Digital Outlook 2030: Business

What can we expect from digital services and technologies in the coming decade? There is no shortage of dystopian visions of the future in literature, but tales of hardship and misfortune can also be found in the past.¹ Indeed, progress for most tends to be accompanied by hardship for some, as during the early days of the industrial revolution.² Is there a need for digital technology firms to take more responsibility, and if so, will they?

In many cases, free means payment by other means, but access without direct payment has been an important and inclusive aspect of the internet. More than six billion people have access to a smartphone and the internet, giving them, albeit with some notable exceptions, unhindered access to games, education, and other content. In the notable exceptions, we find governments that do their best to censor the content that their citizens have access to. Twitter had a moment of triumph during the Arabic spring, while Facebook was blamed for genocide and election tampering.³ Unwieldy as is their business, these tech giants have been made to feel responsible for their impact on society, and more are likely to follow as new sectors of the economy are digitised.

Is there a model for responsible business? Profit and loss accounting has been a driving force of economic development and has by some been seen as the model of responsible business.⁴ To many, it is also incomplete because some costs, such as carbon emissions, do not enter the accounts. To remedy this, firms report on how the company impacts the environment and society, in addition to profit and loss. What started with the triple bottom line, profit, people, and planet, evolved into codified responsibility to report on the impact on the environment, society, and governance (ESG) in the annual financial report. The hope was that greater transparency would incentivise more responsible behaviour, but some now call for a change.⁵ The ESG impacts are inherently difficult to measure, and in the view of some, ESG has created an incentive to overpromise and underdeliver.

Taking the lessons from ESG, one may conclude that there are limits to what formal responsibility can achieve, but also that failure in this respect has dire consequences for business, society, and the world. Similarly, as digital technology and services become more complex and deeply embedded in society, they will provide great benefits but possibly also harm to some. In the end, responsible business means responsible leaders taking decisions that may harm the short- term profits but benefit in the long term.

1 Dickens and Balzac come to mind.
2 McAffee «More from Less » chapter 3.
3 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html
4 Friedman https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html
5 https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/07/21/esg-should-be-boiled-down-to-one-simple-measure-emissions