Professor Philip Howard - 24 November 2017 - 'Pax Technica’ Keynote Address

‘Pax Technica’ Keynote Address: Professor Philip Howard (Oxford)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 create* The IoT will generate remarkable opportunities for society but the security and privacy risks that it could create will also pose formidable problems for