My Top 10 Predictions for the Next Decade: The True Arrival of Big Brother or a Brave New Digital…

My Top 10 Predictions for the Next Decade: The True Arrival of Big Brother or a Brave New Digital World?

It is not easy predicting the future, and if we could do it well, we would all be billionaires. So, in this article, I will try to avoid the “it’ll get smaller” or “it’ll get faster” type of prediction, as they things will come naturally. And, while many paint an amazing future of automated cars, AI, and 5G, I believe that the world could be turned on its head in the 2020s, and where our old world will be probed as it has never been before. To me, governments — and society, in general — will clash with the Internet like never before, and that we will define the period between 1980 and 2020 as the initial prototyping of the Internet, and where the 2020s actually rebuilt our societies and reshaped our economic models.

So here we go:

1. Goodbye Centralised PKI and Hello To Distributed Trust. The next decade will really push public-key encryption to the fore and see the rise of digital signing, and where entities build their own trust infrastructures. This will move away from the flawed global PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) system, and move towards infrastructures such as IBM Hyperledger, and where each ecosystem will define their own rules for governance, ownership, rights, and consent. This will break down the dominance of the existing centralised model of trust, as pushed by Google, Facebook, and others. Within these ecosystems, digital signing will be key, and only those trusted within the environment will be given rights -and which could be revoked in an instance. As a default, there will be zero rights within the infrastructures, and where trust will be gained within a specific community. To me, cryptography and software engineering will build the foundation of our new societies, in the way that Ethernet, IP and TCP built our existing Internet.
2. The Death of the URL. The URL was standardized by Tim Berners-Lee and others in December 1994 within RFC 1738. It was the solution to people having to remember IP addresses and in creating some structure to the content stored on servers. While the grew, its base was Unix, and where spaces in filenames were just not allowed, and so a whole lot of Windows users ported their documents with spaces, and so the RFC supported them with “%20”. The URL was meant to be a way to speak a link “out-loud”, but it has been proven to be clunky. The way parameters were passed is also clunky, and where we use a “?” for passing parameters, and an “&” to delimit them. And so what will replace it? Well, it’s not going to be replaced anytime soon, so all that will happen is that Web browsers will simply stop showing the URL, and where you just type in your search terms. The format of the URL all looks a bit old fashioned now, and where it was meant to support a whole lot of protocols, including “ftp:”, “telnet:”, and “news:”. In the end, we only really use it for HTTP, but it is quite flawed in its structure, leaving it open for scammers to change things.
3. The Rise of the Automated Political Bot. Within 2018, a scary bot propagated on Twitter, and which targeted those with accounts with some credibility within cryptocurrency. It then created clones of their ID, and instantly gathered followers from valid looking accounts. We are thus not to far away from bots being given targeted objectives, and which could have metrics for their operation, and where they operate autonomously. For example, bots could be created to automatically generate a campaign of misinformation about a party leader, and automatically generate slogans which are targeted on single issues, and where these issues will be matched to each individual. Someone who worries about dog fouling in their area, might get something like, “The Whigs don’t believe that you should pick-up your dog’s mess! Vote Social Democrats to clean up their mess!”.
4. Censorship truly kicks-in. As our media platforms merge into one, and where companies such as Google, Netflix and Facebook hold much of the delivery of content, we will see a rise of the corporate censor. This will be pushed by many governments of the world, who will force these companies to censor using fines and regulations. The recent removal of cryptocurrency videos on YouTube shows that this can be fairly brutal censorship, and where automated searches for keywords can be used for take-down, and where there is little in the way of human intervention. Governments of the world missed the rise and the power of the Internet and thought that they could just use their old and ancient laws to control their population in a digital way, but this is not the case, and it is now the major cloud providers that have the power to control. For them to operate in different parts of the world, our governments will move to suppress their power, and increasingly threaten them with fines, and even blocking them. The cloud service providers will, in the end, bend to the desires of governments, as they risk losing their economic power.
5. Big Brother Truly Arrives in Many Areas of the World. The technology is now in place to create the largest spying network ever created. Your face, your mobile phone, and your Internet activity, now give away almost every single one of your thoughts, your movements, and your likes/dislikes, and an in an almost real-time way. For advertisers this is a dream world, and where they can almost predict when you are thinking about buying a new car, or where you are looking for a change in your life. For some governments, too, this is a perfect world of controlling and monitoring their population. It is likely that governments will push for this type of monitoring through campaigns, such as “Let’s reduce carbon, and monitor the traffic flows by monitoring for the most polluting cars. We will thus scan for number plates and monitor the number of people in each vehicle”, but underneath there will be increasing state control of every movement of their population. The threat of terrorism and extremism will provide another major driving force for this, but underneath, the rights of citizens to privacy, though, will be increasingly undermined, and where little will be left private.
6. Auto-policing. A recent incident at a football match in England revealed that police can use lip-reading methods to determine what individuals in a crowd are actually saying. While it may be useful for solving crimes, we could see the rise in CCTV monitoring, and where citizens would be monitored for the things that they say while in the street, and where everything is recorded, and automatically matched.
7. Wet signatures disappear. In the 21st Century, the whole concept of wet signatures is farcical, but there is really nothing to replace it, and our whole legal infrastructure has to be radically overhauled. We thus need to move into a world where digital signing becomes the default in virtually all our transactions, and which has a digital certainty. For just now, only countries like Estonia, Switzerland and Lichtenstein are transforming their legal system, but a major wave of digital identity systems are due to emerge, and this will bring in new ways to digitally sign.
8. The Rise of the Tokens. As wet signatures go, we must see the rise of a tokenized world, and with legal certainty of the ownership and transfer of assets. Why does the ownership of a car reside in a single database that still requires someone to post the details of a sale, based on vague definitions of the identities involved? In the 2020s we must see the rise of digital assets being created, and for our legal system to properly define how these can be transferred — and for there to be protections in place for fraud.
9. Homomorphic encryption becomes possible at scale. The end game for the protection of data is to store and process it, in an encrypted format. The existing methods of doing this are not quite ready to build at scale, but supercomputers such as the IBM Z-series, will be ready to process data in an encrypted way.
10. Zero-knowledge proofs will be mandated. A large entity, such as the EU, will break-through, and define that personally sensitive information — including passwords — will not be stored or transmitted in any form. We will thus see a formal definition of how a zero-knowledge framework will be used to allow citizens to prove things, without revealing their sensitive data.

— Bill.

And here’s how wrong people can be: