Vladimír Šucha is an education, research and innovation expert of the Progressive Slovakia – SPOLU coalition.
Predicting the future is a highly uncertain exercise – and possibly even more so at this moment. We may be at the brink of pivotal revolutions in terms of technological developments, climate change, societal transitions, and geopolitical balance.
As an example of the pace of change, it took only seven years for one quarter of the US population to gain access to the internet, compared to 16 years for personal computers, and 35 for telephones.
Between the dawn of civilisation and 2003, we only created five exabytes of data; now we are creating that amount every two days. By 2020, that figure is predicted to sit at 53 zettabytes (53 trillion gigabytes) – an increase of 50 times.