The classical tools of political economy were well suited for the analogue world. Strategies were built on resource scarcity and ‘real’ events with physical objects. As, for example, transportation was experiencing revolution with cars, roads and highways becoming mainstream, it was mission critical to come up with traffic rules, system of number plates and driving licenses, to enable frictionless collaboration among complex systems. These rules are simple as they are meant to avoid collisions. Since no one wants to have accidents, every system participant benefits. It is a clear win-win situation. The world rapidly shifts from analogue to digital. Rules have now changed with self-driving connected cars that make decisions not on ‘real’ events but on data streams that can enable predictive analytics and many other forms of augmented decision-making. These data streams can act in the car without the knowledge of the driver. As data is the new source of future value, identity becomes the main issue in the next decade.
Identity becomes a crucial factor in economics (dynamic pricing, aggregated services, personalized offerings) as well as in politics (paying taxes and fines and qualifying for voting in elections) and supranational infrastructures (qualifying for services like a passport) in certain case, like the social credit system, combining all categories into singular repositories dedicated to a single person.
In NGI work on identity has been done for the past years in many workshops and events. A new series is starting with a kickoff in the European Parliament’s Panel for the Future for Science and technology (STOA).
This roundtable is organised and hosted by the Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA) at the European Parliament in cooperation with ELONTech and the IoT Council in the context of the work on identity of the Strategy Team of Next Generation Internet.
For more info: https://ngi.eu/event/stoa-roundtable-on-digital-sovereign-identity/
