Plus, how AI can help deal with the threats.

Forget enterprise digital transformation. For better or worse, we are digitizing the world, and it’s changing everything. The opportunities to make things better are tremendous; we can save wasted energy and natural resources, democratize access to all kinds of services, improve standards of healthcare, prevent avoidable accidents, and accelerate our transition to renewable energy. By connecting everything, and introducing AI into the mix, we can gain insights we would otherwise never detect. Moreover, we can see the effects of our own behavior and use the analysis to identify ways to improve. Earlier technologies could never have done all this for us.

But there is always an “on the other hand,” and in this case the issues relate mostly to privacy and cybersecurity. We are putting more information about ourselves than ever before into the hands of data scientists. While we can expect better shopping experiences, we are at the same time disclosing insights into ourselves, our activities, and our preferences as individuals. And if we are not giving away information directly, everything we do online (and we are almost permanently online) reinforces the accuracy of any and every inference made by the AIs that constantly watch from the cloud.

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