Pax Technica: The Implications of the Internet of Things - 24 November 2017 - Panel 1

Panel 1: Geo(politics)Chair: Professor David Runciman (POLIS, Cambridge)Professor Ross Anderson (Computer Lab, Cambridge)Dr Bill Janeway (Pembroke College and Warburg Pincus)Professor John Naughton (CRASSH, Cambridge)In 2016 Philip Howard, now Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford and a leading scholar on the impact of the Internet on politics, published Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up in which he tried to assess what the long-term implications of this hyper-connected network might be. Among these possible implications, he noted, are:* The IoT is likely to bring a special kind of stability to global politics (analogous to the uneasy stand-off of the Cold War)* The new world order would be characterised by a pact between big tech firms and governments* Governments may have a decreasing capacity to govern the IoT while corporate (and also bad) actors will become more powerful in the hyper-connected world that the technology will crea