Digitalisation

Since 2015, IRGC expressed concerns related to various aspects of the digitalisation of the economy. These concerns are tightly interconnected with opportunities, which complicates decisions and makes risk management not only a matter of technical solutions but, increasingly, a matter for societal deliberation.

• In 2015, we explored the types of approaches relevant to ensuring cyber security: Comparing Methods for Terrorism and Cyber Security Risk Analysis
• Then, we reviewed threats to data confidentiality, integrity and availability (landscape, detection) and possible response strategies: Cyber Security Risk Governance (2016)
• Focusing on the IoT, we tried to explicit where the benefits and the risks lie: Cybersecurity Risks in the Internet of Things: application to connected vehicles and medical devices (2017)
• As blockchain technologies open opportunities for remediating many well-known concerns, it also brings some fears and scepticism: Governing Risks and Benefits of Distributed Ledger Technologies (2017)
• Over the years, it has become increasingly clear that we need to keep human control on Artificial Intelligence (AI), at least for certain applications that may present risks to individuals: The Governance of Decision-Making Algorithms (2018)
• In 2019 we worked to understand the development of deepfakes as a case of misusing AI: Forged Authenticity: Governing deepfake risks
• And our latest concern relate to digital currencies: for whom, what future and what benefits? Digital Currencies: Governing risk and and opportunities (2022)
• There would be much more to do, for example to constrain the use of Generative AI to those applications and users that won’t adversely affect society, and to develop a vision of benefits and risk of AI in the longer term. These could be topics for future work.