“We are at the beginning of a new digital society and we have the opportunity to fix the sins of the past by including people who have not been included.”
Taher Elgamal, Salesforce
A replay of this conversation is available here.
Sir David Payne set the context for the conversation by defining digital equity as the conditions necessary for all individuals to have the information capacity for full participation in society and the economy. The three pillars of digital equity are Internet access, devices and digital literacy. This last is a major component of what we will be talking about today. Knowing how to operate the Internet gives us access to essential services such as healthcare, employment, and lifelong learning. This panel asks the question of how can tomorrow’s technology help to bring digital equity across the world? We know that 99% of the Internet’s traffic travels on optical fiber underwater, over mountains and across land masses and the entire traffic of the Internet could be carried on one single fiber today. So backbone capacity is not the issue. We have a dream team of experts to help us answer that question with expertise in networking, security and applications and decades of combined thinking about digital equity.
Siavash Alamouti, Executive Chairman of the Board, mimik
Right now, I am working on cloud decentralization, which is key to my passion for bringing affordable connectivity to everyone. We are still very challenged when it comes to cellular connections due to the high cost of building networks. The hardware cost is not there to get high data rates in all parts of the world. We need to close that cost gap on the cellular front as this is a key driver for digital inclusion. With the mobile internet, people became the producers of content and this changed the way data travels by creating more uplinks traffic and more Internet of Things (IoT) demand. Our systems were not designed for so much information and so much upload traffic and our architecture needs to change. This really needs to be considered in countries where networks are being built now so that we can fix the problem of sending data long distances and introducing latency.
I see big data as an enabler for internet affordability. As the fuel for our hyperconnected world, data is being scraped and stolen. People should be able to monetize their data since hardware, equipment, standards, internet business models and ownership of data are all critical parts of digital equity.
In the next ten years, I believe we will expand network capacity with the growing needs of the hyperconnected world. There will be more wired than wireless due to traffic density. Our network will be heterogeneous, including wifi, 5G, 6G and fiber backhaul. Governments will subsidize backhaul infrastructure. Most of all, the business models have to change from the current eyeball-grabbing, ad-driven options we have today to subscription and revenue-sharing models – and models we have not even thought about. We built the internet to give truth and right now it’s dominated by mis-information which leads to polarization and negativity. While we cannot limit freedom of speech, we need a mechanism to differentiate beliefs, truth and opinion.
Aakanksha Chowdhery, Staff Software Engineer, Google
Wireless has been the key to connectivity in India and satellite has accelerated to cover the country. Since most content on the Internet is in English, access to content is limited and there is a growing divide in India between those that speak English vs those that don’t. If you only have cell phone access, you have connectivity, but you do not have access to the full set of education and resources that lead to economic mobility.
I think about digital equity and the future of the Internet from an application layer perspective. There are tremendous advances in artificial intelligence (AI) sourced from the data on the Internet. We have language models that can generate text and image models to generate images. The internet will not just be an amalgamation of human-generated content – it will include both human and AI-generate content. Using these models to generate multilingual content can be a good thing and can help bridge the digital divide by providing education and economic opportunities. AI advances can enable digital equity if we are thoughtful about how we use it
One of the challenges is that a lot of applications are designed on phones that are hard for older people to operate. AI is moving in a direction where consumers will be able to talk with devices in natural language. Human computer interaction is a field set for disruption in the age and accessibility divides.
Martin Cooper, Co-Founder and Chairman, Dyna, LLC
I am focused on the digital divide in education. To achieve a complete education today, a modern student must have full-time access to the Internet and neither cable nor satellite provides enough bandwidth. In addition, schools have not kept up with the need for digital literacy. While students have access to more content than anyone could teach, they must learn to distinguish information from misinformation.
There is already a dedicated Internet for the legal profession. Why don’t we consider a dedicated Internet for education and a dedicated Internet for languages that are spoken by smaller numbers of people? If we had a dedicated Internet for education, we might have fewer worries about safety and content.
To solve the digital divide from a networking perspective in areas of the US and other countries that have inadequate coverage, we need to introduce tools to determine where the people are and where the networks are. There is no reason why we cannot economically cover every part of the country. Kids need to be educated. If we do not solve the educational divide, we’ll have an even deeper divide between those who have had a technology-informed education and those who have not.
When I think about the next ten years – and I focus on the last mile – I believe that people will realize that the emphasis on 5G and 6G is on millimeter waves. They are talking about terahertz. The real problem is in rural areas and the same technology that makes millimeter and terahertz possible in urban areas also can work in rural areas. This can help us get universal coverage. Every cell phone measures its coverage area. If we accumulate that information, we will know coverage of wireless. I believe we have technology that can solve the wireless coverage problem for less than $5 per month per user.
In terms of digital literacy and usability, engineers should not create user interfaces. We need designers to do this and need to recognize that everyone is different so that the interface can be right for everyone.
Taher Elgamal, CTO Security, Salesforce
We are at the beginning of a new digital society and we have the opportunity to fix the sins of the past by including people who have not been included. We are making amazing progress and when we leave people behind, the impact is even more profound. As a citizen of the world who has traveled everywhere, I know that the ability to picture ourselves in other people’s shoes in different parts of the world with limited resources is a very powerful thing.
I have been in the security world for a long time. I focus on the word “trust.” Technology will allow people to reach the Internet and get connected. It is difficult to trust what you get from the Internet. While the mainstream will succeed in providing trusted information and connectivity to most people, in some places people will not get the information that we want them to get. It’s very easy to poison the information that people receive and to create unsafe areas on the Internet. If we’re in a city, we are trained to understand what the dangerous parts of the city look like. This is difficult to do on the internet because we don’t know what the dangerous areas look like. In ten years, we will help people understand what is trusted and not trusted and help people obtain the truth.
Can the older generations catch up with the younger ones? Are we handing generations a trusted medium? The younger generation will understand what we’re giving them and how to manage it and the generational technology divide will always exist. The older generation usually protects the younger generation. In the case of technology, the younger generation learns fast, but can make big mistakes along the way. There are always 80-90% of people who want the right things to happen. New generations who continue to build this society will improve the trust in it.
Henry Samueli, Co-Founder, Chief Technology Officer, and Chairman of the Board of Broadcom
Right now, 40% of the population is unconnected and the rate of connectivity year over year is growing rapidly. There are 300M new connections to the Internet each year, bringing us another 3B connections in the next 10 years. We are not that far from being able to connect anyone who wants to be connected. We are making great progress from a technology perspective by driving prices down. The issues around digital inclusion are really around equity, safety and the like.
I believe the Internet will evolve as a heterogeneous network and be more evolutionary than revolutionary. There will be a large variety of last mile connections (wired over copper, fiber to the home; satellite for rural) with a cellular overlay over everything. We need to continue driving costs down, which happens with hardware businesses. The Internet will not look that different, but it will function differently. Software, protocols, security, regulation will change as society demands that the Internet operates differently.
From a policy perspective, when you have lack of control, you have bad actors. When you have too much control, the government controls content. I am not sure we will ever find a solution that everyone is happy with – the wild west is not good, but neither is walling off information from people. We need some government regulation that leans to open, but not so open that the Internet becomes dangerous.
There is clearly an age divide which will self-correct over time. The key is ensuring equity so that the Internet is not only the people with the means and capacity to have technology. Focusing on accessibility to the Internet will help people start careers. Kids want this now and it’s a matter of training teachers.
