When The Economist asked me to contribute an article on how technology can help save democracy, I jumped at the chance. Tech and politics have been my twin passions for most of my life, although I was rarely able to indulge them since they were relegated by my overriding concern: chess.
The invention of differential privacy was ahead of its time. The technology, pioneered by Microsoft researchers 15 years ago, makes it possible to extract useful insights from datasets, while safeguarding the privacy of the individuals included in the data. What was needed to realize its full potential? The marriage of cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI), which allows for the sharing and analysis of huge amounts of data requiring that individual personal privacy is protected.
Twenty years ago, Google published its very first end-of-year list, called the Year-End Google Zeitgeist. Looking back, it’s clear how much some things have changed (please see the list of the top 10 MP3 music resources), and how much they stay the same (decades later and we’re still watching some of these sitcoms).