After more than 2 decades of writing for DBTA, this will be my final column. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to engage with you on databases and emerging technologies. As with all good things, this journey must end, and I want to use this moment to reflect on the changes we’ve witnessed during the past 20 years and look ahead to the future.
When I started writing this column in 2004, software had an essential role in business but a relatively limited role in everyday life. While most office workers used software as part of their jobs, most of us interacted only sporadically with the internet and software applications outside working hours.
Fast-forward 2 decades, and software has woven itself into the fabric of modern life.
The launch of the iPhone in 2007 sparked a communications and lifestyle revolution. Today, nearly everyone carries a smartphone and is continuously connected to the internet. At the same time, social networks surged in popularity, reshaping how we interact. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and others now mediate more human connections than face-to-face interactions.
At the same time, new software architectures—most notably cloud computing—allowed software applications, including social networks, to scale almost without limit and to achieve global expansion. This has resulted in a centralization of data and power within a relatively small number of mega-corporations such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.
The impacts of these changes are staggering. In 2004, social connections were primarily in-person, and news came from a small, trusted pool of sources. Today, the smartphone revolution has granted access to almost all human knowledge—but paradoxically, it has fractured our shared sense of reality. Information abundance has led to misinformation proliferation, eroding trust, and fragmenting societies.
In the 2010s, the promise of “Big Data” and “Data Science” dominated discussions, but it was the AI revolution that truly leveraged the vast reservoirs of online data.
AI researchers have worked with neural networks for as long as anybody can remember. However, in 2017, a breakthrough in neural network architecture—the transformer architecture—set the stage for the GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) family of AIs.
When trained on the massive online datasets available on the internet, AIs such as ChatGPT, that could outperform a human across a wide range of tasks and convincingly simulate human language, were born.
The impacts of this AI revolution will play out in the next years and decades, but the effects have already been massive and are accelerating. On the bright side, AI will have a huge positive impact on education, accessibility, and human empowerment. But there’s a risk that AI will further erode trust and privacy, cause mass unemployment, and perhaps even threaten our civilization.
I have been a technophile my whole life. At a personal level, I love my smartphone, revel in the achievements of AI, and can’t wait to see what comes next. However, objectively, I must admit that the impact of modern information technology on human society within the past 20 years has been predominantly negative. The world was simply a better place before the emergence of social networks, whose growth was powered by smartphone and cloud technology.
I hope we can adapt to these new technologies and build a better future for our children and grandchildren. Indeed, there are technologies—such as Web3—that can help us restore trust to the online world. The next generation of quantum computers could revolutionize human health and longevity.
We could use AI and other technologies to help create a utopian future of leisure and self-fulfillment. But it won’t happen unless we face up to the issues created by AI and social networks and move decisively in the right direction.
My latest book, AI, Quantum Computing and Web3, takes a deep dive into these technologies and looks at the social, political, and individual implications. I’d be interested to know what you think.
Thanks to DBTA and all of its readers for giving me the opportunity to be part of the discussion! I wish you all the best for the future.