Challenges of the Digital Era

This chapter discusses four important challenges of the digital era: managing global inequality, augmenting democracy, addressing the scale mismatch between economy and policy and new moral challenges posed by automation and artificial intelligence. Technologies of the digital era, due to their non-rivalrous character, are a potent force of income divergence, contributing to “the rise of the global 1%”. Due to the cognitive bandwidth problem stemming from the associated information deluge, the digital era also poses a major challenge to representative democracy. Another problem is that while the economy has become global in the digital era, policy has remained at most national—a configuration that is likely unstable and subject to coordination failures. Finally, the chapter also addresses the emerging moral challenges. How to maintain a sense of purpose and a reasonable extent of local control among people who cannot contribute to the economy? And what will be the moral status of non-human forms of advanced intelligence?