The digital revolution across the globe has transformed the world on a major level and it affects every aspect of our lives from our lifestyle, jobs, businesses, communication, to creativity, and whatnot. If we have a look at the overview of the adoption and use of connected devices and services as of January 2023, as mentioned in 3One4’s latest report, India- A Startups Nation, out of the total world population of 8.01 billion people, 57.2 percent have undergone urbanization.
68.0 percent of the global population, that is 5.44 billion people are unique mobile phone users, 64.4 percent of the people, which is 5.16 billion people are active internet users. And finally, 59.4 percent of the world’s population, that is 4.76 billion people are active social media users.
Furthermore, as mentioned in the report, the business sphere has been so highly affected by the use of tech that tech-companies are enjoying an overwhelming majority on the world leader boards, and this is indeed the age of tech giants as out of the 8 companies with the world’s largest market capitalizations (as of 2021), 7 are tech giants. Next, if we look at different regions of the world, it is noteworthy that the US rules the cloud as according to the forecast of May 2022, the highest estimated revenue of public cloud services was in the USA at US$ 206.1 billion.
Also, as of 9th February, 2021, the USA has the greatest number of data centres across the globe (2653), followed by 451 in the UK, 442 in Germany, 279 in Canada, 274 in the Netherlands, 272 in Australia, 248 in France, and 199 in Japan. On the other hand, the EU is proving to become an aging digital colony because corporate Europe is falling behind as tech weakness is permeating its various sectors.
Questions are hence being asked as to why all the tech giants across the world are American or Chinese, and why any of the top digital companies are not European.
Moving ahead of this regional variation as far as digitalisation is concerned, as of November 2021, Google.com is the website with the highest number of visits (89.08 billion), followed by YouTube.com (34 billion), Facebook (20.61 billion), and Twitter (6.55 billion). The report also mentions that the power enjoyed by tech giants is such that they are actively involved in lobbying and outspend to maintain their monopolies. And these monopolies are not encumbered by geographical borders in a ‘data+ AI- first world’.
With increasing digitalization and the monopoly of tech, it has become the new normal for global tech conglomerates to exist and it can be seen that tech companies are dominating globally and will continue to accrete disproportionate control over new value creation.
The report also talks about how American duopolies have been ruling most digital sectors globally- android and IOS in mobile operating system, google and Microsoft in internet search, meta and twitter in social media, amazon and Microsoft in cloud, and google and meta in digital advertising revenue. The power of technology has increased to such a scale that the future arenas of competition are transversal technologies; from applied AI, edge computing, nanomaterials, to tissue engineering, the race is on to own the technologies of tomorrow.
The development in the field of technology has revolutionised the sphere of manufacturing and industry as well. For instance, Foxconn has completely automated some of its factories using AI-enabled ‘Foxbots’; and Adidas reduced its production to market time from two months to under two weeks, and the shoes got much better as well.
We have also been hearing how it is possible that in the near future, robots will replace humans in most of the activities and will help humans to work more efficiently and quickly. Moving in the same direction, Boston Dynamics has brought human-equivalent movement capabilities in its range of robots. Let alone robots, ‘designer babies’ are also being manufactured now. They are modified using the CRISPR technology by China.
We, as a species, need to come to terms with CRISPR technology as China awaits birth of the third genetically modified baby.
