. I think that would be pretty cool.”

Dr. David  A. Bishop, Agile Worx

Problem: Hunger

David is a technology consultant and researcher who has worked with companies such as AT&T, Delta Airlines and Toshiba. He is also an author and the creator of agile vortex theory, the subject of his book Metagility: Managing Agile Development for Competitive Advantage . Bishop says a problem he wishes tech could solve is hunger.

“Hunger, while it seems like a very simple thing off the cuff…it has such a great impact long-term on communities.” 

Ed Skoudis, SANS Technology

Problem: Feelings of depression, loneliness, and isolation

Ed is the founder of Counter Hack, an information security consulting firm, and the president of the SANS Technology Institute where he developed their penetration testing curriculum. Skoudis says a problem he wishes tech could solve is the feelings of depression, loneliness, and isolation.

“I would love digital technology to be leveraged to limit the depression people are facing and turn it around.”

Josh Linkner, University of Michigan

Problem: Racial Injustice

Josh has founded and sold five tech companies and authored four bestselling books including his most recent, Big Little Breakthroughs . Linkner says a problem he wishes tech could solve is aiding in help of restoring the environment.

“I’d love to use technology to help solve issues like racial injustice and hunger. We have a long way to go, but I am an optimist and think that while technology will not solve all of these issues in one swoop, technology will certainly be able to aid in the solving of the most difficult and pesky problems.”

Camille Eddy, Open Tech Pledge

Problem: Misunderstanding of other cultures

Camille is the senior product engineer at the startup Sector and the co-founder of the Open Tech Pledge. Eddy says a problem she wishes tech could solve is misunderstanding other cultures.

“Not understanding other people gets in the way of innovation. I think if we could use technology to find a way to understand each other a little bit faster and easier that would be great.”

Tom Sweet, GM Financial

Problem: Privacy

Tom is the VP of Cloud Services at GM Financial, where he inspires colleagues to start a career in IT based on his own career journey. Sweet says a problem he wishes tech could solve is the lack of privacy.

“I think we are losing our privacy in a lot of different areas, and it is always at the top of my mind.”

Bill Miller, Beelinebill Enterprises

Problem: Cancer

Bill is an executive advisor and consultant, speaker, author, mentor, and coach who helps small and medium company CEOs and leaders who need a partner to guide them through overwhelming times and issues and get desired outcomes. Miller says an issue he wishes technology could fix is cancer.

“In the year of a pandemic and vaccines, I would love to see technology create a vaccine that cures cancer.”

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Three tech trends that will solve some of the world’s biggest challenges today

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Like never before, the future of people, prosperity and the planet demands fresh new approaches to drive positive change. Tackling the world’s biggest challenges means doing things differently. Let’s discuss three pressing problems and how technology and digital trends offer potential solutions to address them.

SEE: The COVID-19 gender gap: Why women are leaving their jobs and how to get them back to work (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Make cities more sustainable through digitally enabled and enhanced spaces

According to the UN, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities; by 2050, two-thirds of us will be urban dwellers. As we begin to recover from the pandemic, cities face crowds and congestion again. Our lives are hectic and busier than ever. There’s real value from signing into an app before leaving home to see if the train or bus is bursting with bodies or checking how long the queue is at the coffee shop. Technology is exploring new ways to improve urban living and conditions.

Digitally enabled modern urban spaces connect varying forms of technology, such as IoT, electronics, voice-movement activation and sensors to collect information for improved real-time responses and actions. When actual occupancy, capacity and presence detection information are available to businesses and citizens, endless city congestion issues can be solved. We address traffic management using autonomous vehicles connected to smart roads to save time and energy. Intelligent data and information response platforms act as a multi-orchestrator that provide an overlay solution and adapt to immediate needs by optimally controlling multiple resources, including cloud, networks, devices and applications.

Updated forms of digital twin computing are going one step further by enabling interaction between models, recombining to perform more precise, high-precision simulations of the real world. Smart cities will gain better urban design through highly detailed virtual replicas that accurately mimic local environmental conditions with complex data and information variables. It’s becoming possible to model a simple object or process or even a complex, sophisticated system that connects multiple things working together across a broader ecosystem. Beyond the clear end-user experience benefits, the real value of this type of virtual reality mapping is the insights into potential future city design and process improvements or predictive modeling that considers the beneficial yet elusive ‘what if’ scenario.

This integrated approach to gathering past, present and predictive data to anticipate patterns and outcomes is entirely transferable across industries, giving the manufacturing, transportation and healthcare sectors an upper hand in improving operations, processes and experiences.

Solve the energy crisis with zero environmental impact networks

Networks, platforms and systems across multiple physical and virtual locations: SaaS applications and devices at the edge produce thousands of pieces of data requiring space and energy. There’s a seemingly never-ending need for more bandwidth and speeds, putting growing pressure on energy grids. The rate at which that growth is happening is evident by how we talked in terabytes, then petabytes and by today, zettabytes.

Extending beyond the environmental regulations and sustainability indices that help us determine IT’s green footprint, many of us know that a fundamental change is needed to relieve the burden on the environment. Some influential members of the technology industry are working together to pilot an energy-efficient network that would effectively connect zero environmental harm with economic growth. It’s still early, but based on global, open architecture and optical transmission, this kind of network will improve equity and access for an energy-efficient digital society.

Collaborative efforts are underway to create new transmission laws for vast volumes of data across a massively globalized interconnected network. Its infrastructure uses ultra-high capacity, ultra-low latency and ultra-low power consumption that steps away from relying on heat-heavy electronics and moves towards photonics. In addition, new platforms will connect, manage and control data, and combine the real world with the digital to create service applications.

SEE: Hiring kit: Data scientist ( TechRepublic Premium)

Zero environmental impact networks lay the groundwork for a future that relies on larger-scale technologies, enormous computing resources and faster real-time information processing.

Prepare better for future upheavals with higher-tech, more connected and resilient infrastructure

We’re facing an increasingly complex, disruptive and uncertain future. A connected and resilient infrastructure is at the core of navigating the shocks and strains of change. Those industries and organizations that adopt more interconnected networks and systems with next-generation technologies, such as AI, 5G and software-defined platforms, will prove more resilient and effectively support the inevitable, continuous reliance on digital.

Drawing on the learnings of the past two years, today’s CIOs are thinking outside of the enterprise IT box to better understand and provide the best end-user experience possible, regardless of external forces and disruptions. IT leaders who focus on meeting the growing demand for more intelligent, enriching experiences attuned to people’s personal and professional needs are ahead of the game.

One way to better prepare for uninterrupted and enhanced customer, employee and digital experiences is to examine current IT systems and determine if it provides the necessary resilient foundation. In an ideal world, aka the holy grail of IT, you’d approach your organization’s technology by starting with the end-user experience framework and build it from there, but this doesn’t always happen.

IT leaders typically inherit disconnected networks, which can be limiting, yet beginning your examination here provides an opportunity to identify bandwidth gaps, update legacy systems and add-on extended capabilities, automate processes, and drive new efficiencies and better resiliency. Much of this process involves bringing together disparate and siloed legacy systems using improved, more advanced types of connectivity curated for business-critical applications that provide new levels of network redundancy.

Increasingly, new transformative technology fully integrates into existing IT and IoT infrastructure. Emerging styles of hybrid cellular and wireless capability are meeting multiple business needs. For example, more advanced networks can prioritize security and provide useful levers and pathways to access faster speeds with a range of latencies and support millions of IoT-enabled devices in an operating environment. Building an onramp to digitalization offers a valuable solution to improving predicted performance and scalability when it’s needed the most, and it also creates more consistent and enhanced digital experiences.

As the world challenges mount, new digital technologies that were once viewed as nice to have are today considered critical to driving positive change across business, cities and the environment.

Simon Walsh is Chief Executive Officer of NTT Ltd. Americas. Simon is responsible for the leadership of all resources and the successful execution of customer success, sales, delivery, operations and profitability for the region.

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Can science and technology really help solve global problems? A UN forum debates vital question

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Science and technology offer part of the solution to climate change, inequality and other global issues, a United Nations official said on Tuesday, spotlighting the enormous potential these fields hold for achieving humanity’s common goal, of a poverty and hunger-free world by 2030.

“New advances in science and technology hold immense promises for achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development ,” said UN Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, Liu Zhenmin, in his opening remarks to a session of the intergovernmental body overseeing the UN’s development work.

The 2018 Integration Segment of the Economic and Social Council ( ECOSOC ), being held from Tuesday to Thursday at UN Headquarters, brings together key stakeholders to review policies that support an integrated approach to achieving sustainable development and poverty eradication - with a focus this year on increasing resilience.

“To truly leverage the benefits of science and technology for sustainable development, we need to prioritize solutions that are pro-poor and equitable,” Mr. Liu said. “Only in this way can we ensure that no one is left behind.”

He stated that a rapidly warming planet was one of the greatest threats today, but a wide array of technological measures for climate change adaptation and mitigation can help the transition from carbon-intensive growth, towards more sustainable and resilient development.

Technologies can also help provide jobs to disadvantaged groups in society, and can help make cities smarter and more sustainable, by facilitating new transport systems and improving the management of natural resources.

To truly leverage the benefits of science and technology for sustainable development, we need to prioritize solutions that are pro-poor and equitable –  Liu Zhenmin, head of DESA

Threatened by unsustainable consumption and production patterns, the ocean is also suffering, he added. Numerous technologies have been shown to help mitigate and address these effects, such as innovations in sustainable fishing; enhanced surveillance of ocean acidification, and environmentally-sensitive forms of pollution prevention and clean-up, he added. 

To make new technology and innovation work in support of communities, any efforts must be driven on a local level, and be inclusive. 

Taking integrated approaches and working to break down barriers is of utmost urgency, too, as crises and shocks are increasingly complex and span the economic, social and environmental spheres. 

“And, finally, we need to build capacities and institutions for anticipating risk, and for planning and strategic foresight to effectively leverage technologies,” Mr. Liu said.

Also addressing the opening segment was Marc Pecsteen, Vice-President of the Economic and Social Council, who said that technology and innovation have been identified as “two key enablers, whose appropriate, efficient, equitable and sustainable use can support our efforts to build and maintain resilient societies.”

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Tech Can’t Fix It

Climate change and other big problems won’t be solved by tech alone.

By Shira Ovide

This article is part of the On Tech newsletter . You can sign up here to receive it weekdays.

I’ve been having a crisis of confidence in technology. Not because of the harm that people and companies do with technology, but because of all the ways that tech may not matter very much.

Think about some of the big issues that Americans are facing, in no particular order: the coronavirus pandemic, climate change , disagreements over the appropriate role of government, a reckoning over systemic racism, inequality in wealth and health , increases in homicides and other public safety threats and educational and social safety systems that fail many people.

Technology didn’t cause these problems, nor should we put too much faith that technology can solve them. I worry that when we vilify or glorify what technology and tech companies do, it makes us lose focus on what’s actually important.

Technology is part of the solution, perhaps, but mostly we have to  find the answers through collective human will and effective actionIt’s not Uber’s fault alone that work can be precarious and many Americans have trouble making ends meet. Jeff Bezos may be delusional for wishing to move polluting industries to space , but Amazon is also not really responsible for warming the earth. And likewise, if Facebook intervened more in misleading online information, it wouldn’t erase the root causes of Americans’ doubts about vaccines, nor would our children be totally safe if schools had facial recognition cameras .

We can see the ways that humans have deployed technology as tools for good, and we need to do more to mitigate the downsides of technology in our world. But I also fear that we — and me, too — overvalue technology’s importance.

I’ll give you a glimpse into my contradictory feelings about both the power and the impotence of technology.

There have been reflections in the last few days about how the U.S. government misled the public about the devastating effects of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 76 years ago.

That kind of official misdirection or denials about war and abuses still happens, but it is more difficult in part because of the prevalence of technology like phone cameras, Facebook and Twitter that enable anyone to show their truth to the world. Thinking about what has changed since World War II made me feel optimistic about the ways that technology has helped empower us with information and a voice.

But I also worry about what technology can’t really change. My colleague Somini Sengupta wrote this week that it is technologically feasible for the countries most responsible for spewing planet-warming gases into the atmosphere to shift faster to clean energy and stop destroying forests. But those choices are contentious, disruptive, expensive and difficult for many of us to accept.

Climate change and other deep-seated problems are hard to confront, and it’s tempting to distract ourselves by hoping that technology can save the day. Unrealistic optimism about driverless car technology has made some policymakers think twice about transit projects or other measures to reduce emissions. My colleagues have written about concerns that the pursuit of technologies to suck large amounts of carbon from the air might allow industries to put off doing more to prevent harmful emissions in the first place.

Ambitious technologies can be part of the answer to our collective challenges, as long as we put them in perspective.

I am grateful for improved data-crunching that has helped scientists better understand the impacts of climate change. Tech advances including Tesla’s electric cars make it more feasible for politicians and the public to imagine shifting transportation and energy grids.

It’s easy to misdiagnose the causes of our problems and hope for relatively painless solutions. But technology isn’t magic and there are no quick fixes.

Before we go …

How to lose friends in Washington the Facebook way: Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Cecilia Kang take us inside the White House, where officials grew annoyed over what they felt were Facebook’s dodges of their efforts to understand how people’s views on coronavirus vaccines were being shaped online.

Related: There has been an increase in both new and recycled unsubstantiated online narratives about the coronavirus, my colleague Davey Alba found.

How to win Amazon shoppers the creepy way: In violation of the website’s rules, some no-name merchants on Amazon try to persuade, bully or bribe unhappy customers to delete negative reviews , The Wall Street Journal writes. (Subscription required.) Amazon merchants do all sorts of wild things to improve their customer ratings.

How to Instagram the 2021 way: Posts with text often paired with low-quality oddball images are an emerging form of written expression on Instagram, my colleague Taylor Lorenz explains. Yes, it’s weird.

Hugs to this

Just watch these waves lapping the shore for a few minutes . It’s soothing. (I found this in the Daily Respite newsletter.)

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you’d like us to explore. You can reach us at [email protected].

If you don’t already get this newsletter in your inbox, please sign up here . You can also read past On Tech columns .

Shira Ovide writes the On Tech newsletter, a guide to how technology is reshaping our lives and world. More about Shira Ovide

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How Technology Can Help Solve Societal Problems

April 21, 2017 • 14 min read.

Nonprofits must embrace Social Change as a Platform to reach more people and at lower cost, experts say.

In the next article of the   series , “The Network Revolution: Creating Value through Platforms, People and Technology,” authors   Barry Libert ,   Megan Beck , Brian Komar and Josue Estrada debut the concept of Social Change as a Platform.   Libert is a Wharton senior fellow and CEO of OpenMatters; Beck is the firm’s chief insights officer. Komar is vice president of community engagement for Salesforce.org, the nonprofit reseller of Salesforce.com Inc. Estrada is the senior vice president of strategy and operations at Salesforce.org. 

As Charles Dickens so astutely observed about life during the French Revolution in “A Tale of Two Cities,” it was the best and worst of times. One could say the same thing today. The Fourth Industrial Revolution of technology networks and platforms could usher in an era of mass societal disruption — as well as unprecedented social cooperation. Whether the latter would prevail depends on the ability of nonprofit entities and the broader social sector to boost their collective impact by adopting the new business models that are disrupting the for-profit world. It would also depend on whether they can embrace what we call ‘Social Change as a Platform’ or SCaaP.

During the turbulent 1960s, Bob Dylan wrote the following powerful lyrics for “The Times They Are A-Changin’” that seems apropos for today. “ Come gather ’round people, wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown. And accept it that soon, you’ll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you is worth savin’, then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone. For the times they are a-changin’.” At the time, anti-war protests ruled the day. A generational collide over the future of America was afoot. And all the images of a nation coming apart at its seams were emblazoned across a new communications medium — TV — that was coming of age.

And so is it today. The Fourth Industrial Revolution — what Klaus Schwab (founder of the World Economic Forum) defines as the fusion of technologies blurring the lines among the physical, digital and biological spheres — is upon us. Meanwhile, nationalism is colliding with globalism, machine learning and artificial intelligence advancing geometrically, and global warming is on a direct path to changing the very nature of our planet. Despite these many challenges, this revolution, like the many that have preceded it, also comes with a great promise of opportunity.

To be sure, there are reasons for great optimism. In just the past 30 years, the global poverty rate halved with many of the poorest people in the world becoming significantly less poor. These gains mirror dramatic improvements in health and education including advances in life expectancy, child mortality, health care provision, among other important areas. Moreover, most of these gains predate the effective integration of digital technologies into the cause. In short, it is reasonable to argue that the potential for social ‘changemakers’ armed with today’s digital platforms in partnership with large and growing virtual networks can dramatically improve the human condition.

“The potential for social ‘changemakers’ armed with today’s digital platforms in partnership with large and growing virtual networks can dramatically improve the human condition.”

Self-organization Powered by Technology

Civil society — the network of institutions that define us as actors in the civil sphere independent of governments — is supposed to serve as the leader in promoting pluralism and social benefit. As Klaus Schwab notes that “a renewed focus on the essential contribution of civil society to a resilient global system alongside government and business has emerged.” Unfortunately, nonprofit groups, academic institutions and philanthropic organizations engaged in social change are struggling to adapt to the new global, technological and virtual landscape.

Legacy modes of operation, governance and leadership competencies rooted in the age of physical realities continue to dominate the space. Further, organizations still operate in internal and external silos — far from crossing industry lines, which are blurring. And their ability to lead in a world that is changing at an exponential rate seems hampered by their mental models and therefore their business models of creating and sustaining value as well.

If civil society is not to get drenched and sink like a stone, it must start swimming in a new direction. This new direction starts with social organizations fundamentally rethinking the core assumptions driving their attitudes, behaviors and beliefs about creating long-term sustainable value for their constituencies in an exponentially networked world. Rather than using an organization-centric model, the nonprofit sector and related organizations need to adopt a mental model based on scaling relationships in a whole new way using today’s technologies — the SCaaP model.

Embracing social change as a platform is more than a theory of change, it is a theory of being — one that places a virtual network or individuals seeking social change at the center of everything and leverages today’s digital platforms (such as social media, mobile, big data and machine learning) to facilitate stakeholders (contributors and consumers) to connect, collaborate, and interact with each other to exchange value among each other to effectuate exponential social change and impact.

SCaaP builds on the government as a platform movement (Gov 2.0) launched by technologist Tim O’Reilly and many others. Just as Gov 2.0 was not about a new kind of government but rather, as O’Reilly notes, “government stripped down to its core, rediscovered and reimagined as if for the first time,” so it is with social change as a platform. Civil society is the primary location for collective action and SCaaP helps to rebuild the kind of participatory community celebrated by 19 th century French historian Alexis de Tocqueville when he observed that Americans’ propensity for civic association is central to making our democratic experiment work. “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition,” he noted, “are forever forming associations.”

But SCaaP represents a fundamental shift in how civil society operates. It is grounded in exploiting new digital technologies, but extends well beyond them to focus on how organizations think about advancing their core mission — do they go at it alone or do they collaborate as part of a network? SCaaP requires thinking and operating, in all things, as a network. It requires updating the core DNA that runs through social change organizations to put relationships in service of a cause at the center, not the institution. When implemented correctly, SCaaP will impact everything — from the way an organization allocates resources to how value is captured and measured to helping individuals achieve their full potential.

SCaaP “requires updating the core DNA that runs through social change organizations to put relationships in service of a cause at the center, not the institution.”

Digital Platforms Empower Social Change at Scale

To be sure, early adopters are already using technology to effectuate change at a pace and scale not previously available in the physical and digitally disconnected world. The marginal cost of delivery remains too high. But with today’s technologies, with support from the board and management to make it happen, social change at scale is possible. Here are some organizations that are on the way to implementing SCaaP.

• DonorsChoose.org: Every one of their 1.5 million donors can create engagement paths for each potential recipient of a classroom project, matching their specific giving preferences and history — something previously available only to large donors. It is the only nonprofit to be named to Fast Company’s list of the 50 Most Innovative Companies in the world.
• Health Leads: It is a healthcare organization that connects low-income patients with the basic resources they need to be healthy, as part of their regular doctor’s visits. As Forbes noted, “Community health workers, case managers and/or student volunteers screen patients for unmet needs and help them access any of the 50 basic resource needs relevant for their circumstances, such as food assistance, childcare vouchers, enrollment in a GED program — even negotiating with the utilities company to get their heat turned back on.”
• College for America: Southern New Hampshire University went from a small, relatively unremarkable New England institution to one of the biggest nonprofit online educators in the country. According to Campus Technology magazine, “SNHU has succeeded in the online space by leveraging technology and providing well-constructed courses and Amazon-like customer service to mostly older students at a cost they can afford.”
• Salesforce.org’s Power of Us Hub: Among the most successful online communities built on Salesforce technology, the Power of Us Hub facilitates peer-to-peer collaboration around the effective use of technology for more than 30,000 social change organizations. More than 98% of the questions asked get answered by the community, a real shared benefit model in action.

Just as Apple chose a platform approach when launching their App Store, these organizations are enabling their partners and contributors to share and co-create in the value chain they co-inhabit. Each has moved beyond allowing supporters to donate and promote, toward sharing real value through stakeholders’ talents and assets.

Tomorrow’s SCaaP

We are at the dawn of the SCaaP era. The future of social change as a platform is a world of connected platforms working to solve society’s most pressing challenges more effectively as fast as possible. These platforms will supersede and encompass existing social change organizations. Those organizations that embrace social change as a platform will lead the way in helping to usher in this new era of connected social change platforms.

The core assets needed today to advance social change — ideas, individuals and institutions — continue to be the primary ingredients. What is changing and will continue to change, however, is the way these assets are assembled to deliver maximum social impact. Organizations can achieve SCAAP to the extent that those with a shared cause can gradually maximize shared capability (platforms) and minimize organization products. This represents a radical shift in approach.

Every organization relies on its information, capabilities and assets to be effective, but their networks are largely untapped or underutilized. Creating more value and scaling social impact requires the organizations’ leaders to leverage their networks, tapping into new sources of value, both tangible and intangible.

Value in the social impact supply chain will continue to come from new sources, for those who allow that to happen. Existing stakeholders in social change organizations will add value in new ways and new stakeholders will interact in new ways with the community’s resources and assets via the platform. SCaaP will increasingly bring all those actors and sectors together.

Philanthropic institutions supporting similar causes will be working together out in the open, ensuring all their resources and those supported through their grant-making are at the disposal of the community working to advance social change — not any one individual or institution. These efforts will be focused on maximizing the way value is derived and how the agency is built, shared and advanced throughout the network.

“The future of social change as a platform is a world of connected platforms working to solve society’s most pressing challenges more effectively as fast as possible.”

Key SCaaP Advantages to Nonprofits

Social change organizations that leverage their stakeholder’s networks as well as their tangible (programs and services) and intangible (expertise and relationships) assets will gain these and other advantages from embracing the SCaaP business model.

• Decreases costs: Stakeholders willing to share their opinions, skills, relationships and even real assets for shared value to the cause, at a very low or near-zero cost , stretch an organization’s very scarce resources. Moreover, reinventing the wheel each time social change products and services are created lead to duplication and waste.
• Deepens community engagement: Enabling meaningful ways for stakeholders to add value increases engagement and deepens understanding and strengthens these relationships. SCaaP enables anyone with a good idea to build innovative services that connect citizens to the cause of their choice, allowing citizens to more directly participate.
• Increases organizational flexibility and decreases risk: Operating as a network increases an organization’s adaptability and speed. Work is more distributed and lends itself to self-organizing, which makes it highly responsive to changing needs. Allowing common functions to be implemented as shared utilities across social change organizations instead of replicating them in each silo also reduces risk.
• Enhances transparency and accountability: SCaaP fundamentally shifts the power dynamic within the social change community. Grant makers work with community stakeholders as peers, helping them achieve full potential as individuals and their organizations.
• Expands impact: Ultimately, scaling relationships lets an organization secure more value, which helps maximize social impact. As co-creating partners who have a vested interest in advancing a cause, stakeholders’ incentive to add value is clear. The platform’s success is their success.

To succeed, a clear and understandable pathway to adopting SCaaP is necessary for this large, untapped market.

Seven Steps to Embracing SCaaP Today

Social change as a platform is first and foremost a business strategy, a theory of change that needs to be integrated into every organization’s five-year strategic plan. That effort begins by identifying how and where an organization can accelerate the transition to a network-model across the entire organization. Specifically, organizations must assess their business model and inventory network assets, and start to reallocate resources and capital to networks as well as develop network key performance indicators (KPIs).

• Choose the right platform. Platforms that embrace intelligence, speed, productivity, mobility, and connectivity empower social change organizations to take advantage of the most significant transformations taking place in enterprise software.
• Select the relationships to scale. Identify all the key stakeholders for advancing your mission and indicate which relationships are the most important to scale. Be sure to include existing and potential relationships, including other partners and organizations that can add value.
• Connect programs and services. Plot the organization’s various offerings — programs and services offers to various stakeholders — and map how each contributes value to advance the relationships with different stakeholders.
• Convert the data into intelligence. A unified view of relationships and programs creates troves of data. Convert the data into useful, real-time intelligence integrated into the organization’s processes in real-time.
• Drive one-to-one engagement. Real-time intelligence lets organizations engage more effectively with all.
• Track what matters. It’s not just financial performance that matters, but also engagement, sentiment and co-creation. Create KPI’s for each of these items and add them to daily performance reviews.
• Keep platforms, networks and intelligence at the center. Products and services are helpful, but in the final reckoning, it is the breadth and depth of the network that will create the scale of social change desired.

The biggest hurdle to SCaaP is changing the mental models and core competencies of the leadership team and board of directors. However, nonprofit organizations and academic institutions are better positioned to embrace SCaaP because they are more accustomed to imagining their community as active participants, instead of passive recipients. But it is critical that leaders significantly change how they embrace today’s technologies.

With SCaaP, the nonprofit world will have the potential to enact social change on a scale previously unimagined. It is time to take up the mantle because doing so can unlock the future potential of every human being. People are worth it.

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• Experts Predict More Digital Innovation by 2030 Aimed at Enhancing Democracy
• 5. Tech causes more problems than it solves

Table of Contents

• 1. The innovations these experts predict by 2030
• 2. Tech is (just) a tool
• 3. Power dynamics play a key role in problems and innovation
• 4. It’s all just history repeating itself
• 6. The net effects in 10 years will be negligible
• About this canvassing of experts
• Acknowledgments

A number of respondents to this canvassing about the likely future of social and civic innovation shared concerns. Some said that technology causes more problems than it solves. Some said it is likely that emerging worries over the impact of digital life will be at least somewhat mitigated as humans adapt. Some said it is possible that any remedies may create a new set of challenges. Others said humans’ uses and abuses of digital technologies are causing societal harms that are not likely to be overcome.

The following comments were selected from among all responses, regardless of an expert’s answer to this canvassing’s main question about the impact of people’s uses of technology. Some of these remarks of concern happen to also include comments about innovations that may emerge. Concerns are organized under four subthemes: Something is rotten in the state of technology; technology use often disconnects or hollows out a community; society needs to catch up and better address the threats and opportunities of tech; and despite current trends, there is reason to hope for better days.

The chapter begins with some overview insights:

Larry Masinter , internet pioneer, formerly with Adobe, AT&T Labs and Xerox PARC, who helped create internet and web standards with IETF and W3C, said, “Technology and social innovation intended to overcome the negatives of the digital age will likely cause additional negative consequences. Examples include: the decentralized web, end-to-end encryption, AI and machine learning, social media.”

James Mickens , associate professor of computer science at Harvard University, formerly with Microsoft, commented, “Technology will obviously result in ‘civic innovation.’ The real question is whether the ‘innovation’ will result in better societal outcomes. For example, the gig economy is enabled by technology; technology finds buyers for workers and their services. However, given the choice between an economy with many gig workers and an economy with an equivalent number of traditional middle-class jobs, I think that most people would prefer the latter.”

Michael Aisenberg , chair, ABA Information Security Committee, wrote, “Misappreciation of limits and genesis of, e.g., AI/machine learning will produce widely disparate results in deployment of tech innovations. Some will be dramatically beneficial; some may enable abuse of law enforcement, economic systems and other fundamental civic institutions and lead to exacerbation of gaps between tech controllers/users and underserved/under- or mis-skilled populations (‘digital divide’) in what may be a significant (embed limitations on career/economic advancement) or even life-threatening (de facto health care or health procedure rationing) manner.”

The problem is that we are becoming more and more dependent on machines and hence more susceptible to bugs and system failures. Yaakov J. Stein

Peter Lunenfeld , a professor of design, media arts and digital humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine,” predicted, “We will use technology to solve the problems the use of technology creates, but the new fixes will bring new issues. Every design solution creates a new design problem, and so it is with the ways we have built our global networks. Highly technological societies have to be iterative if they hope to compete, and I think that societies that have experienced democracy will move to curb the slide to authoritarianism that social media has accelerated. Those curbs will bring about their own unintended consequences, however, which will start the cycle anew.”

Yaakov J. Stein , chief technology officer of RAD Data Communications, based in Israel, responded, “The problem with AI and machine learning is not the sci-fi scenario of AI taking over the world and not needing inferior humans. The problem is that we are becoming more and more dependent on machines and hence more susceptible to bugs and system failures. This is hardly a new phenomenon – once a major part of schooling was devoted to, e.g., penmanship and mental arithmetic, which have been superseded by technical means. But with the tremendous growth in the amount of information, education is more focused on how to retrieve required information rather than remembering things, resulting not only in less actual storage but less depth of knowledge and the lack of ability to make connections between disparate bits of information, which is the basis of creativity. However, in the past humankind has always developed a more-advanced technology to overcome limitations of whatever technology was current, and there is no reason to believe that it will be different this time.”

A vice president for research and economic development wrote, “The problems we see now are caused by technology, and any new technological fixes we create will inevitably cause NEW social and political problems. Attempts to police the web will cause freedom of speech conflicts, for example.”

Something is rotten in the state of technology

A large share of these experts say among the leading concerns about today’s technology platforms are the ways in which they are exploited by bad actors who spread misinformation; and the privacy issues arising out of the business model behind the systems.

Misinformation – pervasive, potent, problematic

Numerous experts described misinformation and fake news as a serious issue in digital spaces. They expressed concern over how users will sort through fact and fiction in the coming decade.

Stephanie Fierman , partner, Futureproof Strategies, said, “I believe technology will meaningfully accelerate social and civic innovation. It’s cheap, fast and able to reach huge audiences. But as long as false information is enabled by very large websites, such social and civic innovators will be shadow boxing with people, governments, organizations purposely countering truthful content with lies.”

Sam Lehman-Wilzig , a professor of communications at Bar-Ilan University specializing in Israeli politics and the impact of technological evolution, wrote, “The biggest advance will be the use of artificial intelligence to fight disinformation, deepfakes and the like. There will be an AI ‘arms race’ between those spreading disinformation and those fighting/preventing it. Overall, I see the latter gaining the upper hand.”

Greg Shatan , a lawyer with Moses & Singer LLP and self-described “internet governance wonk,” predicted, “I see success, enabled by technology, as likely. I think it will take technology to make technology more useful and more meaningful. Many of us pride ourselves on having a ‘BS-meter,’ where we believe we can tell honestly delivered information from fake news and disinformation. The instinctual BS-meter is not enough. The next version of the ‘BS-meter’ will need to be technologically based. The tricks of misinformation have far outstripped the ability of people to reliably tell whether they are receiving BS or not – not to mention that it requires a constant state of vigilance that’s exhausting to maintain. I think that the ability and usefulness of the web to enable positive grassroots civic communication will be harnessed, moving beyond mailing lists and fairly static one-way websites. Could there be ‘Slack for Community Self-Governance?’ If not that platform, perhaps something new and aimed specifically at these tasks and needs.”

Oscar Gandy , a professor emeritus of communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said, “Corporate actors will make use of technology to weaken the possibility for improvements in social and civic relationships. I am particularly concerned about the use of technology in the communications realm in order to increase the power of strategic or manipulative communications to shape the engagement of members of the public with key actors within a variety of governance relationships.”

An expert in the ethics of autonomous systems based in Europe responded, “Fake news is more and more used to manipulate a person’s opinion. This war of information is becoming so important that it can influence democracy and the opinion of people before the vote in an election for instance. Some AI tools can be developed to automatically recognize fake news, but such tools can be used in turn in the same manner to enhance the belief in some false information.”

A research leader for a U.S. federal agency wrote, “At this point in time, I don’t know how we will reduce the spread of misinformation (unknowing/individual-level) and disinformation (nefarious/group-level), but I hope that we can.”

A retired information science professional commented, “Dream on, if you think that you can equate positive change with everybody yelling and those with the most clout (i.e., power and money) using their power to see their agendas succeed. Minority views will always be that, a minority. At present and in the near future the elites manipulate and control.”

A research scientist for a major technology company whose expertise is technology design said, “We have already begun to see increased protections around personal privacy. At present, it is less clear how we might avoid the deliberate misuse of news or news-like content to manipulate political opinions or outcomes, but this does not seem impossible. The trick will be avoiding government censorship and maintaining a rich, vigorous exchange of opinions.”

Privacy issues will continue to be a hot button topic

Multiple experts see a growing need for privacy to be addressed in online spaces.

Ayden Férdeline , technology policy fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, responded, “Imagine if everyone on our planet was naked, without any clear options for obtaining privacy technology (clothing). It would not make sense to ask people what they’d pay or trade to get this technology. This is a ‘build it and they will come’ kind of scenario. We’re now on the verge, as a society, of appropriately recognizing the need to respect privacy in our Web 2.0 world, and we are designing tools and rules accordingly. Back in 1992, had you asked people if they’d want a free and open internet, or a graphical browser with a walled garden of content, most would have said they prefer AOL. What society needed was not AOL but something different. We are in a similar situation now with privacy; we’re finally starting to grasp its necessity and importance.”

We’re now on the verge, as a society, of appropriately recognizing the need to respect privacy in our Web 2.0 world, and we are designing tools and rules accordingly. Ayden Férdeline

Graham Norris , a business psychologist with expertise in the future of work, said, “Privacy no longer exists, and yet the concept of privacy still dominates social-policy debates. The real issue is autonomy of the individual. I should own my digital identity, the online expression of myself, not the corporations and governments that collect my interactions in order to channel my behaviour. Approaches to questions of ownership of digital identity cannot shift until the realization occurs that autonomy is the central question, not privacy. Nothing currently visible suggests that shift will take place.”

Eduardo Villanueva-Mansilla , an associate professor of communications at Pontificia Universidad Catolica, Peru, and editor of the Journal of Community Informatics, wrote, “I’m trying to be optimistic, by leaving some room to innovative initiatives from civic society actors. However, I don’t see this as necessarily happening; the pressure from global firms will probably too much to deal with.”

An international policy adviser on the internet and development based in Africa commented, “Technology is creating and will continue to evolve and increase the impact of social and civic innovation. With technology we will see new accountability tools and platforms to raise voices to counter societal ills, be it in leadership, business and other faculties. We must however be careful so that these innovations themselves are not used to negatively impact end users, such issues like privacy and use of data must be taken on in a way that users are protected and not exposed to cybercrime and data breaches that so often occur now.”

Jamie Grady , a business leader, wrote, “As technology companies become more scrutinized by the media and government, changes – particularly in privacy rights – will change. People will learn of these changes through social media as they do now.”

Technology use often disconnects or hollows out community

Some respondents commented on rising problems with a loss of community and the need for more-organic, in-person, human-to-human connection and the impact of digital distancing.

Jonathan Grudin , principal researcher at Microsoft, commented, “Social and civic activity will continue to change in response to technology use, but will it change its trajectory? Realignments following the Industrial Revolution resulted from the formation of new face-to-face communities, including union chapters, community service groups such as Rotary Club and League of Women Voters, church groups, bridge clubs, bowling leagues and so on. Our species is designed to thrive in modest-sized collocated communities, where everyone plays a valued part. Most primates become vulnerable and anxious when not surrounded by their band or troop. Digital media are eroding a sense of community everywhere we look. Can our fundamental human need for close community be restored or will we become more isolated, anxious and susceptible to manipulation?”

Rebecca Theobald , an assistant research professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, said, “Technology seems to be driving people apart, which would lead to fewer connections in society.”

The program director of a university-based informatics institute said, “There is still a widening gap between rural and urban as well as digital ‘haves’ and ‘have nots.’ As well, the ability to interact in a forum in which all members of society have a voice is diminishing as those with technology move faster in the digital forums than the non-tech segment of the population that use non-digital discourse (interpersonal). The idea of social fabric in a neighborhood and neighborly interactions is diminishing. Most people want innovation – it is the speed of change that creates divisions.”

An infrastructure architect and internet pioneer wrote, “The kind of social innovation required to resolve the problems caused by our current technologies relies on a movement back toward individual responsibility and a specific willingness to engage in community. As both of these work against the aims of the corporate and political elite as they exist today, there is little likelihood these kinds of social innovations are going to take place. The family and church, for instance, which must be the core institutions in any rebuilding of a culture that can teach the kind of personal responsibility required, were both hollowed out in the last few decades. The remaining outward structures are being destroyed. There is little hope either families or churches will recover without a major societal event of some sort, and it will likely take at least one generation for them to rebuild. The church could take on the task of helping rebuild families, but it is too captured in attempts to grow ever larger, and consume or ape our strongly individualistic culture, rather than standing against it.”

A researcher based in North America predicted a reining in of the digital in favor of the personal: “Between email and phones, I think we’re close to peak screen time, a waste of time, and it’s ruining our eyes. Just as we have forsaken our landlines, stopped writing letters, don’t answer our cellphones, a concept of an average daily digital budget will develop, just as we have a concept of average daily caloric intake. We’ll have warning labels that rate content against recommended daily allowances of different types of content that have been tested to be good for our mental health and socialization, moderately good, bad, and awful – the bacon of digital media. And people who engage too much will be in rehab, denied child custody and unemployable. Communities, residences and vacation areas will promote digital-free, mindfulness zones – just as they have quiet cars on the train.”

Society needs to catch up and better address the threats and opportunities of tech

Some of these experts said that the accelerating technological change of the digital age is making it difficult for humans to keep up and respond to emerging challenges.

A chair of political science based in the American South commented, “Technology always creates two new problems for every one it solves. At some point, humans’ cognitive and cooperative capacities – largely hard-wired into their brains by millennia of evolution – can’t keep up. Human technology probably overran human coping mechanisms sometime in the later 19th century. The rest is history.”

There is a gap between the rate at which technology develops and the rate at which society develops. We need to take care not to fall into that gap. Louisa Heinrich

Larry Rosen , a professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, known as an international expert on the psychology of technology, wrote, “I would like to believe that we, as citizens, will aid in innovation. Smart people are already working on many social issues, but the problem is that while society is slow to move, tech moves at lightning speed. I worry that solutions will come after the tech has either been integrated or rejected.”

Louisa Heinrich , a futurist and consultant expert in data and the Internet of Things, said, “There is a gap between the rate at which technology develops and the rate at which society develops. We need to take care not to fall into that gap. I hope we will see a shift in governance toward framework-based regulation, which will help mitigate the gap between the pace of change in technology and that in government. At the very least, we need to understand the ways in which technology can extend or undermine the rules and guidelines we set for our businesses, workplaces, public spaces and interactions. To name just one common example, recruitment professionals routinely turn to Facebook as a source of information on prospective employees. This arguably violates a number of regulations designed to protect people from being denied work based on personal details not relevant to that work. How do we unravel this conundrum, bearing in mind that there will always be another social network, another digital source to mine for information about people? Taken from another angle, there is a significant gap between what users understand about certain bits of technology and the risks they take using them. How can we educate people about these risks in a way that encourages participation and co-creation, rather than passivity? As the so-called Gen Z comes of age, we will see a whole generation of young adults who are politically engaged at a level not seen in several generations, who are also native users of technology tools. This could bring about a positive revolution in the way technology is used to facilitate civic engagement and mutually empower and assist citizens and government. Technology provides us with powerful tools that can help us advance socially and civically, but these tools need to be thoughtfully and carefully put to use – when we encode barriers and biases into the applications that people need to use in daily life, whether intentionally or no, we may exclude whole segments of society from experiencing positive outcomes. We are living through a time of rapid and radical change – as always, the early stages feel uncomfortable and chaotic. But we can already see the same tools that have been used to mislead citizens being used to educate, organise, motivate and empower them. What’s needed is a collective desire to prioritise and incentivise this. New Zealand is leading the way with the world’s first ‘well-being’ budget.”

Bulbul Gupta , founding adviser at Socos Labs, a think tank designing artificial intelligence to maximize human potential, responded, “Until government policies, regulators, can keep up with the speed of technology and AI, there is an inherent imbalance of power between technology’s potential to contribute to social and civic innovation and its execution in being used this way. If technology and AI can make decisions about people in milliseconds that can prevent their full social or civic engagement, the incentive structures to be used toward mitigating the problems of the digital age cannot then be solved by technology.”

Gene Policinski , a journalist and First Amendment law expert at the Freedom Forum Institute, observed, “We forget how new the ‘tech revolution’ really is. As we move forward in the next decade, the public’s awareness of the possibilities inherent in social and civic innovation, the creativity of the tech world working with the public sector and public acceptance of new methods of participation in democratic processes will begin to drown out and eventually will surpass the initial problems and missteps.”

Gabriel Kahn , former bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, now a professor of journalism researching innovation economics in emerging media at the University of Southern California, wrote, “We are not facing a ‘Terminator’-like scenario. Nor are we facing a tech-driven social utopia. Humans are catching up and understanding the pernicious impact of technology and how to mitigate it.”

Kathee Brewer , director of content at CANN Media Group, predicted, “Much like society developed solutions to the challenges brought about by the Industrial Revolution, society will find solutions to the challenges of the Digital Revolution. Whether that will happen by 2030 is up for debate. Change occurs much more rapidly in the digital age than it did at the turn of the 20th century, and for society to solve its problems it must catch up to them first. AND people, including self-interested politicians, must be willing to change. Groups like the Mozilla Foundation already are working on solutions to invasions of privacy. That work will continue. The U.S. government probably won’t make any major changes to the digital elections framework until after the 2020 election, but changes will be made. Sadly, those changes probably will result from some nastiness that develops due to voters of all persuasions being unwilling to accept electoral results, whatever the results may be.”

Valerie Bock of VCB Consulting, former Technical Services Lead at Q2 Learning, responded, “I think our cultures are in the process of adapting to the power our technologies wield, and that we will have developed some communal wisdom around how to evaluate new ones. There are some challenges, but because ordinary citizens have become aware that images can be ‘photoshopped’ the awareness that video can be ‘deepfaked’ is more quickly spreading. Cultural norms as well as technologies will continue to evolve to help people to apply more informed critiques to the messages they are given.”

Bach Avezdjanov , a program officer with Columbia University’s Global Freedom of Expression project, said, “Technological development – being driven by the Silicon Valley theory of uncontrolled growth – will continue to outpace civic and social innovation. The latter needs to happen in tandem with technological innovation, but instead plays catch-up. This will not change in the future, unless political will to heavily regulate digital tools is introduced – an unlikely occurrence.”

A computing science professor emeritus from a top U.S. technological university commented, “Social/civic innovation will occur but most likely lag well behind technological innovation. For example, face-recognition technology will spread and be used by businesses at a faster pace than social and legal norms can develop to protect citizens from any negative effects of that technology. This technology will spread quickly, due to its various positives (increased efficiencies, conveniences and generation of profits in the marketplace) while its negatives will most likely not be countered effectively through thoughtful legislation. Past Supreme Court decisions (such as treating corporations as persons, WRT unlimited funding of political candidates, along with excessive privacy of PACs) have already undermined U.S. democracy. Current populist backlashes, against the corruption of the Trump government, may also undermine democracy, such as the proposed Elizabeth Warren tax, being not on profits, but upon passive wealth itself – a tax on non-revenue-producing illiquid assets (whose valuation is highly subjective), as in her statement to ‘tax the jewelry of the rich’ at 2% annually. Illiquid assets include great private libraries, great private collections of art, antiques, coins, etc. – constituting an assault on the private sector, that if successful, will weaken democracy by strengthening the confiscatory power of government. We could swing from current excesses of the right to future excesses of the left.”

Despite current trends, there is reason to hope for better days

Many of the experts in this canvassing see a complicated and difficult road ahead, but express hope for the future.

Cheryl B. Preston , an expert in internet law and professor at Brigham Young University Law School, said, “Innovation will bring risk. Change will bring pain. Learning will bring challenges. Potential profits will bring abuse. But, as was the decision of Eve in the Garden of Eden, we need to leave the comfortable to learn and improve. If we can, by more informed voting, reduce the corruption in governmental entities and control corporate abuse, we can overcome difficulties and advance as a society. These advances will ultimately bring improvement to individuals and families.”

John Carr , a leading global expert on young people’s use of digital technologies, a former vice president of MySpace, commented, “I know of no proof for the notion that more people simply knowing more stuff, even stuff that is certifiably factually accurate, will necessarily lead to better outcomes for societies. But I do harbour a hope that if, over time, we can establish the idea that there are places on the internet that are reliable sources of information, it will in the medium to longer term help enough people in enough countries to challenge local demagogues and liars, making it harder for the demagogues and liars to succeed, particularly in times of national crisis or in times when war might be on the visible horizon. I used to think that if the internet had been around another Hitler would be impossible. Recently I have had a wobble on that but my optimism ‘trumps’ that gloomy view.”

Mike Douglass , an independent developer, wrote, “There is a significant realization that a stampede to create connections between anonymous people and devices was a bad idea. It’s up to the technologists and – more importantly – those who want to make money out of technology – to come up with a more measured approach. There’s a reason why gentlemen obtained letter of introduction to other gentlemen – one shouldn’t trust some random individual turning up on your doorstep. We need the equivalent approach. I’ve no idea what new innovations might turn up. But if we don’t get the trust/privacy/security model right we’ll end up with more social media disasters.”

Hume Winzar , an associate professor and director of the business analytics undergraduate program at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, predicted, “With more hope than evidence, I’d like to think that reason will eventually overcome the extraordinary propaganda machines that are being built. When the educated upper-middle classes realise that the ‘system’ is no longer serving them, then legal and institutional changes will be necessary. That is, only when the managers who are driving the propaganda machine(s) start to feel that they, personally, are losing privacy, autonomy, money and their children’s future, then they will need to undermine the efforts of corporate owners and government bureaucrats and officials.”

Carolyn Heinrich , a professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University, said, “My hope (not belief) is that the ‘techlash’ will help to spur social and civic innovations that can combat the negative effects of our digitization of society. Oftentimes, I think the technology developers create their products with one ideal in mind of how they will be used, overlooking that technology can be adapted and used in unintended and harmful ways. We have found this in our study of educational technology in schools. The developers of digital tools envision them as being used in classrooms in ‘blended’ ways with live instructors who work with the students to help customize instruction to their needs. Unfortunately, more often than not, we have seen the digital tools used as substitutes for higher-quality, live instruction and have observed how that contributes to student disengagement from learning. We have also found some of the content lacking in cultural relevance and responsiveness. If left unchecked, this could be harmful for far larger numbers of students exposed to these digital instructional programs in all 50 states. But if we can spur vendors to improve the content, those improvements can also extend to large numbers of students. We have our work cut out for us!”

In the field I follow, artificial intelligence, the numbers of professionals who take seriously the problems that arise as a consequence of this technology are reassuring. Pamela McCorduck

Heywood Sloane , entrepreneur and banking and securities consultant, wrote, “I’m hopeful the it will be a positive contributor. It has the ability to alter the way we relate to our environment in ways that shrink the distances between people and help us exercise control over our personal and social spaces. We are making substantial progress, and 5G technology will accelerate that. On the flip side, we need to find mechanisms and processes to protect our data and ourselves. They need to be strong, economic and simple to deploy and use. That is going to be a challenge.”

Pamela McCorduck , writer, consultant and author of several books, including “Machines Who Think,” commented, “I am heartened by the number of organizations that have formed to enhance social and civic organization through technology. In the field I follow, artificial intelligence, the numbers of professionals who take seriously the problems that arise as a consequence of this technology are reassuring. Will they all succeed? Of course not. We will not get it right the first time. But eventually, I hope.”

Yoshihiko Nakamura , a professor of mechno-informatics at the University of Tokyo, observed, “The current information and communication technology loses diversity because it is still insufficient to enhance the affectivity or emotion side of societies. In this sense I can see the negative side of current technology to human society. However, I have a hope that we can invent uses of technology to enhance the weaker side and develop tomorrow’s technology. The focus should be on the education of society in the liberal arts.”

Ryan Sweeney , director of analytics at Ignite Social Media, commented, “In order to survive as a functioning society, we need social and civic innovation to match our use of technology. Jobs and job requirements are changing as a result of technology. Automation is increasing across a multitude of industries. Identifying how we protect citizens from these changes and help them adapt will be instrumental in building happiness and well-being.”

Miles Fidelman , founder, Center for Civic Networking and principal Protocol Technologies Group, responded, “We can see clear evidence that the internet is enabling new connections, across traditional boundaries – for the flow of information, culture and commerce. It is strengthening some traditional institutions (e.g., ties between geographically distributed family members) and weakening others (e.g., the press). Perhaps the most notable innovation is that of ad hoc, network-centric organizations – be they global project teams, or crisis response efforts. How much of this innovation will make things better, how much it will hurt us, remains an open question.”

A technology developer active in IETF said, “I hope mechanisms will evolve to exploit the advantages of new tech and mitigate the problems. I want to be optimistic, but I am far from confident.”

A renowned professor of sociology known for her research into online communications and digital literacies observed, “New groups expose the error of false equivalence and continue to challenge humans to evolve into our pre-frontal cortex. I guess I am optimistic because the downside is pretty terrible to imagine. It’s like E.O. Wilson said: ‘The real problem of humanity is the following: We have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.’”

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How to solve 10 common problems with technology

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Technology might cause some of your problems, but it can also solve them. 

I use technology to help with my problems on a daily basis, and I've identified some that most other people have, too.

Whether your work environment is noisy or messy, or you're looking to save a little money, you can find the solutions to your problem on this list.

The problem: not enough outlets

Apartment dwellers are generally worse off when it comes to usable outlets, but even homeowners might find that they're quickly running out of places to plug in their new gadgets. 

You can solve this problem a few different ways depending on its root cause. 

If you're clustering a lot of electronics together (think a home theater system), you should buy a surge protector . I've used one from Belkin for years, and it has helped me stay organized and keeps my gadgets safe. 

If the problem is that too many of our outlets are taken up by single-use power adapters for phones and tablets, you have options. You could go the DIY route and replace the outlets themselves with new ones that have USB ports built into them . Or, you could buy one of Anker's multi-port adapters , which let you charge up to five devices while only taking up a single outlet. 

Regardless of which option you pick, your life will be easier knowing there's a place to plug in the next cool thing you bring home.

Anker PowerPort 5 Multi-Port USB Charger, $23.99, available at Amazon

Topgreener usb charger outlet, $19.99, available at amazon, belkin 8-outlet commercial power strip surge protector, $14.88, available at amazon  , the problem: bad wi-fi.

I've heard people say that having bad Wi-Fi is  worse than having no Wi-Fi, and I agree.

If you live in a place with spotty Wi-Fi you have two options: extend your current network, or create a stronger one. 

I've tried TP-Link's Wi-Fi range extender , and given its budget-friendly price it's what I recommend people try first. It's easy to set up and does a really good job, providing adequate coverage in places that have none. 

If you live in a bigger home, it might be worthwhile to invest in a multi-router Wi-Fi setup, in which case I recommend Eero . Instead of extending your Wi-Fi, Eero's routers create a strong Wi-Fi net to blanket an area in complete coverage. Each router has the same strength and range, so installing them strategically around your house should provide high-speed coverage everywhere.

TP-Link AC750 Wi-Fi Range Extender, $24.99, available at Amazon

Eero home wi-fi system (2-pack), $259.99, available at amazon, the problem: dirty floors.

Most people would  like a robot vacuum, but it can be a pretty significant expense. 

I recently tried a more budget-friendly option in this category, and I'm still impressed at how well it works. With six modes and a 90-minute battery life, Eufy's vacuum should be a good fit for any apartment and single-floor homes. 

The vacuum's sensors are good enough that it's able to accurately clean a room after a very quick survey. Although I'm pretty meticulous when I clean, I can honestly say that since I started trying the Eufy my floors have never been tidier.

Eufy RoboVac 11, $219.99, available at Amazon

The problem: shoddy battery life.

If your phone's battery just isn't cutting it, there are to ways to help it get through a night out or weekend camping trip. 

Those who don't mind adding a little bulk to their phone can invest in one of Mophie's charging cases. Yes, they're bigger than your average case, but they also extend your phone's battery life significantly. During my tests, I was able to get over 30 hours of battery life with my iPhone 7 Plus.

If bulky cases are a no-go, you can pick up one of Anker's external battery packs instead. The one I'm recommending can recharge most phones once or twice, and is still small enough to fit in a pocket, purse, or backpack.

mophie juice pack wireless for the iPhone 7, $71.98, available at Amazon

Mophie juice pack wireless for the iphone 7 plus, $74, available at amazon  , anker powercore 10000 portable battery pack, $25.99, available at amazon, the problem: wanting multi-room audio.

I love Bluetooth speakers, but if you live in a large place and want multi-room audio, things get a little complicated. 

I've had a chance to try Libratone's TOO speaker , which I still think is a great solution to this problem  if you value portability. You can link pairs of these speakers together into "zones," and you can play the same audio from both at the same time.

If you'd prefer to link up multiple speakers and don't care about portability, your best option is Sonos . The whole idea behind the well-known speaker brand is to slowly amass a collection of speakers in every room of your house. Sonos offers greater flexibility than Libratone's solution, but again, you give up portability.

Libratone TOO Portable Bluetooth Speaker, $149, available at Amazon

Sonos play:1 wireless smart speaker, $199, available at amazon, the problem: a high cable bill.

If you cable bill continues to creep up, it might be the right time to consider cutting out your TV package.

I haven't had cable in years, and while I don't  miss live TV, I understand the utility in having it during important events, which is why I bought an HDTV antenna. 

How useful this antenna is will depend on your location, but with a 50-mile range you're likely to pick up the big four networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. You should check how good the over-the-air cover coverage is in your area before making the investment, but in my experience, it's worth it. 

1byone 50 Miles Amplified HDTV Antenna, $29.99, available at Amazon

The problem: too many wires on your desk.

A messy work environment can make it difficult to get things done. 

I realized that the quickest way for  me to clear it off was by investing in some wireless tech, namely a wireless keyboard and mouse. 

I've settled on a Bluetooth mouse from Logitech and Bluetooth keyboard from Anker , and despite their reasonable price tags, I've never had to search further. Both paired to my computer instantly and have worked well together for years. 

My preference for Bluetooth gear over traditional wireless gear is the lack of wireless receivers. Instead of taking up a USB port with a small adapter you might lose, these accessories are  totally wireless.

Logitech M557 Bluetooth Mouse, $19.95, available at Amazon

Anker bluetooth ultra-slim keyboard, $17.99, available at amazon, the problem: overcooked or undercooked food.

Whether you're cooking inside, outside, for yourself, or for family, nothing is worse than overcooking or undercooking food.

With grilling season nearly here, Weber has just released the iGrill 3 , its latest wireless thermometer. Stick it into the center of your meat and you'll never have to worry about the steak or chicken being too pink in the middle.

Indoor chefs might want to try sous vide cooking, a technique that heats meat or vegetables up to the perfect temperature by bagging them up and submerging them in water. It might come across as strange at first, but it's a technique that's been used to cook food in high-end restaurants for years. Anova is the biggest name in consumer-grade sous vide cooking, and their option can be paired with your phone via Bluetooth to let you know when your meal is done.

Weber iGrill 3 Bluetooth Thermometer, $98, available at Amazon

Anova culinary bluetooth sous vide, $149, available at amazon, the problem: a boring commute.

Commutes, even when they're relatively short, can be tedious. 

If you prefer to occupy your mind with games rather than a book or music, I have two recommendations that got me through months of train trips.

Minimize is a minimalist puzzle game that requires you to pair similarly colored tiles together. It starts out simple but has a nice difficulty curve. The last few levels required enough concentration that I almost missed my stop. 

Arguably the most well-known puzzle game on the planet, Tetris is easy to play, but tough to master. Like Minimize, the difficulty curve is gentle, but when blocks start falling at a rapid pace it's easy to lose track of time.

Minimize, $2.99

Tetris, $1.99, the problem: working or living in a noisy environment.

If you're like me, you need silence or pleasant sounds to get anything done. 

Unfortunately, it's difficult to get peace and quiet everywhere, which is why it's a good idea to invest in some noise-cancelling headphones. I've recommended Sony's H.ear headphones for the past few months, and everyone who's tried them has come away impressed. 

They're comfortable, sound good, have the only worthwhile on-ear cup controls I've found on headphones, and their noise cancelling is excellent. If you're looking for a way to put a barrier between you and the outside world, these headphones are a great way to do it.

Sony H.ear on Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphone, $219, available at Amazon

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How One Chinese EV Company Made Battery Swapping Work

• Chengyi Lin

While Tesla and others focused on bigger batteries and faster charging, Nio invested in customer experience, infrastructure, and leasing programs.

Battery swapping is a technology that could solve one key barrier for EV adoption: consumers’ range anxiety and the long waiting time for battery charging. Wouldn’t you feel more assured on a weekend trip if you knew you could stop at a swap station and replace depleted battery packs with fully charged ones in five minutes ? But this isn’t easy to do, as Tesla and Better Place’s past failures. In China, however, battery swapping has been a reality for a couple of years. How did Chinese companies like Nio make it work with 2,300 swapping stations nationwide? What can companies outside China learn from the Chinese experience?

Range anxiety has been one of the most significant barriers for electric vehicle (EV) adoption among consumers. For example, if I wanted to drive a Tesla Model 3 from Paris to the famous Mont Saint-Michel, which is roughly 360 km (or 220 miles away), I would need to carefully plan my route and stop at one of Tesla’s Supercharger stations near Paris before heading east, as there are simply no other Supercharger stations along the way.

• Chengyi Lin is affiliate professor of Strategy and a leading expert on digital transformation at INSEAD. His research and teaching explore the strategic impacts of digital technologies, such as AI, and drivers of innovation for global and multinational organizations.

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The Download: introducing the Hard Problems issue

Plus: Meta is being sued by more than 40 US states

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This is today's edition of  The Download ,  our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology.

Introducing: the Hard Problems issue

For all of history we’ve turned to technology, again and again, to help us solve our hardest problems. It has made virtually all of human knowledge available to us instantly on demand. And we can speak to each other in entirely different languages and be understood using nothing more than a slim slab of glass and metals in our pocket. Sometimes technology can seem like a miracle. But, of course, it is nothing more than human achievement. Yet like all things human, our creations can be deeply flawed. As a result, we have also used tech to unleash horrors on ourselves, intentionally and by accident. 

Technology is an engine for problems, for solving them and for creating entirely new ones—and then we perversely turn to even newer technologies to try to solve those. In our latest print issue of MIT Technology Review , we step back from this cycle. We explore big questions and hard problems and ask: What role can—and should—technology play going forward?

Here’s just some of the great stories you can read in the new issue:

+ Think that your plastic is being recycled? This incisive, fascinating feature by Douglas Main will make you think again .

+ The internet feels pretty broken these days. But there are real steps we can take towards fixing it , as Katie Notopoulos explains in her piece for us. 

+ Meet Gábor Domokos , the Hungarian mathematician making sense of nature’s complexity by describing its forms in the simplest possible geometry.

+ AI consciousness isn’t just a devilishly tricky intellectual puzzle; it’s a morally weighty problem, writes Grace Huckins.

+ Why captchas are getting harder to solve—and what comes next.

Read the full magazine , and if you haven’t already, you can subscribe to MIT Technology Review for as little as $60 a year—for a limited time only.

2023 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: NuScale and its modular nuclear reactors

NuScale is hoping to revitalize the moribund nuclear power industry with safe and affordable small modular reactors. Its approach could put nuclear power within reach of many more communities, and with a fresh stamp of approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the company plans to break ground in 2025. Read more about NuScale , and check out the rest of the list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch .

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Meta is being sued over claims it harms children A new lawsuit on behalf of more than 40 US states claims that it knowingly created features to reel in young users. ( NYT $) + The complaint alleges that Meta used harmful and manipulative tactics. ( WP $)+ These are the five Instagram features the states say harm teens. ( Wired $)

2 Cruise’s driverless taxi service has been suspended in San Francisco Over fears it poses an unreasonable risk to public safety. ( CNBC ) + The company also withheld video footage from an ongoing investigation. ( Motherboard ) + Robotaxis are here. It’s time to decide what to do about them. ( MIT Technology Review )

3 AI thinks the world is full of hot people Because, surprise surprise, that’s what it’s been trained on. ( The Atlantic $) + How it feels to be sexually objectified by an AI. ( MIT Technology Review )

4 A drug factory is stranded in outer space All because of ongoing conflict between the startup behind it and the US government. ( IEEE Spectrum ) + A new Vulcan rocket could be launched before the year’s end. ( Ars Technica ) + This startup wants to find out if humans can have babies in space. ( MIT Technology Review )

5 This new quantum computer is a record breaker It’s got more qubits than any other—but that doesn’t mean it’s more powerful. ( New Scientist $ ) + IBM wants to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computer. ( MIT Technology Review )

6 How US immigration authorities investigate ‘derogatory’ social media posts  Their content can help determine whether someone is allowed to remain in the country. ( 404 Media ) 7 Threads is living in the past Its users are optimistic, but they want more up-to-date content. ( WSJ $)

8 A Chinese firm wants to build the world’s largest gay social platform  And it’s set its sights on the US. ( Rest of World )

9 Work software isn’t really about work anymore It’s all about organizing how you’re planning to complete tasks, instead. ( New Yorker $) + Meet the people who use Notion to plan their whole lives. ( MIT Technology Review )

10 How to make your TikToks to go viral  It might be as simple as applying a bit of lippie. ( NYT $)

Quote of the day

"'Avoid all robots until further notice' was not on my 2023 bingo card." 

—An X user jokes about Oregon State University issuing a warning to students to avoid food delivery robots patrolling its campus after receiving a bomb threat, which later turned out to be false.

The big story

This nanoparticle could be the key to a universal covid vaccine

September 2022

Long before Alexander Cohen—or anyone else—had heard of the alpha, delta, or omicron variants of covid-19, he and his graduate school advisor Pamela Bjorkman were doing the research that might soon make it possible for a single vaccine to defeat the rapidly evolving virus—along with any other covid-19 variant that might arise in the future.

The pair and their collaborators are now tantalizingly close to achieving their goal of manufacturing a vaccine that broadly triggers an immune response not just to covid and its variants but to a wider variety of coronaviruses. If it works, it could protect us against ever having to endure another covid-related lockdown again. Read the full story .

—Adam Piore

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet 'em at me .)

The Download

The download: ai for good, and china’s shrinking internet.

Plus: the UAE wants an AI 'marriage' with the US

The Download: more energy-efficient AI, and the problem with QWERTY keyboards

Plus: an FDA panel has voted against approving MDMA as a treatment for PTSD

The Download: gaming climate change, and Boeing’s space mission leaks

Plus: how an AI-generated news service gained millions of followers

The Download: MDMA for PTSD, and Boeing’s rearranged space flight

Plus: Adobe has been scolded for selling Ansel Adams-style AI-generated images

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How Can Technology Help Combat Climate Change

Setting targets is only the first step. How can countries and companies make sure they hit them? Image:  Pixabay

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Luiz Avelar

.chakra .wef-9dduvl{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-9dduvl{font-size:1.125rem;}} Explore and monitor how .chakra .wef-15eoq1r{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;color:#F7DB5E;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-15eoq1r{font-size:1.125rem;}} SDG 13: Climate Action is affecting economies, industries and global issues

.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;color:#2846F8;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{font-size:1.125rem;}} Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:, sdg 13: climate action.

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• After setting climate targets, countries and companies will need to quantify, reduce and monitor their emissions.
• This process can be complex, time-consuming and prone to errors, especially for novices.
• The right technology can simplify this process and make it more efficient, transparent and effective.
• Here are three ways climate change technology solutions – particularly AIoT.

As society pressures leaders for a more environmentally-friendly agenda, governments responsible for 63% of world emissions have committed to net zero with corporate net-zero commitments covering 12% of the global economy (representing $9.81 trillion in revenue).

However, it is not uncommon to see large disconnects between targets and actual emissions – when the talk and the walk must go hand-in-hand in terms of effective emission-reduction progress. In June 2021, when the G7 decided to make climate risk disclosure mandatory, seven of the most influential global economies indicated that carbon reporting and disclosures would play a vital role in ensuring that emission reduction targets are in fact met.

Setting a target is just the first step; the second is to understand and quantify the real emission baseline into measurable units. Next, a clear definition of the emissions reduction strategy must be built. Finally, near real-time monitoring of targets vs actual progress should be in place. Ultimately, if countries and companies are to achieve net zero, they need to monitor, reduce and, in some cases, offset the emissions they generate.

The journey can be complex for beginners; it can be time-consuming, very manual, and prone to errors. That should not prevent companies from joining the decarbonization wave. After all, beyond satisfying consumers and political leaderships, committing to net zero might also prove economical, as access to capital will prove increasingly difficult for those not embracing the energy transition. As 'carbon tax' or 'cap-and-trade' schemes become the most likely path forward, and as and access to capital is reduced for those who fail to embrace the energy transition, early net-zero movers will have a competitive financial edge over laggards.

Carbon-management process

Carbon management can be broken down into three main categories: emission measuring and reporting, abatement, and offsetting.

1. Measuring and reporting carbon footprint

The first step is to measure carbon emissions. The carbon reporting process involves the collection of CO2 data, organising by emission type and geographical segment. The data is then measured against internationally recognised carbon-accounting standards such as GHG protocol or ISO 14064-1 . Currently, emission data may be obtained through meter readings, purchase records, utility bills, engineering models, direct monitoring, mass balance, stoichiometry (the calculation of reactants and products in chemical reactions), or other methods for acquiring data from specific activities in the company’s value chain. Challenges associated with measuring and reporting commonly include the laborious data collection process, difficulty reviewing carbon footprints across business units and assets, as well as validating underlying assumptions of emissions.

2. Abatement planning and management

Abatement planning involves identifying key sources of emissions and implementing measures to reduce them. By categorising emissions in step one, businesses can then pinpoint and measure which processes emit the highest volumes of CO2 and optimise their carbon-abatement plan. To achieve this, abatement roadmaps set out targets and KPIs to reduce emissions, focusing on changing emission-heavy processes and implementing new technologies to reduce emissions. Due to the multiple variables that need to be considered in such planning, the process can be uncertain and complex. Furthermore, tracking the performance and progress of abatement programmes is laborious. Organizational challenges include a lack of both transparency regarding marginal cost-benefit of abatement programmes, and resources for managing and executing this abatement journey.

3. Carbon offsetting

Carbon offsetting is considered the option of last resort once all abatement efforts and decarbonization investments have been exhausted. It is a way of taking responsibility for unavoidable carbon emissions by paying for others to reduce or absorb CO2. Multiple types of projects are used for carbon offsets, ranging from environmental projects such as reforestation, to carbon-capture technologies and renewable energy production. Carbon credits are measurable, verifiable emission reductions and have been used as a means for governments and companies to offset carbon emissions. Further methods include the use of RECs (renewable energy certificates) to offset energy consumed from non-renewable sources. However, offsets also come with challenges, from accurate measurement to transparency and verification to ease of trade.

How technology can fight climate change

Artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) solutions are integral to tackling some of the challenges associated with carbon management. There are three main areas of focus to make carbon management more efficient, transparent and effective.

1. AIoT – integration into measurement and reporting

With a myriad of databases and systems involved with different carbon-producing assets, the labour required to simply categorise and organise the data from multiple business units and assets is immense. AIoT integration enables seamless sourcing of real-time activity level data and asset inventory data from a variety of systems. This provides an organization with the capability to efficiently structure, collect and transform data into reports for accurate emissions-monitoring and measurement, reducing overall efforts around data collection and enhancing data quality and report resolution.

2. Abatement intelligence – predictive analytics to simulate emissions over time

Abatement planning is a challenge primarily due to the lack of accurate measures for determining the emissions derived from certain processes. AIoT technology tackles this challenge by creating insights from real-time data to better predict process emissions. By analysing and learning through data from multiple processes, AIoT can refine the performance evaluation of abatement measures and optimise emissions predictions. Beyond optimising abatement strategies, this technology also lowers the overall marginal abatement costs.

3. Carbon offsetting and offset integration

Although a last resort, the carbon offset market plays an essential role towards achieving global net-zero emissions goals for countries and organizations, with an estimated addressable market size of $200 billion by 2050 . However, verification of carbon offsetting and difficulty in trading plagues the industry. Technology can support validation of RECs in near real-time and offer a marketplace for affordable and fast carbon offsetting. Offset integration would provide a global pool of offsets to an organisation, improving ease of trade and emissions planning, reducing organizational hassle, and optimising the timings of REC purchases and retirement.

Carbon management solutions are essential to meeting the G7’s mandatory climate risk disclosures. More importantly, they provide the technology to actively manage and reduce carbon emissions and achieve the net-zero pledges made by governments and corporations. Driven by strong political, societal and economic agendas, carbon management solutions will be an integral part of emission reductions. For that, real-time measurement, abatement, and offset integration will help ensure companies not only talk the talk but also walk the walk and transparently meet their net-zero targets.

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ChatGPT vs. Gemini: Which AI Chatbot Is Better at Coding?

• ChatGPT offers superior language support, spanning a vast array of languages both old and new.
• ChatGPT delivers higher accuracy and code quality compared to Gemini for coding tasks.
• ChatGPT excels in debugging, error detection, context awareness, problem-solving, and overall programming features.

If you’re stuck on a programming project, you may go looking for a tool to help you brainstorm ideas, write clean code, or explain a tricky concept. Which AI chatbot do you choose: the swift and informative Gemini, or the comprehensive and powerful ChatGPT?

Language Support

When it comes to language support, ChatGPT outshines Gemini in breadth and proficiency. While Gemini officially supports around 22 popular programming languages—including Python, Go, and TypeScript—ChatGPT's language capabilities are far more extensive.

Unlike Gemini, ChatGPT does not have an official list of supported languages. However, it can handle not only the popular languages that Gemini supports but also dozens of additional languages, from newer languages like TypeScript and Go to older ones like Fortran, Pascal, and BASIC.

To test their language capabilities, I tried simple coding tasks in languages like PHP, JavaScript, BASIC, and C++. Both Gemini and ChatGPT performed well with popular languages, but only ChatGPT could convincingly string together programs in older languages like BASIC.

Accuracy and Code Quality

You’re running late on your project deadline, and you need some boilerplate code. You ask ChatGPT and Gemini to generate code to implement that functionality, and both tools spit out dozens of lines of code. Quick win, right?

But which tool’s code can you trust to deliver the functionality you requested? To compare the accuracy and quality of code generated by the two AI chatbots, I gave them a simple coding task to complete. I asked Gemini and ChatGPT to generate a simple to-do list app using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I didn't provide any primer; the goal is to see how well both chatbots can perform with limited information to work with.

ChatGPT (GPT-4o) produced functional code with a "good enough" aesthetic. Using ChatGPT's code, you can add or delete a task. Here's what I got after running ChatGPT's result on the browser:

Next, I asked Google's Gemini to repeat the same task. Gemini was also able to generate a functional to-do list app. You could also add and delete tasks, but the overall design was not as attractive:

I carried out a second test, this time asking both chatbots to recreate the Twitter (X.com) feed. ChatGPT produced a vintage-style Twitter feed with a functional tweeting feature. I could type into the text box, send a tweet, and have it loaded dynamically onto the page. It wasn't the Twitter feed I hoped for, but considering most of ChatGPT's training data is flooded with legacy Twitter code, the results are understandable.

Unfortunately, in this round, Google's Gemini wasn't able to provide functional code. It generated hundreds of lines of JavaScript code, but there were too many placeholders that needed to be filled in with missing logic. If you’re in a hurry, such placeholder-heavy code wouldn't be particularly helpful, as it would still require heavy development work. In such cases, it might be more efficient to write the code from scratch.

I tried a few other basic coding tasks, and in all instances, ChatGPT's solution was clearly the better option.

Debugging and Error Detection

Errors and bugs are like puzzles that programmers love to hate. They'll drive you crazy, but fixing them is quite satisfying. So when you run into bugs in your code, should you call on Gemini or ChatGPT for help? It may depend on the type of error you’re trying to avoid.

To decide, I gave both AI chatbots two debugging problems to solve. First, I prompted both chatbots to solve a logical error in some simple PHP code. Logic errors are notoriously harder to spot than syntax errors because they depend on the intent of the code:

The code in this screenshot runs and even produces the right result in many cases. However, it has several logic errors that are not immediately apparent; can you spot them? I asked Gemini for help and, unfortunately, the chatbot couldn't pick out the logical error in the code:

None of Gemini’s three attempts at solving the problem were accurate. I tried a similar problem six months ago with the same disappointing result; it seems Gemini has not improved in this area.

I then asked ChatGPT for help, and it immediately picked out the logical error.

Gemini also rewrote the code to fix the error:

After trying a few other bug-hunting and fixing tasks, ChatGPT was clearly better at the job. Gemini wasn't totally a lost cause, though. It was able to fix a lot of syntax errors I threw at it, but it struggled with complex errors, especially logical errors.

Context Awareness

One of the biggest challenges with the use of AI chatbots for coding is their relatively limited context awareness. They may be able to create separate code snippets for well-defined tasks, but struggle to build the codebase for a larger project.

For example, say you're building a web app with an AI chatbot. You tell it to write code for your registration and login HTML page, and it does so perfectly. You then ask the chatbot to generate a server-side script to handle the login logic. This is a simple task, but because of limited context awareness, it could end up generating a login script with new variables and naming conventions that don't match the rest of the code.

Which chatbot is better at retaining context awareness? I gave both tools the same programming task: a chat app that we know ChatGPT can already build .

Since the arrival of GPT-4 Turbo and its 128k context window, ChatGPT's ability to retain much more context, for a longer period, has increased significantly. When I first built a chat app with ChatGPT using the 4k context window GPT-4, it went relatively smoothly with only minor incidents of veering off context.

Recreating the same project in November 2023 with the 128k GPT-4 Turbo showed marked improvement in context awareness. Six months later, in May 2024, there hasn't been any significant change in context awareness, but no deterioration either.

Unfortunately, when I first tried Gemini (then called Bard) on the same project, it lost track of the project's context and failed to complete the app. Several rounds of updates later, I retested Gemini on the same project, and it seems to have deteriorated further. So, once again, in terms of context awareness, ChatGPT wins.

Problem-Solving

At this point, Google's Gemini is lacking in a lot of ways. But can it finally score a win? Let's test its problem-solving abilities. Sometimes you just have a problem, but you aren't sure how to represent it programmatically, let alone how to solve it.

In these situations, chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT can come in handy. I asked them both to " Write a JavaScript code that counts how many times a particular word appears in a text. "

Here is the result from Google's Gemini:

And here is the result from ChatGPT:

At first, both approaches look pretty solid. Gemini's approach even looks concise. However, ChatGPT's code takes a more robust and accurate approach to counting word occurrences in a text. It considers word boundaries and case sensitivity, handling punctuation properly, and giving more reliable results. Once again, ChatGPT is superior.

ChatGPT's approach splits the input text into words in a way that can handle all non-word characters like punctuation marks, and special characters as word separators. Meanwhile, Gemini only considers whitespace as a separator. This approach may fail if the text contains punctuation marks or other non-word characters within words, or if the words are not separated by whitespace characters.

Since Google Gemini has pretty much lost in every metric I used for comparison, I decided to give it a chance at redemption. I asked the chatbot " Which is better at coding? ChatGPT or Gemini? " Here is its reply:

Seems like something I would partly agree with! I asked ChatGPT what it thought of the assessment and it agreed:

Now, while this seems quite normal, there's an interesting twist here. Throughout most of last year, Gemini (then Bard) always confidently asserted it could produce better code, was more efficient, and made fewer mistakes. Here is a screenshot from one of my tests in November 2023:

It seems that Gemini is now a little more self-aware and modest!

Programming Features

Neither ChatGPT nor Gemini have major features that are exclusively for programming. However, both chatbots come with features that can significantly boost your programming experience if you know how to use them effectively.

ChatGPT offers an array of features that can streamline the programming process when using the chatbot. Useful additions like Memory and Custom GPT let you customize ChatGPT for your specific programming needs.

For example, the Custom GPT feature can help you create specialized mini versions of ChatGPT for particular projects, by uploading relevant files. This makes tasks like debugging code, optimization, and adding new features much simpler. Overall, compared to Google's Gemini, ChatGPT includes more features that can enhance your programming experience.

ChatGPT Is in a League of Its Own

Google's Gemini has enjoyed a lot of hype, so it may come as a surprise to see just how much it lacks in comparison to ChatGPT. While ChatGPT clearly had a head start, you might think Google's massive resources would help it erode that advantage.

Despite these results, it would be unwise to write off Gemini as a programming aid. Although it’s not as powerful as ChatGPT, Gemini still packs a significant punch and is evolving at a rapid pace.

More From Forbes

Anticipating the next disruptive technologies is hard but essential.

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Technology runs the world. It affects every aspect of our lives. This immutable fact is doubly true for large organizations. Not only do we rely on technology to run our organizations, but it is at the heart of the value propositions we offer to customers and the business models we use to compete. Often, the most crucial bets companies make are those based on technologies. Many existential threats to companies come from failing to correctly anticipate how technologies are changing and failing to make the necessary adjustments and investments to capitalize on these changes.

Complicating this need to anticipate technological change are the often significant investments, long lead times, and painful change management required to make the investments and corresponding business model changes. As the pace of technological change quickens, the need to anticipate the implications of forthcoming technological breakthroughs and pair these with corresponding megatrends that will change our world is becoming paramount for all large organizations.

This continuous need to anticipate future technological breakthroughs is vexing for all companies of scale and substance. Channels such as vendors, peer conversations, and conferences fail to give adequate warning and frustrate people with inadequate contextualization. Reading academic and scientific papers is time consuming, and most executives do not have the necessary scientific background to evaluate emerging science or translate these implications into future business realities.

Furthermore, many developments in science fail to become a commercial reality; and for those that do, the timing of when those technologies will be commercially viable is difficult to gauge. But the necessity to gain a clear understanding of these technologies and their likely timing and economic impact is increasingly paramount.

As a useful thought experiment, let’s consider the implications of future battery technology. The current state-of-the-art technology is based on lithium, with evolutions involving phosphate ion technology, which has quickly supplanted the lead acid technology of previous generations. However, the reign of lithium looks to have a shortened life span.

Lithium-based batteries were a step forward from the lead acid technology, storing higher density of electricity without the corrosive side effects of lead acid. However, it is clear that lithium-based batteries have their own set of issues. They are expensive to manufacture, and lithium is rare and expensive to mine. Furthermore, the mining of lithium is destructive to the environment, requiring the processing of huge quantities of rock to extract the lithium. Finally, the density of energy storage is insufficient to meet even the current requirements, let alone the emerging needs of an increasingly solar- and wind-driven energy grid.

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As we examine the emerging technologies that can address these issues, sodium-ion looks to be a promising next step. Sodium-ion is low cost, has better safety characteristics, and is more environmentally friendly. It also holds the promise of operating at a high density of energy store with a slower rate of energy dissipation.

The Everest Group team that tracks this technology anticipates that the current rate of scientific breakthrough for sodium-ion will start to be commercially viable within three years, overcoming the challenges of density and life cycle. With the improved performance, lower cost, and smaller environmental footprint, it is reasonable to expect that sodium-ion batteries will quickly supplant lithium technology.

With this projection in mind, let us now consider the potential impact on a host of industries and companies. Clearly, the battery industry must take this potential change in technology seriously. With a three-year horizon, it will affect existing and future investments in plants and equipment. Supply chains for raw materials will be affected as well as future battery design.

The mining industry should be interested in the future of battery technology. Lithium mines are expensive, and these investments pay off over a 10-20-year time frame. If the major use of lithium is batteries, how will these investments pay off?

Let’s move next to the electric car manufacturers and the implications for their supply chain as well as the design implications for the most critical component. How about consumer products? How will the upcoming change in core battery technology, their products and supply chains affect energy utility companies? They will need to recalibrate.

How about the IT and AI industries with their high dependance of massive data centers and the battery technology that supports them? The list of companies affected in serious ways seems endless and the implications significant.

One of the implications of studying battery technology is broad, and there are pervasive implications that a breakthrough in science has on a wide range of the economy. What will other developments in science portend? How are we to anticipate these changes and their implications?

It is clear that there is a growing need for large companies that wish to secure their future to monitor a broad range of technological development. We at Everest Group believe that this can be accomplished by monitoring seven key areas of technology development, which are:

· Advanced Materials

· Chemicals

· Energy and Environmental

· Information and Communications

· Life Sciences Health and Imaging

· Microelectronics

· Sensors and Instrumentation

By tracking the progress of science in these key areas and projecting the timelines of development of these core technologies, a series of scenarios can be established with corresponding timelines. By identifying important milestones on the technology trajectory, progress toward commercialization can be monitored and companies can build insight and confidence on the progress, time frames, and probability of these future technological disruptions.

Correctly anticipating future technological breakthroughs is insufficient. Executives must also understand the context into which these future technologies will be introduced. To understand this context, a scenario must be built of incorporating likely changes in the economy, evolving trends in human behavior, emerging business models, and evolving regulations and legislation. These scenarios can then be used to evaluate when and how a technology will ultimately arrive at a meaning. How will it evolve? What will it replace? How will it thrive and develop? Who will partner, and how?

The prospect of building or accessing these capabilities may seem expensive and daunting. However, the consequences of failing to anticipate the emergence of disruptive technologies across a wide range of technologies and industries can and will have devastating implications for the long run survivability of all large and established organizations.

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