The thing that frustrates her most, by far, is the difficulty she has using digital technology. My mom didn’t pay much attention to tech through most of her adult years—it wasn’t all that relevant to her. But the combination of mobile devices and grandchildren forced her to try to start using it later in life.

She’s a very smart and independent person and, understandably, she wants to be able to manage her digital life by herself, but things often go wrong, prompting a “rescue call” to one of her four adult children for help. I know her story isn’t unique. In fact, as the pace of digital technology accelerates, more people of all ages are at risk of getting left behind.

When faced with challenges like this or any other, we all have a choice to make—in both our personal and professional lives—to lean in and learn, experiment and adapt continually, or to stick with the status quo and hope for the best, knowing that complacency could rapidly become stagnancy.

As I see it, there are four main challenges or downsides associated with digital technology.

• Cyber Threats: With digital technology, the ability for information to be obtained by nefarious actors through a data breach is much greater than when you had a bunch of paper documents locked in file cabinets or all your important documents in a safe deposit box at a bank. With so much data about us online, and the ability to combine those data sets, there are real benefits, but there are also substantial risks. Linking different data types can create enormous convenience in our day to day lives. From a research standpoint, linked data enables increasingly valuable data analytics and predictive modeling. But it also poses a risk of revealing individuals' identities and exacerbating the negative impacts of data breaches.
• AI Challenges: A second challenge is AI, which presents its own opportunities and obstacles. AI uses predictive algorithms and large language models trained on vast amounts of data. However, these models can sometimes produce inaccurate results, known as “hallucinations,” because they are derived from incorrect data. Essentially, garbage in ends up as garbage out. Until we have better tools to assess the reliability of AI outputs, we need to be very careful. And as AI is integrated more seamlessly into the rest of technology, we see a skill gap developing. Those who develop AI proficiency have a leg-up on those who do not—as individuals and as organizations.
• Digital Divide: That skill gap in AI is one example of the larger digital divide that has been widely written about. Let’s go back to my mother. She has access to a lot of digital technology, but she struggles to use it because she never had a chance to fully acquire and develop the necessary skills. It’s even harder for people who don’t have access to technology. A child with limited access to computers is going to have a difficult time as an adult in our digital world.
• Market Dominance: The fourth main challenge of evolving digital technology is the dominance of a few companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta in the technology sphere. This compounds the issue, as our digital information often passes through these few entities, giving them extraordinary power over the market and our lives. The recent Microsoft-CrowdStrike incident in late July, exemplifies how such dominance can lead to significant impacts on security and data integrity.

These challenges highlight the need for vigilance and robust solutions to keep pace with technological advancements. At NORC, we continuously innovate to address these issues and ensure the integrity and security of our data and research. Consider that the purpose of digital technology is to generate, create, manage, store, analyze, combine, and disseminate data—you can imagine that there is no part of that spectrum where digital technology is not changing how we work at NORC.

• For example, AmeriSpeak, our multimode probability-based panel, uses advanced digital tools to streamline random telephone surveys, enhancing speed and cost-effectiveness in data collection.
• On the data management and analysis front, our Advanced Data Solutions Center provides a secure environment for sensitive microdata, enabling rigorous analysis and de-identification processes.
• To help our audiences understand our data and develop data skills we use digital storytelling, data visualizations from our VizStudio, and engaging data dissemination and analysis tools like the GSS Data Explorer.
• In terms of AI, we see it as an opportunity to experiment and innovate and to develop skills among our people. At the same time, given the risks associated with AI, we are being careful to create guidelines and proper use cases to ensure we are using the technology effectively and appropriately.
• On the tech market dominance risk, it’s a lot harder to envision solutions. We were fortunate not to have been affected by the Crowdstrike crashes, but there is no doubt that highly concentrated markets put us all at risk.