From foreign intervention in free elections to the rise of the American surveillance state, the Internet has transformed the relationship between the public and private sectors, especially democracy's public sphere. The global pandemic only further highlights the extent to which technological innovation is changing how we live, work, and play. What has too often gone unacknowledged is that the same revolution has produced a series of conflicts between our desires as consumers and our duties as citizens. Left unaddressed, the consequence is a moral vacuum that has become a threat to liberal democracy and human values. Surveillance in the Internet Age, whether by governments or companies, often relies on algorithmic searches of big data.

ABOUT A CENTURY ago, engineers created a new sort of space: the control room. Before then, things that needed control were controlled by people on the spot. But as district heating systems, railway networks, electric grids and the like grew more complex, it began to make sense to put the controls all in one place. Dials and light bulbs brought the way the world was working into the room. Levers, stopcocks, switches and buttons sent decisions back out. By the 1960s control rooms had become a powerful icon of the modern. At Mission Control in Houston, young men in horn rimmed glasses and crewcuts sent commands to spacecraft heading for the Moon. In the space seen through television sets, travellers exploring strange new worlds did so within an iconic control room of their own: the bridge of Star Trek's USS Enterprise. A hexagonal room built in Santiago de Chile a decade later fitted right into the same philosophy--and aesthetic. It had an array of screens full of numbers and arrows. It was linked to a powerful computer. It had futuristic swivel chairs, complete with geometric buttons in the armrests to control the displays. Unlike the Johnson Space Centre and the Enterprise, it even had a small bar where occupants could serve themselves drinks after a hard day's controlling.

Everyone likes to talk about the ways that liberalism might be killed off, whether by populism at home or adversaries abroad. Fewer talk about the growing indications in places like Denmark that liberal democracy might accidentally commit suicide. As a philosophy of government, liberalism is premised on the belief that the coercive powers of public authorities should be used in service of individual freedom and flourishing, and that they should therefore be constrained by laws controlling their scope, limits, and discretion. That is the basis for historic liberal achievements such as human rights and the rule of law, which are built into the infrastructure of the Scandinavian welfare state. Yet the idea of legal constraint is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the revolution promised by artificial intelligence and machine learning--specifically, those technologies' promises of vast social benefits in exchange for unconstrained access to data and lack of adequate regulation on what can be done with it. Algorithms hold the allure of providing wider-ranging benefits to welfare states, and of delivering these benefits more efficiently.

Yuval Noah Harari says data is the new source of political power, and he worries that big data and AI technology threaten to destroy liberal democracy. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, lecturer, and author. He is the author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, as well as Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Harari received his PhD from Oxford. He is currently a lecturer in the history department at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Years from now, artificial intelligence (AI), predictive algorithms and biometric sensors might provide the poorest people in society with far better healthcare than the richest people currently have access to today, and nearly all aspects of society will benefit from this imminent technological boom. Governments all over the world are becoming aware of this trend and similarities are already being drawn to the industrial revolution of the late 18th to early 19th century. Experts are predicting that whoever leads the world in AI will most likely dominate the entire world, and effectively threaten liberal democratic principles globally. Taking a different look at the differences between communism and liberalism, it can be deduced that their dissimilarities did not just emanate from their fundamental core principles but also in the way both political systems process data and make decisions. The liberal democratic system is essentially a distributed system -- it distributes information and the power to make decisions between several individuals and organizations.

The BBC Reith Lectures in 1967 were given by Edmund Leach, a Cambridge social anthropologist. "Men have become like gods," Leach began. "Isn't it about time that we understood our divinity? Science offers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny, yet instead of rejoicing we feel deeply afraid." That was nearly half a century ago, and yet Leach's opening lines could easily apply to today.