Five friends discuss furiously at the common table. Their several-year-old offspring are absorbed in something else. They don’t stack Lego blocks together. They don’t play peekaboo.
Don’t even secretly tie uncle George’s shoelaces under the table. It absorbs their screen. And basically the screens of smartphones and tablets. Each of them is occupied with any form of pictorial content: movie or game. They cannot write, retort, or surf the Internet yet. Not yet. But it’s only a matter of time.
The world of digital space
I am not competent in educational assessments. However, our world is becoming more and more dependent on the digital space. We digitize basically everything today. If we don’t, it is also a matter of time. This global digital world that we create and the algorithms we create is stored on millions of servers, constantly searched by search engine bots and artificial intelligence systems. AI is constantly learning our behavior, and behavioral economics and responsible, humanist capitalism becomes a real challenge.
Integrated with the network
Several years from now, in a few years they will not be able to function without the Internet, especially in the 5G dimension, which will provide unique possibilities of integrating payment systems, transferring information, tracking behavior, media consumption and everything that surrounds us. Lack of the Internet or problems with its availability will cause serious social problems, similar to large power outages, water shortage or climatic disasters. One of the reasons is prosaic – how will people used to and integrated into the network be able to cope without it? For people of the semi-digital world, for whom the Internet has become an element of life at some point, it is still imaginable. But will the generation in a few years time be able to use the car atlas, cope without a voice assistant in the ear or run in the woods only with a compass, without the need to use the GPS on your phone? How will the decline of human skills and dependence on the digital environment affect our lives?
Orionids
One of the similar pictures was presented by Janusz Christa (1934-2008) in his comic book “Kajko i Kokosz w kosmosie” published in “Wieczor Wybrzeza” in the years 1968-1972. It is the longest comic book in Polish history. In one of the episodes, the heroes find themselves in the Orionid society. The Orionids explore the cosmos in the form of their own humanoid copies. They have one more feature – they must be permanently connected to the central computer. Without it, their knowledge and skills are basically zero. Any information, decision or assessment of the situation requires full communication with him. The image of the world that becomes addicted to one information system or artificial intelligence is a common vision of the authors of stories about the human future.
Internet shutdown?
A year ago, the media spread the news that Russia was planning a test shutdown of the Internet to see if it could cope without the world around it. Such attempts always sound ominous. Turning off the communication tools nowadays by any country never bodes well. We ask ourselves what for? What is the purpose of such experiments? Does Russia want to follow China’s path and take full control of today’s key information channel? Or maybe it’s a broader problem — maintaining the autonomy of your own systems to carry out some insane e-war destruction plan, or worse.
Who rules the internet?
In the sense of its civilization meaning, the Internet is today equivalent to electricity, drinking water or food. The world today could hardly cope without it, but in a dozen or so years? When children staring at their screens, they will not be able to function without countless cybernetic and IT systems based on the instant exchange of information: robots, cars, the Internet of Things or augmented reality.
Now we can put down the smartphone, tablet or turn off the navigation system without any particular consequences. The subway gates may not let us in tomorrow, as well as electronic locks in our own home. As soon as the system recognizes that we are an “illegitimate citizen” of a country or a “politically inconvenient” individual. That is why it is so important who rules the internet. I hope it will always be a Smart Democracy.