Humans, technology and cybersecurity — looking ahead to 2030

The trends of today become standards of tomorrow: The Internet of Things (IoT) will support us in many parts of our daily life. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will turn massive amounts of data into insights. Robots will interact with us and perform tasks tirelessly and with great precision. Augmented reality (AR) will enable us to overlay a digital perspective to our world. Virtual Reality (VR) will allow us to explore new ideas, ways of learning and forms of communication. And everything will be orchestrated in the cloud.

Many human activities and tasks of today are automated tomorrow. What is done by us, the humans, by then? We are enabled to focus more on analytical tasks, creative activities and human-to-human interactions. We will develop our human skills further — in a similar way in which our ancestors developed further during times of revolutionizing innovation over the last centuries.

Today’s innovation in the form of technology however adds an important dimension which asks us humans to personally grow and learn to better cope with in future: Our mindset and knowhow with regard to cybersecurity. As technology becomes more intimately involved in our daily lives and those of our children, we need to understand which data it collects, analyses and transfers to others. Moreover, our dependence upon technology increases dramatically so we also need to make sure to have well-performing safety measures in place. Already today it might be difficult for some of us to stay offline or to go out without a mobile phone for a couple of hours. In the future, even a temporary loss of technology may seriously affect productivity or could even result in a disastrous harm to our lives and businesses.

The future starts now so now is the right time to work on our partnership with machines, to embrace our new possibilities and to grow ourselves to also be able to cope with the challenges ahead.