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worsen economic inequality as those who are highly connected and the tech-savvy pull further ahead of those who have less access to digital tools and less training or aptitude for exploiting them and as technological change eliminates some jobs.
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Notable shares of these respondents foresee significant change that will: A number describe this as a “tele-everything” world. Their broad and nearly universal view is that people’s relationship with technology will deepen as larger segments of the population come to rely more on digital connections for work, education, health care, daily commercial transactions and essential social interactions. A new canvassing of experts in technology, communications and social change by Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center finds that many expect similar impacts to emerge from the COVID-19 outbreak.Īsked to consider what life will be like in 2025 in the wake of the outbreak of the global pandemic and other crises in 2020, some 915 innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded. When pandemics sweep through societies, they upend critical structures, such as health systems and medical treatments, economic life, socioeconomic class structures and race relations, fundamental institutional arrangements, communities and everyday family life. More on the methodology underlying this canvassing and the participants can be found in the final section. In all, 915 technology innovators and developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded to at least one of the questions covered in this report. The predictions reported here came in response to a set of questions in an online canvassing conducted between June 30 and July 27, 2020. Pew Research Center and Elon’s Imagining the Internet Center built a database of experts to canvass from a wide range of fields, choosing to invite people from several sectors, including professionals and policy people based in government bodies, nonprofits and foundations, technology businesses, think tanks and in networks of interested academics and technology innovators. This is a nonscientific canvassing based on a nonrandom sample this broad array of opinions about where current trends may lead in the next few years represents only the points of view of the individuals who responded to the queries. In this case, the questions focused on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 on the evolution of humans-plus-technology. This is the 12th “ Future of the Internet” canvassing Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center have conducted together to get expert views about important digital issues.
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