Digitalisation and society

Digitalization isn’t just about the usage of digital technology. Much more important is that, digitalization is about representing us and our environment in a machine-readable language.
This implies that digitalization leads to an enormous increase in structured and (mostly) unstructured data. Today we use a huge variety of scientific methods, algorithms, and systems to extract knowledge and insights from this data.

The goal is clear: Finding correlations and implications.

As AI becomes more prevalent, an increasing number of tasks that were previously completed by humans are now being automated. These tasks are now fulfilled with a level of accuracy and speed that surpasses that of any human. Due to these developmets it highly likely that digitalisation will incresingly displace professions. At this point I am not just talking about professions that invole repetitive tasks.

Lets have a look at a more complex profession that is (in my eyes) particularly affected: a lawyer. Already now new machine learning techniques are highly efficient when it comes to extracting/generating information from legal documents. More and more AI will lead to the automatic creation of any legal document. Legal research will be incresingly conducted by AI. And self-executing, -enforcing smart contracts change the way we conduct business and interact with each other.

Of course, this development creates new job opportunities for experts in data science, AI development, and probably philosophy. But that’s out of all proportion to the jobs that will be displaced. Digitalization also changes the way we interact and how we learn new things. For example, I am within reach of nearly everyone with my phone, and a huge junk of the world knowledge is in my pocket.
A further important point related to digitalization is health. There are countless studies that outline how the use of digital devices and social media can negatively impact mental health, leading to issues such as anxiety, depression, and addiction.

Ultimately and probably most important: Digitalization means that we must be clear about what it means to be human and, in particular, to anchor these developments morally / ethically.