Reflections on our Digital Future

Reflections on our Digital Future 
The pandemic in 2020 saw many sectors adopt technology in order to continue operation during what was testing time for all of us. Technology was seen as a useful tool to help ensure operation while limiting the number of employees in office spaces. The advantage of leveraging technology and benefits of remote working has led to many companies to adopt this as a permanent strategy for business operations, allowing companies to save on energy bills and for employees to save on travel time and cost. This has forced many to skill up in order to be in line with the times, as a strong technology skillset becomes a requirement for many to continue in their jobs.
Many industries have seen much benefit from greater automation, such as unmanned operations in manufacturing and energy plants where many have achieved remote operation and monitoring, which is no easy feat as such operations are critical and highly complex. Work is now being reengineered to be done more remotely as internet of things devices start to mature and provide real life solutions which are integrated with AI and blockchain technologies to optimize business operations.
There has been a lot of generated momentum to adopt, use and innovate greater technologies in areas such as AI, blockchain and others to achieve greater efficiency in business operations that previously were not possible. The pandemic forced us to become a digitally based workforce.
However, this greater reliance on new technologies has implication on data security and the need to provide greater assurance in all aspects of the technology development and operation chain. We cannot afford for these to remain black boxes that only a few understand as we are becoming more reliant on them.
These systems need better security, particularly around datasets being used for these systems to operate in order to remove bias from them to ensure accurate output and decisions. They must be better protected as malicious actors become more sophisticated in their attacks.
The time for monolithic solutions is over as the lines between technologies starts to blur to established integrated ecosystems of technologies to better serve the need of business and man. Now that we have undergone a lot of trial and error during the pandemic, we understand better what technologies work and which ones need improvement. This is affecting the pace and direction of change leading to better adoption and evolution of technology.
The applicability of blockchain as a super distributed ledger is applicable in many industries with the need for good, correct data being imperative. An essential element is for us to be able to keep control over our data and provide access to it on a need-to-know basis, have knowledge workers that understand these technologies, how to audit them and how they can be enhanced.
What is happening now is a consolidation with most technologies now having an element of AI in them. A democratization of digital technologies is taking place where silos are being broken and concerns are being looked at collectively as the future of them lies in taking an integrated approach to collectively make best use of them for business and people. Moving forward this will provide new ideas and models that we have not thought of yet and will certainly see new ways of doing business coming about.
This requires forethought with proper governance in place and an environment that promotes learning and innovation as we must build the new generation of knowledge workers with not just a digital skillset, but with a much greater level of technical knowhow so that we may benefit from, and contribute to, this growing field.
This leads to a matter that has been close to my heart for many years which is reforming our education system to produce technology specialists who can harness this technology in an expert and ethical manner. We need to move away from traditional modes of education and learning that have led to regression, and establish educational systems that are truly modern and help students navigate that labyrinth of online resources. 
We must focus on building technical specialists to survive which is the only way in which we can achieve a renaissance of this regions past, where great scholars contributed to many sciences in the past and left their mark in history.

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh