Webinar_ #23 “Governing the IT technologies Choices that rule our daily lives, and making us resilient to cyber threats

Topic: “Governing the choice of IT technologies that rule our daily lives, and making us resilient to cyber threats”.

IT (Information Technologies) have now invaded our daily lives, and will do so to an even greater extent in the coming years. Our rate of adoption of these new technologies is getting higher and higher as they are imposed on us, and very tempting indeed. If IT brings benefits that we had never clearly imagined before, it comes at a price too. Tablet PCs and smart phones have taken hold of our home life. But our young kids are now exposed to harmful blue light effects, they lose the joy of the old games we used to play, and their capacity to focus their attention is seriously affected, not mentioning the deleterious impacts on the cognitive and social development of kids by exposing under-three to screens. Another example is Air Traffic Management Systems (ATMS). Its modernisation will allow to densify the sky by interconnecting all its elements via the internet. If this makes flight control easier and more efficient, it exposes all ATMS technical and functional resources to a much larger cyber-threat, thus posing questions in terms of safety for passengers and crews. As always, all new technologies have indeed their good and their bad sides. The incredible pervasiveness of IT technologies, from home to space, from cars to plants, from classroom to entertainment, raises therefore a big issue. How can we control progress in the nature, pace, scope and adoption of computing technologies? This conference/webinar would like to open the discussion about this crucial subject from the perspective of our human sovereignty, our capacity and will to exercise control over our own lives, both at a collective and individual levels. And as the rise of computing technologies in all compartments of our daily lives triggers new cyber threats of an unknown magnitude, the conference/webinar will seek to discuss how we could govern technology and the associated ways to assure our resilience to growing cyber threats.

Speaker -  Dr Paul Theron