By TruePublica: Thomas Friedman is a three-time Pulitzer Prize
winner. At the end of January this year he wrote about a subject that
will hit the headlines regularly this year and the years ahead.
“Around the end of each year, major dictionaries declare their “word of the year.” Last year, for instance, the most looked-up word at Merriam-Webster.com was “justice.” Well, even though it’s early, I’m ready to declare the word of the year for 2019.
The word is “deep.” Why? Because recent advances in the
speed and scope of digitization, connectivity, big data and artificial
intelligence are now taking us “deep” into places and into powers that
we’ve never experienced before — and that governments have never had to
regulate before. I’m talking about deep learning, deep insights, deep
surveillance, deep facial recognition, deep voice recognition, deep
automation and deep artificial minds.
And Friedman is right to say that some of these technologies will
offer unprecedented promise and unprecedented peril — but whichever way
we look at it, they are now all now part of our lives. Everything is, as
he says, going deep.
