The first issue of the Information Society Journal for 2025 is published. The main theme of the issue is The digital age and its possibilities. The articles in this issue cover, among others, the following topics:
Understanding the conceptual foundations of information society development
Institutional regulation of digital trade
Analysis of investment attractiveness of innovative sectors of the economy
The impact of digital transformation on foreign policy
Information support for consumer cooperatives
Chatbots and video blogs as auxiliary learning tools
Encyclopedia as a source of knowledge about the history of demography and statistics
Technologization of the judicial process using China as an example
Cybersecurity systems for an autonomous robotic complex
Remote sensing of the Earth to improve management efficiency in the information society
In her address to readers “Summing up the results of 2024,” the journal’s editor-in-chief Tatiana Ershova wrote:
It is impossible for us to ignore the dramatic and potentially unpredictable events surrounding Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Each of them could have a powerful impact on the course of events in the world, but we will focus on the revolution started by Elon Musk, who headed the Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE) under the Trump administration.
The reformer has declared his mission to be to expose corruption and reduce gigantic bureaucratic costs, which, according to him, could reach $1 trillion. He wants to save the US economy from the debt crisis and restore investor confidence. He intends to reduce costs by automating some government functions with the help of artificial intelligence.
Reuters reports that as early as February 2025, Trump and Musk fired 9,500 federal employees as part of their campaign to reduce bureaucratic red tape in the US. These people joined about 75,000 people who agreed to voluntarily leave with a compensation package. The cuts also affected the diplomatic corps: several sources reported that some embassies were asked to reduce both American and local staff by 10%.
It is very difficult to predict how this risky venture will end. If everything works out, the United States could become the first major economy to successfully reform its bureaucratic system using AI and digital technologies. However, if the reform fails, the country could face even more serious economic and social problems, the first of which will be rising unemployment and a decline in trust in government institutions.
In Russia, AI is being dynamically introduced into the work of government agencies, but we are not doing this to reduce the number of their employees, but rather counting on a radical improvement in the quality and increase in the volume of work performed. The most obvious areas of AI application are working with citizen requests, communications between government agencies, working with texts (for example, regulatory legal acts), modeling and forecasting, analyzing government spending, and much more. Time will tell whether the country’s economy will receive a bonus in the form of the release of a large number of qualified personnel and their use in other sectors.
People of science can only observe these processes, comprehend them and share the results of their research with the public. And we, of course, publish scientific articles on this topic.
Our journal has been actively publishing articles on AI since 2020. And they are by no means only purely technological. This issue also contains two such works. One of them is devoted to the use of AI for the administration of electronic justice (using China as an example), the second – to the use of neural networks by people with hearing impairments. Paying due attention to all thematic sections, we will follow research in the field of the most advanced technologies with attention and interest.
The full text of the issue can be found on the journal’s website.