21c recently joined over 300 delegates at the 25th annual Global Forum held this September in Eindhoven for 2 days of discussion around digitisation and global transformation covering areas from eHealth to cyber-security and future industry. Whilst proceedings may be over for another year, the meeting left 21c Managing Director, Susie Ruston McAleer with three key thoughts:
1. Cognitive government is coming
What is cognitive? From the keynote discussions on day 2 of the conference we discovered cognitive is all about taking and ingesting vast amounts of data, having machines understand it and learn from it to deliver actionable insights. It’s a form of super intelligence which computers, like IBM’s Watson, use to enhance decisions that not only deliver better services but can also save lives. From uncovering hidden connections in the ‘dark’ web to predicting which children will commit suicide, digital intelligence will soon be having an impact on our every day lives.
Check out IBM Watson
2. Forget IoT, and scale thinking to IoE
Forum panels showed 37 billion new things will be connected by the year 2020, meaning thinking is now shifting from the Internet-of-Things (IoT) to the Internet of Everything (IoE). IoE brings together not just objects and things but also people, process, and data to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before, feeding Cognitive computers (see above) and helping data scientists create new capabilities, richer experiences, and unprecedented economic opportunity for businesses, individuals, and countries.
See SELECT for Cities competition to create large-scale, IoE innovation labs for cities.
3. To leverage full benefits of IoE & Cognitive a radical governance shift is needed
A number of questions were raised during this years Forum that have no easy answer. Such as, ‘in the age of Artificial Intelligence, 21st Century ways of dealing and regulating tech is no longer good enough, what should be the new approach?’ And, ‘our democracy is breaking down, so how do we make autonomous systems that take account of ethics? Events like Global Forum provide an important sanctuary for ICT and digital transformation experts to discuss these important cultural and governance shifts, but new ways of thinking and powerful young minds must also be bought into the mix to shake up the old processes and traditional ways of looking at tech.
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