Social Science Activities

Digital Transformation

JOSÉ GARCÍA MONTALVO, winner of the King Jaime I Prize for Economics in 2019 and member of the Social Science Council of the Fundación Ramón Areces, considers that there is a huge imbalance in the use of artificial intelligence and big data to solve market problems and for tackling social problems through research and evaluation of public policies. He addressed this question in the talk before the round table Big data and economics in the era of fake news and inaccurate truths.

Digital Revolution is guided by a set of enablers that are fueling business transformation and new business models creation. Really interconnected, those enablers are four and are: Cloud Computing, Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, 40% of the companies in the Fortune 500 list will disappear in the next 10 years, as revealed in the Panel Discussion Enterprise Analytical Management: Business Transformation in the New Era of the Digital Revolution.

ROSS ANDERSON, co-director of the Cambridge University Computer Lab of the London School of Economics, believes that “sustainable digital security will be the next big challenge” and “the industry will have to improve its operations in order to address this issue since digital security cannot be an excuse for keeping planned obsolescence." Anderson participated in the round table Future Shock? Cybersecurity in the 21st Century . In the 4th Masterclass of the LSE the addressed topics were “CryptoAsset and Blockchain". The main conclusions of the speakers can be read in this link.

The digital revolution motivated a wave of techno-optimism, justified by what technology does for us on a day-to-day basis: being able to take pictures or recording videos at any time, maintaining real time communications 24 hours/day or guiding us by GPS was unimaginable only 20 years ago. This is good, in principle, but it has a dark side. This dark side is in the basis of numerous modern pathologies according to Roberto Serrano (Brown University) in his lecture The Digital Revolution: Lights and Shadows.

We present the categories in which the Social Sciences activities of the year 2019 are included: