The opportunities offered by digital technology are enormous. The global social and economic system is being reconfigured at an incredible rate. Connectivity is increasingly reshaping our world and redefining the way we interact with our environment. The rise of digital technologies is transforming almost every aspect of modern life. More and more of our interactions are mediated by machines. Along with the rapid evolution comes the risks, threats, and vulnerabilities in the system for those who plan to exploit it. In this chapter, firstly, the authors explore the role of 5G, big data, the internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), autonomous vehicles (AV), and cloud computing play in the context of smart societies; secondly, they analyse how the synergy between these technologies will be used by governments and other stakeholders around the world to improve the safety of citizens albeit increasingly relinquishing privacy rights and encouraging mass surveillance at the expense of liberty.
Top1. Introduction
Digital technologies have advanced more rapidly than any other innovative technology in history reaching around 50% of the world’s population in the last twenty years, transforming societies, accessibility to public services and businesses (UN, 2020a, 2020b). This has led to continual move of people to the big cities globally. The mandatory legislation to solve related migration problem smartly without depletion in ecosystem is a major issue that many urban policy makers are currently facing. Several concepts such as smart city, smart society, smart region, smart home, smart car, etc. are therefore emerging in an attempt to provide intelligent and environmentally friendly solutions. The components of smart city among other are smart economy, smart environment, smart governance, smart citizen, smart transportation, and smart wellbeing of the citizen.
Adequate implementation of these conceptual components will enhance suitable provision of healthcare, waste management, cyber control and essential social services such as policing, housing and education to the citizens. Likewise, the advent of digital technologies and connection of technological devices are suddenly changing our method of communication with our environment and other citizens (Arts, Wal, & Adams, 2015). As of 2019, almost half of the world population are digitally connected by social media and internet users are growing by an average of more than one million new users every day (Kemp, 2019). Review shows that as of October 2020 almost 4.66 billion people were active internet users encompassing 59 percent of the global population (Clement, 2020). Despite these researches, review further shows that robots and artificial workers could make 800 million real-workers (BBC, 2017; Manyika, et al., 2017) redundant by 2030.
The internet technology that was originally meant for military has suddenly accelerated the pace of industrial revolution and a major key player in global unification and citizenship. Advanced development of AI technologies, chains of several mathematical programmes, simulations and integration of big data has made it possible for machines to impersonate human intelligence in several areas: autonomous vehicles, industrial automated systems and Industrial Internet of Things.
The society is moving toward big brother state; UK has more CCTV cameras per person than any other country in the western world, the citizen faces surveillance by their own government. USA, China, EU and other countries are following similar trend. It is becoming more intrusive than the domestic spying carried out by Big Brother in George Orwell's '1984' (Adams, 2019). Big brother ideology is no longer a fiction but few steps from being a reality due to availability of big data and digitization technology.
The emerging technology affects the way people interact with each other on daily basis, it enhance efficiencies of processes, products, and services. It therefore plays important role in today’s society. However, it also has negative effects on critical infrastructure and come with threats, risks and other susceptibilities that are associated with their deployment. Therefore, there is need for robust policies and regulations to optimize the positive benefits and control the negative impacts on the society.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the emergence of smart-contemporary technologies, their benefits and consequences to the societies. This will provide an important opportunity to advance our knowledge and understanding of current development in Industrial Revolution 4.0 (Renjen, 2019) and how science and technology is digitally realizing one-society-one-world, at the same time progressively eroding our liberty and changing ways of life.