Not even 30 years separate us from the end of the Cold War. Yet, we appear to be witnessing the emergence of a new one, a technology Cold War between the United States and China. This time, instead of a ‘red under the bed’, the US government has declared there is one at the back door. It accuses Chinese technology companies of deliberately building vulnerabilities into their tech, allowing the Chinese to access and control the 5G critical infrastructure, and through it the connected devices and machinery at will. Headlines are dominated by the case against Huawei, and debate continues to rage about the legitimacy of the US’s claims. Are these well-founded or part of a more comprehensive assault on China’s growing global technology dominance? Regardless, the battle lines are...

Today’s business leadership face a conundrum. Artificial Intelligence (AI) unquestionably will play an enormous role in the future of their organizations and the business environment in which they operate, but what effects will it have? Prognosticators have wildly different visions of the future it will create, ranging from causing the extinction of humanity to ushering in a Golden Age in which machines provide all humanity’s needs and free us to focus on altruistic service to one another and the advancement of human culture. Both of these most commonly heard predictions are based on assumptions that lead to wild speculation that piques the interest of media. Dramatic visions of the future draw eyeballs to websites and sell magazines and newspapers. What little analysis we have seen on the issue that doesn’t rush...

In their outstanding book, Wicked and Wise, Alan Watkins and Ken Wilber look at some of the most pressing ‘wicked problems’ facing the human race. ‘Wicked problems,’ they suggest, are difficult to define, but they are essentially unsolvable in the usual scientific sense. The authors go on: wicked problems, such as climate change, are multi-dimensional, have multiple causes, multiple stakeholders, multiple symptoms and multiple solutions. They are by definition complex and difficult to process. Crucially, they are created or exacerbated by people. Our species has proved capable of producing challenges of unfathomable difficulty. We may, however, also prove capable of developing the novel thinking and technology required to overcome them. Society 5.0 is the vision of such a future, in which humans and machines “co-create” the solutions to societal problems by integrating cyberspace...

We live in a world in which the way we observe and control it is radically changing. Increasingly, we interact with physical objects through the filter of what computational systems embedded in them tell us, and we adjust them based on what those systems relate. We do this on our phones, in our cars, in our homes, in our factories and, increasingly, in our cities. Physical objects are so interconnected that we simply take those connections for granted, as if being able to unlock your car by pushing a button on your key fob, unlocking it with your phone or even by walking toward it is the way car locks always worked. This interconnectedness offers us capabilities that exponentially exceed the expectations of science fiction writers and futurists of past generations....

Recent advances in Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) / Blockchain have significant implications for the global economy and financial services FinTech and Decentralized Finance (DeFi) solutions. Blockchain is a set of technologies that through distributed computing and mathematics can now deliver Trust to an enterprise, consumer or financial institution remotely and without human intervention. Blockchain continues to improve at a torrid pace, driven first by Moore’s law and second by extraordinary advances in software and connectivity. As technology advances, the rapidly increasing number of use cases being developed on top of blockchain are illustrating the transformative potential of the technology to financial services, broader business, economy, and even society. Blockchain application in the financial services industry has the potential to transform the way value is transferred, information is shared and business logic...

The topic of diversity is not one that most people find in their comfort zone. As I wrote in a previous article on diversity, increasing diversity often engenders frustration in those tasked with accomplishing it, and inspires eye rolls among diversity-fatigued employees who have heard countless reports on management’s diversity goals, but remain unconvinced of diversity’s value. Can anything be done to make diversity less of an uncomfortable topic? The answer is no. Nothing about diversity will ever make it into the general business population’s comfort zone. I say that not out of cynicism, but out of practicality. At its root, diversity is uncomfortable. But, surprisingly, the discomfort it creates is what makes it so valuable. Implicit biases, perceptions and reality A 2016 Harvard Business Review article that brought together some of the most advanced research...

Recent events have confirmed that the cyber realm can be used to disrupt democracies as surely as it can destabilize dictatorships. Weaponization of information and malicious dissemination through social media pushes citizens into polarized echo chambers and pull at the social fabric of a country. Present technologies enhanced by current and upcoming Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, could greatly exacerbate disinformation and other cyber threats to democracy. Robert Kagan in his recent Post essay, “The strongmen strike back,” insightfully states: What we used to regard as the inevitable progress toward democracy, driven by economics and science, is being turned on its head. In non-liberal societies, economics and science are leading toward the perfection of dictatorship. Kagan refers to state surveillance and social media control and manipulation as technological mechanisms of social control....

The worlds of financial crime and cybercrime are colliding, converging into one. The biggest threat to businesses globally is the new cyber-enabled financial crime. Yet businesses and even financial institutions tasked with protecting our money continue to fight this combined threat with multiple separate defense systems and multiple separate defense teams. The situation is like a military leader trying to fight different enemies on different fronts. While those enemies remain in different fronts, it makes sense to send separate defense forces against them, each focused on fighting only the enemy assigned to it. But what if those enemies merge and launch joint attacks? A smart military leader would merge his forces against the joint attacks. That’s not happening in financial institutions, though. Rather than having financial crime and cybercrime teams work...

Canada’s rankings in innovation has lagged that of other peer nations for decades despite government efforts to address this issue. Considering its success in developing research programs at its universities, its mediocre rankings overall in technology development is disappointing. Those programs alone have not been enough to translate into entrepreneurial innovation. A 2017 C.D. Howe Institute study points out that, even though Canadians have been at the forefront of breakthroughs in emerging technologies, in many cases, the chief beneficiaries of those breakthroughs have been other nations’ economies. Canada needs to take a stronger role in building an environment in which Canadian know-how spurs Canadian business growth. Causes for concern According to a 2017 PwC global survey, Canadian companies stand significantly ahead of their global counterparts in having a dedicated team for digital...

From The Jetsons to Blade Runner, to Back to the Future, to A.I. to The 5th Element, popular culture has long been fascinated by what the future would look like for ordinary people. In these films and countless others, humans of the future are shown engaging with technology that speaks to them, cooks for them, asks them how their day was and connects them with the outside world in a seamless and intuitive way. These are all examples of what we now regard as smart homes and smart cities – living spaces optimized by devices connected through the Internet of Things (IoT), intelligently responding to our needs. These homes are a natural extension of the smart capabilities that most of us are already carrying around with us in our wearables...

Neil Harbisson calls himself a cyborg. Without the antenna implanted in his skull, he would not be able to see colour of any kind. Born with achromatopsia, a condition of total colourblindness that affects 1 in every 30 000 people, Harbisson's physical faculties are augmented by cyber technology to grant him access to a life of greater meaning and satisfaction. As technological evolution leads to concomitant advances in medical science, we are seeing more and more examples of humans who are integrating devices and sensors into their biological makeup. For some, like those part of the growing "transhumanist" movement, this is a means of artistic expression or exploration of human potential. For others, it is a solution to a medical problem. Either way, it represents the most vivid and personal...

For many end-users of today's communications technology, the cloud is a somewhat mystical concept, a digital equivalent of aether. Most think of it as a formless abstraction "up there" when, in fact, the cloud is rooted in the ground. Or the seabed. Despite rapid advances in satellite connection, almost all intercontinental data transfer that takes place every second of the day occurs via hundreds of thousands of miles of underwater cables. Reading a map of these submarine cables is like viewing a tapestry of international telecommunication. It is perhaps strange to think that the email you just sent to your colleague in Africa traveled below the Atlantic Ocean. It's an oddly analogue image in an online world. Yet, the digital capability that those cables unleash is increasingly the stuff of science...