Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

To Know How Tech Transforms World, Read 'Future Politics'


Thu 02 May 2019 | 08:38 AM
Ahmed Yasser

”Jamie Susskind” argues that rapid and relentless innovation in a range of technologies from artificial intelligence to virtual reality will transform the way we live together. Calling for a fundamental change in the way we think about politics, he describes a world in which certain technologies, platforms and those who control them come to hold great power over us.

Others will filter our perception of the world choosing what shapes us? what affects us? how we feel and guiding how we act?. Still others will force us to behave certain ways, such as self driving cars that have been manufactured to check our speed limit while driving.

”Susskind” gives us an easy read separated nicely into easily digestible chapters. The fascinating section on force does not merely cover the increasing digitisation, automation and privatisation of military activities but also the serious impacts tech could have on the justice system and all the ways a state enforces law.

'Future Politics'

He talks about how to understand humanity when what is considered humanity will be fundamentally altered by genetic engineering and biomechanical additions, to grasp how the deep inequalities between rich and poor will be exacerbated when only a handful of global elite can afford bio-technologies that could extend life to perhaps 200 years.

Big tech firms and the state will increasingly control us. They will set the limits of our liberty decreeing what we may do and what is forbidden. ”Future Politics” should be essential reading for those will to anticipate the future challenges facing society.

In the future the question will be how far our lives should be directed and controlled by powerful digital systems and on what terms?.