![]() ![]() Rich Salz, principal engineer at Akamai Technologies, commented, “We have already seen some negative effects, including more isolation, less ability to focus, more ability to be deceived by bad actors (fake news) and so on. All in all, digital life is now threatening our psychological, economic and political well-being.” And finally, the addictive technologies that have captured the attention and mindspace of the youngest generation. And then there are the worries about AI and the technological displacement of labor. I am mainly worried about corporate and governmental power to surveil users (attendant loss of privacy and security), about the degraded public sphere and its new corporate owners that care not much for sustaining democratic governance. The harms have begun to come into view just over the past few years, and the trend line is moving consistently in a negative direction. The massive and undeniable benefits of digital life – access to knowledge and culture – have been mostly realized. Rob Reich, professor of political science at Stanford University, said, “If the baseline for making a projection about the next today is the current level of benefit/harm of digital life, then I am willing to express a confident judgment that the next decade will bring a net harm to people’s well-being. The technologies that 50 years ago we could only dream of in science fiction novels, which we then actually created with so much faith and hope in their power to unite us and make us freer, have been co-opted into tools of surveillance, behavioral manipulation, radicalization and addiction. ![]() All of these voices are represented in this section of the report. ![]() In addition, even among those who said they are hopeful that digital life will be more helpful than harmful and among those who said there will not be much change, there were many who also expressed deep concerns about people’s well-being in the future. Roughly a third of respondents predicted that harms to well-being will outweigh the positives overall in the next decade. However, as in all great technological revolutions, digital life has and will continue to have a dark side. About half of the people responding in this study were in substantial agreement that the positives of digital life will continue to outweigh the negatives. ![]()
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