Invisible Digitization Tsunami

It’s a bright day in 2023, and most humans on the planet are acclimating to the new normal after the pandemic that changed the way we work and live, while a few months back, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took the first civil flight to space, creating a milestone. The world around us is changing fast. The human population in 2022 was around 8 billion, and most of us had a mobile phone; the count of phones is hovering around the 10 billion mark. What’s moving faster than the human and mobile population is the count of internet-connected smart devices, also known as IoT devices. Today, they are found in cars, smart homes, and industrial devices and they number 13.5+ billion at the time of writing. That totals up to 24 billion internet-connected devices between 8 billion humans.

On a personal front, I think the number of virtual assistant devices, such as Amazon devices, will beat the estimate of 90 million for 2022. In 2021, Amazon sold close to 55 million devices. Sometimes, you may wonder why we did not have such innovation a few years back. I remember the shift humans made from the once-dominant Sony Walkman to CDs, and then to mass storage devices, such as the Apple iPod and the MP3 format. I owned an iPod, and it was a cool product that Apple launched in 2001; it got its last update at some point in 2014. While at its peak Apple sold close to 51 million iPods, it still missed the innovation spotted by Amazon – voice command technology. Apple eventually recognized this trend and decided to retire its music hardware products. Visit the following link for interesting facts and an assessment from Statista about why Apple said goodbye to music devices: https://www.statista.com/chart/10469/apple-ipod-sales/.

It’s so convenient to just talk to a machine and ask it to play the song of your choice instantly. You don’t have to move your hand, touch a button, or shuffle through a rack of CDs to find your favorite songs anymore. You can just ask the machine to play your choice of song and your virtual assistant device plays it. I call this the inflection point in the human history digitization journey. It opens up a world of voice commands, such as operating lights, refrigerators, heating, security cameras, and home service drones – it’s truly an inflection point where machines and humans define how humans live, work, and play.

It’s interesting to see trends around digital assistants such as Amazon Alexa. Feel free to read more about this at https://safeatlast.co/blog/amazon-alexa-statistics/#gref.

The last few years also heralded a shift in the way we communicate both personally and professionally; I remember growing up watching Star Trek, which became very popular during the 1970s. It had the concept of cellular phones, which became reality in the 1980s, first in Japan thanks to NTT. It was fiction coming true in just a few years, and today, we can reach anyone on the planet in just a few clicks with HD video quality. Today, more than 500 million meetings occur daily on Teams and Zoom combined, which is a staggering digital immersion of our lives in technology.

Technology’s rapidly evolving adoption due to the pandemic is transforming industries, companies, and governments at a pace never seen before. The democratization of AI and the establishment of cloud technologies is giving birth to new ideas, companies, and risks that were never imagined before.

The pandemic disrupted education across the globe and affected millions of students. In response, education institutes implemented some forms of digital learning. Digital learning opened up new ways to learn independently of physical proximity between teachers and learners. Digital learning provides a new learning environment that has benefits and risks. Digital learning provides the convenience of attending classes from your home. It also provides an easy way for your friends to attend the same class, or anyone else to attend the class on your behalf. The vast majority of students had never attended online courses before the pandemic. The experience was equally new to teachers across all age brackets. While most students and teachers were busy adjusting to the new digital world, what went unnoticed was the risk of digital learning.

How the world eats has changed dramatically, thanks again to the pandemic. Just a decade back, ordering food mostly meant pizza. Nowadays, food delivery has become a global market worth more than $150 billion; it has more than tripled since 2017. Most food orders pre-pandemic were delivered by a driver employed by the restaurant. There were fewer payment methods, including cash on delivery. In the post-pandemic times, things have changed. Today, most customers order via their cell phones and through food delivery apps such as Uber Eats, Foodpanda, Zomato, and DoorDash. The food delivery business has its risks, such as the time it takes to deliver food, packing to maintain the food’s quality, and theft of food while it’s being delivered. Risks that go unnoticed are private information about what you eat, the time you order, and sensitive data such as credit card numbers that get transmitted and stored across multiple systems owned by various third parties in the delivery network.

Changes triggered by the pandemic were unexpected and fast. More important was the new world, which was more digital and stayed not just for a few days but for months across the globe during the pandemic. Changes impact our lives in different ways. Some of us embrace change faster than others. The digital habits induced by the pandemic are changing the way we learn things, make payments, order food, go shopping, and work.

For most of us, change brings uncertainty and loss of control. Digital changes are no different. Sometimes, changes in technology are inevitably agnostic to our liking or the rate at which we adopt them. Digital changes could include downloading an app from an app store if you want to purchase goods or services, which creates new digital habits. Digital changes such as “you must update the software or you will not be able to get new features again” evoke mixed responses. Attending calls on your favorite collaboration suite, such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom, and sharing your screen is a newly formed habit.

Changes around video calls and video meetings came in so fast that it’s worthwhile looking at trends, as covered in the following links on the usage and statistics for leading video call providers, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom during the pandemic years:

• Zoom Revenue and Usage Statistics (2021) – Business of Apps: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/zoom-statistics/
• Microsoft Teams Revenue and Usage Statistics (2021) – Business of Apps: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/microsoft-teams-statistics/

You may not like browsing the app stores offered by various phone or technology service providers, you may not like the new version of the operating system, or you may find sharing screens a very mundane activity; however, changes are inevitable.

Some changes require you to act, such as updating your phone’s operating system, while some changes just soak into your life, such as browsing the internet or spending time on social networks, without any action needed from you. I call these changes ambient as they bring permanent changes to our lives. Moving from SMS to WhatsApp, Telegram, and Instagram are examples of ambient change. Driving a car to a new holiday location using digital maps is again an ambient change that has soaked into the lives of billions. Ambient changes come fast, without friction, with extremely low learning curves, and permanence. Ambient changes are what I am afraid of most. These changes bring in differentiated digital risk, giving humans almost no option to go back to the old ways of doing the same activity.

Well, don’t lose your thoughts, and let me remind you what Hagrid said: “No good sittin’ worryin’ abou’ it. What’s comin’ will come, an’ we’ll meet it when it does.” What this phrase teaches us is to not worry and face the changes as and when they come.

In this chapter, we’ll explore how rapidly we are getting fused into this digital web around us. This chapter also discusses the contentious fact that it is as though an invisible hand is guiding us to become absorbed in and addicted to this digital life, where risks are only visible toward the end of the journey. To begin with, we’ll explore the following topics:

• Digital transformation: This covers the journey we have followed to get to the digital domain – how quickly the population at large is immersing itself into innovations, providing new ways of living and working, and the associated risks; yes, associated risks.
• An invisible hand: This covers how the invisible hand that is made up of convenience, ease, and gratification of having control, time-saving mechanisms, and an unprecedented level of access to services is pushing us into the digital life, and new kinds of digital and physical risks.

There is surely a digital tsunami ahead that has benefits, new experiences, and new risks.