You have read an article on the effect of digital technology on social change and would like to recommend it to other readers. Write an essay in which you:
• introduce the topic and summarize the issues mentioned in the text,
• discuss the implications of these issues for the future of society,
• conclude with predictions for the future of digital technology’s impact on society and recommend the article to other readers.
Support your arguments with relevant examples from the extract. Do not copy directly from the text but summarize, paraphrase or quote short phrases. Write your answer in 300–350 words. You have 80 minutes to complete the task.
Digital technology and social change: the digital transformation of society from a historical perspective
Martin Hilbert, PhD
Digital technology, including its omnipresent connectedness and its powerful artificial intelligence, is the most recent long wave of humanity’s socioeconomic evolution. The first technological revolutions go all the way back to the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, when the transformation of material was the driving force in the Schumpeterian process of creative destruction. A second metaparadigm of societal modernization was dedicated to the transformation of energy (aka the “industrial revolutions”), including water, steam, electric, and combustion power. The current metaparadigm focuses on the transformation of information. Less than 1% of the world's technologically stored information was in digital format in the late 1980s, surpassing more than 99% by 2012. Every 2.5 to 3 years, humanity is able to store more information than since the beginning of civilization. The current age focuses on algorithms that automate the conversion of data into actionable knowledge.
The digital growth of information and communication led to the often-lamented information overload for humans, whose mental capacities get crunched in the ambitions of the information economy. At the same time, it led to the much-celebrated “unreasonable effectiveness of data” in discovering actionable knowledge through artificially intelligent machines. The world’s computational capacity has grown three times faster than our information storage and communication capacity (some 80% per year ), which enabled us to analyze the provided data in an automated fashion. For many practitioners, artificial intelligence (AI) has become synonymous with data-driven machine learning, including the neural networks of deep learning architectures.
Advancements in the field of AI have been dazzling. AI has not only superseded humans in many intellectual tasks, like several kinds of cancer diagnosis and speech recognition (reducing AI’s word-error rate from 26% to 4% just between 2012 and 2016), but has also become an indispensable pillar of the most crucial building blocks of society. By now, most humans not only trust AI blindly with their lives on a daily basis through anti-lock braking systems in cars (ABS) and autopilots in planes, but also with the filtering of their cultural, economic, social, and political opinions. The electric grid is in the hands of AI; three out of four transactions on the US stock markets are executed by it; and one in three marriages in America begins online. If we were to study any other species that has outsourced almost all of its energy distribution decisions, three-quarters of its resource distribution decisions, and an average one-third of its procreation decision to some kind of intelligent and proactive system, it is unlikely that we would treat them as two distinct and independent systems. We would look at it as one inseparable and organically interwoven socio-technological system. From a historical perspective of social change, the merger between biological and AI has already crossed beyond any point of return, at least from the social science perspective of society as a whole. Currently, the downsides of this merger are starting to become obvious, including the loss of privacy, political polarization, psychological manipulation, addictive use, social anxiety and distraction, misinformation, and mass narcissism.
Hilbert, M. (2020). Digital Technology and Social Change: The digital transformation of society from a historical perspective. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 22(2), 189–194. https://doi.org/10.31887/dcns.2020.22.2/mhilbert