Digital Life

Data-driven innovations have the power to address some of the most pressing social challenges in Europe. While many government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are using data in their attempts to tackle a range of social issues from high unemployment to the refugee crisis, more can be done. To accelerate progress, public and private-sector leaders should take steps to collect data on disadvantaged populations, facilitate cross-sector collaboration on data projects for social good, and implement policies that encourage data use, reuse, and sharing in support of social goals.

Experts say the rise of artificial intelligence will make most people better off over the next decade, but many have concerns about how advances in AI will affect what it means to be human, to be productive and to exercise free will.
Digital life is augmenting human capacities and disrupting eons-old human activities. Code-driven systems have spread to more than half of the world’s inhabitants in ambient information and connectivity, offering previously unimagined opportunities and unprecedented threats. As emerging algorithm-driven artificial intelligence (AI) continues to spread, will people be better off than they are today?

ATMs constitute a critical component in today’s infrastructure for facilitating cash payments. However, ongoing digitalisation (cashless payments, e-commerce and online banking) is challenging the role of ATMs and putting pressure on the cash infrastructure in the EU. The shift from cash to cashless payments reduces the need for cash withdrawals and the rise of online banking challenges the bank branch as the traditionally most prevalent location for ATMs. Moreover, the introduction of pricing policies might also change the dynamics in EU ATM markets. Transparency and price caps on the so-called dynamic currency conversion (DCC) as well as potential reductions in interchange fees will put pressure on the revenues of certain ATMs.
Against this background, this report assesses the sensitivity of EU ATM markets to ongoing digitalisation and pricing policies. The impact of these developments is assessed across business models in Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, which are representative of the ATM markets in all EU member states.

2025 may seem like a long way off. The pressing issues of today necessarily preoccupy European leaderships. But consider this reality: youngsters who are 10 years old today (2009) will be entering the prime of life by 2025. Many millions of 10-year-olds in Europe and around the world are already “digital natives” – born and raised in a world of digital communications. Behind them will come wave upon wave of youngsters, particularly in today’s young emerging societies and economies, with increasing numbers growing up with ever-more powerful digital tools. Indeed, given current trends any distinction between “the digital world” and any other worlds will have become largely academic by 2025. Over the past 15 years digital communications have already transformed the way ever-increasing numbers of us behave individually and collectively in our working and social lives. But this is just the beginning as the pace of change itself accelerates.

Digital skills are vital for individuals and national economies to prosper in a rapidly-changing world, benefiting from the opportunities of digital and remaining resilient to potential risks. More than 90 per cent of jobs in some categories now demand digital skills. Yet in 2016, just 56 per cent of Europeans had adequate digital skills for the world they live in, and 37 per cent of the workforce lacked adequate digital skills. In this project we examined the development and approach of Grow with Google, a project which operates through national programmes matched closely to the contexts and needs of individual countries, in six case study countries (Sweden, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Nigeria) in order to identify key themes and learning to support ongoing good practice in growing a digital skills ecosystem.

Digital technologies have opened up ways of discovering the world, creating an unprecedented access to knowledge and information. Fostering vast communication and connection opportunities, they came with the promise of furthering free and open democratic deliberation. And they have initially delivered: facilitating freedom of expression, enabling easier and faster access to information and greater transparency, boosting media diversity, and creating broader opportunities for civic engagement and political participation. Social media in particular now allow for unparalleled connectivity of a truly interactive nature. They help people stay in touch with friends and family, and find people who share the same passions, interests or beliefs across borders, facilitating new groups and communities of interest to form and grow.

What is the benefit of digital technology in healthcare for the brain? What is the likelihood the benefit will reach the people who need it most? In this report, the outgoing World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Brain Research review five emerging themes in digital technology that may impact brain health.

Futurium is a small concrete attempt to respond to the growing demand for citizen participation in policy making. Its structured approach to content co-creation and synthesis allows streamlining otherwise expensive traditional foresight processes.
The Futurium is an open source project, free for download by any public administration or private organisation. It is work in progress. Everyone can contribute to its further improvement and development or use it to support specific foresight and policy making needs.

The world is moving rapidly towards ubiquitous connectivity that will further change how and where people associate, gather and share information, and consume media. A canvassing of 2,558 experts and technology builders about where we will stand by the year 2025 finds striking patterns in their predictions. The invited respondents were identified in previous research about the future of the Internet, from those identified by the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project, and solicited through major technology-oriented listservs. They registered their answers online between November 25, 2013 and January 13, 2014.

In their responses, these experts foresee an ambient information environment where accessing the Internet will be effortless and most people will tap into it so easily it will flow through their lives “like electricity.” They predict mobile, wearable, and embedded computing will be tied together in the Internet of Things, allowing people and their surroundings to tap into artificial intelligence-enhanced cloud-based information storage and sharing. As Dan Lynch, founder of Interop and former director of computing facilities at SRI International, wrote, “The most useful impact is the ability to connect people. From that, everything flows.”