Yuval Noah Harari has written two incredible books: Sapiens and Homo Deus. His 3rd book comes out summer 2018 titled 21 lessons for the 21st century.
His session at the WEF was sandwiched between Angela Merkel’s and Emmanuel Macron’s, perhaps the only historian to be given such spotlight according to Gillian Tet (editor of Financial Times).
In this talk Yuval Harari talks about data being the most important asset of our day, and compares data to machinery (post industrial revolution) and land (post agricultural revolution). He says that the real battle for data won’t be driven by advertising dollars attracting eyeballs, but by biochemical data that tells us more about ourselves than we may be aware of.
His big theme being: organisms are algorithms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npfShBTNp3Q
My thoughts on this incredible important issue is that we will have to make very serious structural changes to our political, social and economic systems in order to be able to manage issues of data dictatorship. It is hard to see this coming from our current leaders be it in businesses or politics. We need to bring democracy further down in our societies and use that to create a better environment from where we can organise these major transitions. It is very important that we take these considertations into account in the development of our smart/digital/connected cities.