The perils of 100% digitization

The Industrial Revolution has been retroactively called Industry 1.0. After that the telegraph and railroad transformed society with the fast dissemination of goods, people and mainly ideas. We called that era Industry 2.0. After World War II came a period of great technological progress with the PC and Internet revolutions. That’s Industry 3.0 in which we are still in.

The period to come has been dubbed Industry 4.0: Smart homes, smart cities and smart manufacturing powered by the all-pervasive Internet of Things (IoT). That and dark factories which won’t even require people to monitor them and will be able to function remotely 24X7.

All this to be ably aided by the ongoing mobile and GPS revolutions. Then there’s the alphabet soup of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA). In business Digital Transformation is the new mantra and in things like Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) everything is virtualized.

On the personal front, the mobile is the be all and end all and you don’t need anything else. It is your best friend, social media circle, camera, messenger and it helps you hail a cab, know where you are and order virtually everything under the sun. Welcome to the world of 100% digitization, which escaped Industries 1-3.0 but is inevitable in Industry 4.0.

The machines and hardware are fading totally into the background and the duo of software and data are firmly in the foreground. In fact an exciting (or scary depending on how you look at it) proposal is Billionaire maverick genius Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Electrodes will be connected to your brain which will link to a device embedded under your ear which will control computers. That takes the other HCI (Human Computer Interface) to a totally new level.

But if everything is virtualized and everything is connected, then everything can be hacked, attacked and manipulated. Cybersecurity will no longer be about viruses that can bring down a system and the theft of data. The whole world will be one interconnected cyber organism encompassing the Internet, the Internet of People and the Internet of Things. Hollywood film Terminator’s Cyberdyne Systems doesn’t seem that far away in the 2020s.

Aadhaar became the first system in the world to get the biometrics of more than a billion on its database, which is currently ruling over all of our documentation. China upped that and took it to a different level with dynamic real-time facial recognition. Together a clear 2.5 billion+ are on these systems. Is it all safe?

In the future Cybersecurity will probably be the single most pressing issue facing mankind.