Next Civilization

Epilogue

Why did I write this book and how did it come about? My research activities, on which this book is based, had three essential triggers. While I studied statistical physics in Göttingen, Germany, I specialized in modeling complex systems and became increasingly interested in addressing real-life problems, such as the conflicts between neo-Nazis and left-wing students that were happening at that time.

Later, when I was Managing Director of the Institute of Transport & Economics at Dresden University of Technology, I was shocked by September 11, 2001. Just a year later, the beautiful city of Dresden was terribly flooded. This led me to study disasters and how to respond to them.

Finally, when I worked as a professor of sociology at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, the financial crisis in 2008 clearly revealed that we needed entirely new ways of thinking about socio-economic systems. As a result of ongoing cascading effects, the emerging economic crisis would eventually result in political extremism and increasing levels of societal conflict—a scenario that had to be avoided.

To address these concerns, I launched the FuturICT initiative back in 2010.¹ This was a response to a European call for proposals for two €1 billion “flagship” projects to boost innovation in the information and technology sector—so we are talking about the perspective of significant funding, here. The FuturICT project aimed to develop new scientific and technological systems to manage our future in an increasingly complex world. In particular, FuturICT wanted to develop a “Living Earth Simulator” that would allow us to explore and understand the opportunities and risks implied by possible decisions we might take. This simulator was intended to be an open and participatory platform, committed to the protection of personal privacy.²

FuturICT was (and—in various aspects—still is) recognized as a highly innovative project, bringing the best researchers in the social, natural, and engineering sciences together. Eventually, we established a global network of interdisciplinary research communities, including more than 25 European countries, the USA, Japan, Singapore, Australia, and many other states. Far more than 100 academic institutions and a similar number of companies wanted to be partners of the project. As a result, about €90 million of co-funding had been promised for the first 2.5 years.

Leading the FuturICT project, however, also turned out to be an adventure. Big players from all over the world became interested in the project. The USA quickly launched Big Data research programs amounting to $150 million or more. China broadcast a film about the project on national TV, watched by hundreds of millions of people. Russia sent big TV teams to cover the project. Moreover, on the title page of the Christmas edition of the Scientific American in 2011, FuturICT was featured as No. 1 world-changing idea.³

Months later, the FuturICT project was in the final round and performed well, but contrary to everyone’s expectations, it wasn’t funded. At this point in time, I started to worry that governments might enter a digital arms race rather than building the global, participatory information and communication system that FuturICT had proposed. I also worried that a powerful surveillance-based digital society may be brought on the way, ignoring privacy, informational self-determination, democracy and human rights. Therefore, I wrote an article entitled “Google as God?” to make the public aware of the potential dangers of information and communication systems that lack transparency. In fact, the digital revolution created the scary possibility to control entire societies and every one of us.

When I later searched the Internet for “Google as God?”, I was surprised to find results such as the “Church of Google”. While these sites are perhaps not meant to be serious, they provide interesting food for thought nevertheless. At some webpages⁴ one can find “proofs” that Google is God, for example: “Google is the closest thing to an Omniscient (all-knowing) entity in existence” or “Google is everywhere at once (Omnipresent)” or “Google can ‘do no evil’ (Omnibenevolent)”. My book explored these ideas further and asks how realistic it is to realize such ambitions.

When I talked about a “crystal ball”, “magic wand”, “wise king” or “benevolent dictator”, I used these terms to represent some abstract concepts. Even when I used names for illustration, I didn’t mean any particular company or institution, such as Google, the NSA, or a particular computer network with Artificial Intelligence. Nevertheless, we must ask ourselves where we are heading. Could we unintentionally create a digital nightmare, even if all the Big Data companies and institutions had the very best intentions? And if so, what can we do to minimize the risk of such a scenario? In other words, what institutions and technological solutions will the digital society need? How much decentralization and encryption are required to ensure sufficient Internet security? How much transparency and informational self-determination are needed in order to enter an age of digital enlightenment, i.e. to avoid “digital slavery” and ensure “digital freedom”?

Without any doubt, we must develop a better understanding of the new world we are currently creating—a world characterized by more data, more processing speed and more connectivity. We are at a crossroads, where we might mistakenly take the wrong turn, which would lead to more instability and, potentially,global disaster.

Remember that, even with the best technology ever, huge amounts of information, and the very best intentions, our world might become impossible to control. A good analogy of the hyper-connected world we are living in is perhaps an atomic bomb, which may explode as a result of chain reactions that are triggered when a certain “critical mass” (a critcal density) is reached. It turns out that similar kinds of “explosions” happen in socio-economic systems, too. They are much slower, but similarly destructive—think, for example, of a political revolution, a war, or the collapse of a civilization. Has our global system unintentionally become a “complexity time bomb”? If so, was it already ticking?

I certainly don’t want to worry you, but history tells what the results of such “explosive” socio-economic processes can be. This includes political instabilities and regimes that might be unjust and cruel. It is important to avoid these scenarios by developing a better understanding of the causes of societal problems such as economic crises, crime, and war. In this book, I tried to provide a new and integrated perspective of how society works, and how we can use this knowledge to master our future. In fact, I believe we shouldn’t be too pessimistic. We should rather take the future into our own hands, because we can make our society more resilient to crises and change the world for the better.

About the Author

Dirk Helbing is perhaps one of the most imaginative experts in the world when it comes to envisioning the opportunities and risks of the digital revolution. He is an advocate of value-sensitive design and strongly contributed to the public debate around Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. He also coordinated the FuturICT initiative, which built a global interdisciplinary community of experts at the interface of complexity, computer and data science. These activities, aimed at confronting global problems and crises were featured by Scientific American as the number one world-changing idea and earned him an honorary doctorate from TU Delft, where he later coordinated the PhD school on “Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible Digital Future”.

Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences and also affiliated to the Computer Science Department at ETH Zurich. He has a Ph.D. in physics, was Managing Director of the Institute of Transport & Economics at Dresden University of Technology in Germany, and Professor of Sociology at ETH Zurich.

Helbing is an elected member of the German Academy of Sciences “Leopoldina” and worked for the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems for some time. He was also a co-founder of the Physics of Socio-Economic Systems Division of the German Physical Society and ETH Zurich’s Risk Center. Furthermore, he is a member of the International Centre for Earth Simulation in Geneva and various high-level committees to assess the implications of the digital revolution. He was also a board member of the Global Brain Institute in Brussels.

The motivation for his research may be summarized by “What can complexity science and information systems contribute to saving human lives?” This ranges from avoiding crowd disasters over reducing crime and conflict to the reduction of epidemic spreading. His work brings theoretical studies, data science, and lab experiments together with agent-based computer models, where agents may have cognitive features. Furthermore, his publication on globally networked risks called for a Global Systems Science.

Using the “Internet of Things”, his team was also engaged in establishing the core of a decentralized Digital Nervous System as a Citizen Web (see nervousnet.info). This was intended to be an open, transparent and participatory information platform to support real-time measurements of our world, situational awareness, successful decision-making, and self-organization. The goal of this system was to open up the new opportunities of the digital age for everyone, but the project was heavily obstructed.

Photo: Jannick Timm