The World Economic Forum (WEF) recently posted its Global Risks 2013 insight report bringing together multinational views on the top risks to the world today by risk management experts in business and academic institutions. This looks at Economic, Environmental, Geopolitical, Societal, and Technological sources of risks, compares likelihood and impact of each factor. The technological risks of cyber attacks, massive incidents of data fraud or theft, and massive digital misinformation caught my eye in particular. One additional aspect of global governance failure under geopolitical risks also matters here indirectly.
[Note: The WEF paper copyright notices does not allow me permission to reproduce the graphs. Please check their Interactive site in comparison to my comments here. The Data Explorer in particular is very interesting]
First of all, it is important to recognize that technological issues are not at the center of the world’s issues, and in fact rank as some of the lowest risk factors.
Cyber attacks rank the highest likelihood although does not seem to be growing (see their Figure 1). The include state sponsored, non-state sponsored and criminal activity. This will remain a challenge of moving towards a distributed connected world. The software technology and the ingenuity go hand in hand and there seems to be continuing support and opportunism available.
Massive digital misinformation is hidden in the middle of these technological risks, but with so much commercial advocacy behind Big Data and analytics systems, this is likely to become more and more pervasive. This includes both the commercial systems in open public use, e.g. Facebook’s new graph search, Google search, and so many others; as well as enterprise level monitoring of such information. The continuing demand for rapid, real-time or predictive proactive response to these factors make misinformation a reality. How do we mitigate such risks? Make the study of analytics a key discipline, and get us to understanding it is not just precision of data but confidence in the information that we need.
Data fraud or theft is becoming easier because we have avoided the very complex problem of data access and privacy, both on technologically and on a policy level. More so, the challenge remains on a cross-national domain level of what regulatory and compliance environments even exist. For example, in social business there is a whole lot of identity information far beyond what is classically considered Personally-Identifying Information (PII) and Sensitive Personal Information (SPI). These are how we considered them decades ago. They still matter but we need to look deeper into these from today’s viewpoint of highly active social networks inside and outside organizations.
My mention of mineral resource vulnerability may surprise some but I should point out the heavy dependency of rare earth minerals in technology such as mobile devices and consumer electronics, and the limited supply we have. With mobile devices surpassing all the desktop and laptop PCs as soon as this year (see KPCB Analys Mary Meeker’s State of the Internet presentation), this challenges the tech industry’s continual trends to cheaper and more affordable devices, upsetting commerce quite substantially.
Global Governance is going beyond Governmental or Formal Organizations
What does global governance failure have to do with technology? As thought leader and author Don Tapscott has pointed out repeatedly, there is a new aspect that has not existed in the past facilitated by technology: the impact of mass collaboration across multi-stakeholder networks (MSNs). The key point here is that there are non-governmental entities who can now have a big impact on global governance. In fact, all my earlier points hinge on the rise of MSNs.
These are not NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) that are typically officially recognized and formulated to support different public-beneficial or policy lobbying activities. MSNs in comparison demonstrate crowdsourcing and collective intelligence in action. They are everything from ideas gone massively viral (e.g. the Kony project) to coordinated hacktivism like Anonymous to private sector organizations like ICAAN. Then there are events like the Arab Spring.
Some are sponsored and carefully organized or at least orchestrated, while others spring up from collective interest and collaboration. These are all facilitated by technology and public communications at some level or another. They could not have existed in the past until we had the degree of worldwide communications over the Internet as we have now. Regardless of whatever you consider of their goals or activities, what is important to recognize is that they can have wide reaching impact on governance on society across nations, as well as public policy.
The WEF needs to recognize that as a particular item in itself, although I am not entirely sure if this is a risk or opportunity. It certainly is a known factor that is increasingly having an impact across societies.
