Computational Power in the Digital World

What is power in our information societies? Who owns it? Contemporary power is mostly computational power: i.e., the power to process inputs and to turn them into outputs. If data is the new oil, that oil feeds a powerful engine: computation. Every computational system processes data in its own way, based on its representation of the world and computing capacity. Never as much as today has power been entangled with knowledge. This raises a key question: who will adapt what representation of the world to whom? Indeed, many legal, ethical, political, and social issues depend on the diverse epistemology with which human or artificial agents represent the world and act within it. In our time, power in the digital world is not only linked to big IT societies and information silos; it is primarily connected with the proliferation of new forms of knowledge based on computational power.