FuturICT Newsletter: SOCIETY IS AT A CROSSROAD!

A personal Message from Dirk Helbing
 
Dear FuturICT Supporters

This has been another momentous year. The digital revolution is on its way at full pace. Many countries have invested into data-driven governance. The idea that "more data is more knowledge, more knowledge is more power, and more power is more success" has promoted the concept of a "benevolent dictator" or "wise king", able to predict and control the world in an optimal way. This "magic formula" seems to be the main reason for the massive collection of personal data, which companies and governments alike have engaged in. 

The concept of the benevolent dictator implies that democracy would be overhauled. In Silicon Valley there have been many voices claiming that democracy is an "outdated technology," which has to be replaced by something else. Similar arguments have been put forward by politicians in a variety of countries. There is an acute danger that democracy would be ended in response to challenges and threats such as climate change, resource shortages, and terrorism. However, recent data-driven analyses show that democracy is not a luxury, in contrast to what has been claimed by increasingly many people before.

The anti-democratic trend is dangerous and needs to be stopped. First, because ending freedom, participation, and justice would end in socio-political instability and finally in revolution or war. (Similar instabilities have occurred during the transition from the agricultural to the industrial society and from there to the service society.) Second, because the above magic formula is based on flawed assumptions.

Society is not a machine. It cannot be steered like a car. Interaction - and the resulting complex dynamics of the system - changes everything. We know this, for example, from spontaneous breakdowns of traffic flow. Even if we could read the minds of all drivers, such "phantom traffic jams" could not be prevented. But there is a way to prevent them, based on the use of suitable driver assistant systems: distributed control approaches, using knowledge from complexity science.

The paradigm of data-driven optimization would possibly work if we knew the right goal function; moreover, the world would have to change slowly enough, it would have to be sufficiently well predictable, and simple enough. However, all these preconditions are not fulfilled. As we continue to network the world, its complexity grows faster than the data volume, the processing power and the data that can be transmitted. Many aspects of the world are emergent and hardly predictable. The world is quickly changing by innovation, and we need even more of it! Not even the goal function is well-known: should it be gross national product per capita or sustainability, power or peace, average lifespan or happiness? In such cases, (co-) evolution, adaptation, and resilience are the right paradigms, not optimization.

 

I have spent last year to make decision-makers around the globe aware of these things, to save democracy, to get better information systems on the way than those that are based on mass surveillance and brute-force data mining; to argue for interdisciplinary and global collaboration; for approaches built on transparency and trust; for open and participatory systems, because they mobilize the capacity of the entire society; and for systems based on diversity and pluralism, because they promote innovation, societal resilience, and collective intelligence.

I would like to ask you to engage strongly along these lines too. Because if we don't manage to get things on the right way, we may lose many societal, economic, legal and cultural achievements of the past centuries; we might see one of the darkest periods of human history; something much worse than "1984 - Big Brother is watching you": a society, in which we might lose our freedom, enslaved by a citizen score that would give us plus or minus points for everything we do, where the government and big corporations would determine how we should live our lives.

My recent Nature Commentary "Build Digital Democracy" and an article in Spektrum der Wissenschaft - the German version of Scientific American - have elaborated on this, to alert the public. This might have come just in the very last moment.

Fortunately, there is some encouraging news too: The USA have started to invest in a new strategy. It seems they are betting on a combination of reindustrialization on the one hand, and citizen science and combinatorial innovation on the other. Even Google has embarked on a new strategy with the founding of Alphabet, which aims to make the company less dependent on personalized advertising. And Apple has recognized the value of privacy as a competitive advantage.   People also increasingly understand that the digital economy is not a zero-sum game. In the area of the Internet of Things, Google has engaged in open innovation, and it recently made its Tensorflow Artificial Intelligence software open source. Tesla Motors has opened up many of its patents, and many billionaires have recently promised to donate large sums of money for good. So, we see many signs of change.

The benefit of open information exchange is becoming increasingly evident. Sharing information often increases the value of information, inventions, and companies. If properly organized, the digital economy provides almost unlimited possibilities because intangible goods can be reproduced as often as we like. In fact, more and more money will be earned in virtual worlds. This relates not just to computer games; Bitcoin has even shown that bits can be turned into gold. Almost nobody believed this were possible.

Let's hope the development will continue in this direction. In that case, the digital revolution will take a positive path. But it's too early to relax. We need to be highly alert and ready to defend the constitutional principles of our society. Otherwise our societies will most likely end up disrespecting human rights and fighting wars.

I am sure our community will experience an exciting year 2016, and I look forward to the interaction and collaboration with you!

Best wishes, Happy Holidays, and Seasons Greetings,

Dirk

PS: Here is some further news - please remember to send us input about your own news and success stories, so we can feature it in the next newsletter.

March 26, 2015: Lecture "The automation of society is next: How to build a smart, resilient, digital society (and how not)"

March 31, 2015: Blog "Implementing change in a complex world: Responding to complexity in socio-economic system: how to build a smart and resilient society“
April 10, 2015: Lecture "Toward Government 3.0: Scientific Policy Decision-making" discusses the problems of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence and calls for a global, interdisciplinary collaboration 
April 15, 2015: Blog "Societal, economic, ethical and legal challenges of the Digital Revolution: From Big Data to deep learning, Artificial Intelligence, and manipulative technologies“
April 16, 2015: Book „Thinking Ahead: Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society“ 
June 4, 2015: Open Letter on the Digital Economy 
August 6 2015: Larry Page announces that Google is to become less dependent on personalized advertisements
August 10, 2015: Google is turned into Alphabet
August 30, 2015: The book "The Automation of Society Is Next" appears as preprint
September 16, 2015: The leading scientific journal "Nature" publishes the articles "How to solve the World's Biggest Problems" and "Interdisciplinarity: How to catalyze cooperation"
Interdisciplinarity has become all the rage as scientists tackle climate change and other intractable issues. But there is still strong resistance to crossing borders...
www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/1.18367!/menu/main/topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/525308a.pdf
http://www.nature.com/news/interdisciplinary-research-by-the-numbers-1.18349
September 22, 2105: Nature paper "Climate Policy: Democracy is not an inconvenience"
September, 24th-28th, 2015: UN General Assembly. The Pope underlines the importance of freedom, human rights and decentralization; the Presidents of America and China are calling for more democracy - let's see this happen!
September 29, 2015: Apple turns the protection of the privacy of its users into a sales pitch
October 6, 2015: The backdoor law in the USA is abandoned.The European Court stops the "safe harbor“ agreement and criticizes mass surveillance as incompatible with human rights.

October 7, 2015: The journal Nature calls for "crowd-sourced research"

November 5, 2015: Nature Commentary "Build Digital Democracy"
November 7, 2015: The Economist announces TU Delft's PhD program in "Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible Digital Future"
November 9, 2015: Talk "Breaking the Wall to Digital Democracy" at the Falling Walls Conference in Berlin
November 12, 2015: The Digital Manifesto "Digital Democracy Rather than Data Dictatorship" appears in Spektrum der Wissenschaft (in German); many newspapers report
November 13, 2015: TERROR ATTACKS IN PARIS - THE SETBACK! Will France and Poland lose their democracies? Is your country stable?
December 2, 2015: Preprint "Democracy-Growth Dynamics for Richer and Poorer Countries" presents a data-driven analysis showing that “Democracy is not a Luxury”December 11, 2105: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and others invest 1 billion dollars into OpenAI and stress: “A.I. should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible.”
December 12, 2015: All countries support the Paris climate agreement to reduce global warming
December 17, 2015: The European Data Protection Directive is decided
December 31, 2015/January 1, 2016: The start of a happy New Year and a new era!

Democracy is not a Luxury

by Heinrich Nax

"Does democracy cause growth, or is it a luxury enjoyed by wealthy countries that slows growth down?“ This is a question that one frequently hears these days.

The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter was first to address this question in his book "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy" in 1942, at a time when Austria had fallen into the hands of Nazi Germany, after having been one of the most important countries in the world before. This question continues to be of central concern, not only for political economists and development economists. Over the past decades, stirred by the disagreement of prominent scientists such as Milton Friedman (1962) and Seymour Martin Lipset (1959) over the corrent answer, this issue has been looked at time and again.

Famously, the American macroeconomist Robert Barro (1996) found that "the net effect of democracy on growth performance cross-nationally over the last five decades is negative or null" (Gerring, Bond, Barndt and Moreno 2005, p.323). Analyses of this kind have fueled arguments for the position that democracy is a luxury enjoyed by wealthy countries, which creates obstacles for economic development. Other scientists have disagreed with this finding (for example, Gerring et al. 2005). Their findings indicate that only sustained democracy has the virtue of facilitating the accumulation of physical, human, social and political capitals, which in turn leads to growth.

Again, one is left with two conflicting sets of evidence. However, there are two recent breakthroughs, which show that democracy is indeed no luxury. Acemoglu, Naidu, Restrepo and Robinson (2015) show that `regime transitions' and their precise timing are crucial. Democratization has a large positive effect on growth: "by estimating the effects on growth of the unprecedented spread of democracy around the world in the last 50 years [...] estimates imply that a country that transitions from non-democracy to democracy achieves about 20 percent higher GDP per capita in the next 25 years" (Acemoglu et al. 2015, p. 1).

However, the question whether established democracies have incentives to de-democratize remained unsolved. Precisely this question was now addressed by Nax and Schorr (2015). Their data-driven study using high-performance computers reveals "short-run economic incentives to de-democratization for the most economically and democratically developed nations. [However,] These short-run boosts come with intermediate-run reductions of political capitals and with long-run reductions in growth" (Nax and Schorr 2015). Therefore, democracy is more than a luxury. Giving up on it would be a terrible mistake.

Further information can be found in

H.H. Nax and A.B. Schorr, Democracy-Growth Dynamics for Richer and Poorer Countries,see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2698287

References:
- D. Acemoglu, S. Naidu, P. Restrepo, and J. A. Robinson. Democracy does cause growth. NBER Working Paper, pages 323-64, 2015.
- R.J. Barro. Democracy and growth. Journal of Economic Growth, 1(1):1-27, 1996.
 - M. Friedman. Capitalism and freedom. University of Chicago Press, 1962.
 - J. Gerring, P. Bond, W.T. Barndt, and C. Moreno. Democracy and economic growth: A historical perspective. World Politics, 57:323-64, 2005.
- S. M. Lipset. Some social requisites of democracy: Economic development and political legitimacy. The American Political Science Review, 53(1):pp. 69-105,
1959.

- H. H. Nax, A. B. Schorr. Democracy-growth dynamics for richer and poorer
Countries. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2698287 , 2015.
 
- J. Schumpeter. Capitalism, socialism and democracy. Harper, New
York/London, 1942.

DISTRIBUTED COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: The Network of Ideas

by Dirk Helbing

Machines that think are here. 

The explosive increase in processing power and data, fueled by powerful machine learning algorithms, finally empowers silicium-based intelligence to overtake carbon-based intelligence. Intelligent machines don't need to be programmed anymore, they can learn and evolve by themselves, at a speed much faster than human intelligence progresses.

Humans weren't very good at accepting that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and they still have difficulties accepting that they are the result of chance and selection, as evolutionary theory teaches us. Now, we are about to lose the position of the most intelligent species on Earth. Are people ready for this? How will this change the role of humans, our economy, and our society?

It would be nice to have machines that think for us, machines that do the boring paper work and other tasks that we don't like. It might also be great to have machines that know us well: that know what we think and how we feel. Will machines be better friends?

But who will be responsible for what intelligent machines decide and do? Can we control them? Can we tell them what to do, and how to do it? Humans have learned to ride horses and elephants. But will they be able to control 10 times more intelligent machines? Would we enslave them or would they enslave us? Could we really pull the plug, when machines start to emancipate themselves?

If we can't control intelligent machines on the long run, can we at least build them to act morally? I believe, machines that think will eventually follow ethical principles. However, it might be bad if humans determined them. If they acted according to our principles of self-regarding optimization, we could not overcome crime, conflict, crises, and war. So, if we want such "diseases of today's society" to be healed, it might be better if we let machines evolve their own, superior ethics.

Intelligent machines would probably learn that it is good to network and cooperate, to decide in other-regarding ways, and to pay attention to systemic outcomes. They would soon learn that diversity is important for innovation, systemic resilience, and collective intelligence. Humans would become nodes in a global network of intelligences and a huge ecosystem of ideas.

In fact, we will have to learn it's ideas that matter, not genes. Ideas can "run" on different hardware architectures. It does not really matter whether it's humans who produce and spread them or machines, or both. What matters is that beneficial ideas spread and others don't get much impact. It's tremendously important to figure out, how to organize our information systems to get there. If we manage this, then, humans will enter the history book as the first species that figured it out. Otherwise, do we really deserve to be remembered? 

SMART DATA: Running the Internet of Things as a Citizen Web

 

by Dirk Helbing
Moore's law, describing the exponential explosion of processing power and data production, is currently driving a fundamental transformation of our economy and society. While processing power doubles every 18 months, data volumes double every 12 months, which means that we literally produce as much data in one year as in the entire history of humankind (i.e. all previous years). However, this is not the end of the digital revolution. More and more "things" are now equipped with communicating sensors - fridges, coffee machines, tooth brushes, smartphones and smart devices. In ten years, this will connect 150 billion "things" with each other - and with 10 billion people. This creates the "Internet of Everything" and data volumes that double every 12 hours rather than every 12 months. How will this impact our society?

First of all, we will have an abundance of data about our world. Data will be cheap, and Big Data analytics can reach entirely new levels.[1] Can we soon know everything? Can we build a Crystal Ball depicting and perhaps even predicting the course of events?[2] Can we build superintelligent systems to run the world in a better way, based on cybernetic control principles?[3] Would humans be steered by information?[4] It seems that such technologies may now be built. For example, Baidu has started to work on a China brain project, which will learn to predict peoples’ behaviors based on their Internet searches.[5] China has further initiated a project that rates the behavior of its citizens.[6] This will make loans and jobs dependent on personal scores, which also depend on the links clicked in the Web - and on political opinions. Is Orwell’s Big Brother coming? Or is this the technology we need? Can the state act like a "wise king"? Or is a state that determines, how its citizens should be happy, a despot, as Immanuel Kant concluded?[7]

In fact, there is no scientific method to determine the 'goal function of society' that ought to be maximized: should it be GDP per capita, sustainability, average life span, peace, or happiness? This is not clear and, furthermore, people are not like ants. The concept of omni-benevolence can't work, because people pursue different goals, have different conceptions of good life. On the one hand, their pluralism results from social specialization, economic differentiation and cultural development. On the other hand, such pluralism hedges the risks to society and increases its ability to master unexpected disruptions. Consequently, as the complexity of a society increases, pluralism needs to increase as well.

The concepts of top-down optimization and control are limited by a number of factors: (1) Data volume grows faster than the processing power. A growing share of data will never be processed. This creates a "flashlight effect": we may see anything we want, but we need to know what to pay attention to. However, some systems are irreducibly complex, so every little detail can matter[8] (2) Due to limited communication bandwidth, an even smaller fraction of data can be processed centrally, such that a lot of local information, which is needed to produce good solutions, is ignored by a centralized optimization attempt. (3) Systemic complexity can prevent real-time optimization, such that decentralized control approaches may perform better. This has been shown for self-organized traffic lights, which are flexibly and efficiently controlled by local traffic flows, while traffic control centers often fail to control traffic flows well.[9] (4) Further problems may be caused by overfitting, spurious correlations, meaningless patterns, noise and related classification errors - problems which are quite common in Big Data analytics. Another concern is that powerful information systems are attractive to organized criminals, terrorists and extremists, so they would sooner or later be corrupted or hacked. 

To unleash the value of Big Data, it often takes theoretical models to look at the data in a useful way, as it is done in experiments at CERN's elementary particle accelerator (which just keeps the 0.1 percent of all measurement data - the data that are actually needed to test a particular theoretical prediction). A similar finding is made when trying to predict epidemic spread: a model-based analysis with little data is more powerful than brute force Big Data analytics such as Flu Trends.[10] Therefore, Michael Macy recently concluded: "Big Data is the beginning of theory, not the end", and most experts agree. This is in sharp contrast to Chris Anderson's earlier claim that "The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete."[11]

Some might say that Singapore, which considers itself a "social laboratory",[12] is a good example for a country that has greatly benefited from data-driven decision-making. Western democracies envy the country for its quick development and economic growth rate, but we must also consider that Singapore has been a tax haven, and it largely profits from imported innovations originating in predominantly Western democracies. Moreover, the political party in power has steadily lost votes over the past years in spite of all its successes. This is irritating, and we should therefore listen to Geoffrey West, the former president of the Santa Fe Institute, who studied cities extensively. He points out that the country of Singapore is run like a company. However, 40-50 percent of the Top 500 companies disappear in a time period of just 10 years, while cities persist for hundreds of years due to their usually more inclusive governance approach. The reason for this is that even powerful decision-makers make mistakes, but when this happens, the mistakes tend to be big.

Where do we stand today? Big Data analytics is far from being able to understand the complexity of human behavior, but it is advanced enough to manipulate our decisions by individualized information such as personalized ads or nudging. Such approaches use a few thousand metadata that have been collected about every one of us. However, manipulating our decision doesn't seem to be a good idea, because it undermines the "wisdom of crowds" - an effect on which the functionality of democracies and financial markets is based.[13] Moreover, manipulating our decisions is likely to narrow down the variance of our choices, i.e. socio-economic diversity. On the one hand, this can foster political and societal polarization (or fragmentation).[14] On the other hand, diversity is key for innovation, economic development, societal resilience, and collective intelligence.[15] Losing socio-economic diversity is equally bad as losing bio-diversity. It can cause systemic malfunction or collapse.[16]^,[17]

Moreover, given that about 50 percent of today's jobs in the industrial and service sectors will be lost in the next 10-20 years, our societies are under pressure to come up with many new jobs in the emerging digital sector (or at least with sufficient income and meaningful activities to give our lives a meaning).[18] 

All of this calls for a fundamentally different strategy and an entirely new approach, particularly as we are faced with an increasing number of existential problems: an economic and public spending crisis, financial and political instability, increasing dangers of large-scale international conflicts or cyber wars, climate change with a mass extinction of species, and growing antibiotic resistance, to mention just a few of our global threats. We need to have more innovation capacity, and this means we need to unleash the creativity of people. Diversity can help trigger innovation, while information platforms and digital assistants can support coordination in a diverse and culturally rich world. A participatory approach, which allows everyone to contribute with his/her skills, ideas, and resources (as in citizen science, for example) can mobilize the full socio-economic potential and capacity of society. If many people are unemployed, have to do jobs that don't fit their skills, or if they are excluded from socio-economic engagement, the competitiveness and well-being of a country is significantly reduced. 

To unleash the good side of the digital revolution and new opportunities for everyone, we must provide useful and trustworthy information to everyone. In the same way as we have built public roads to promote the industrial age and public schools to fuel the service society, we need powerful public information systems and digital literacy to promote the digital era to come. Therefore, I propose to build a Planetary Nervous System that creates possibilities for pluralistic data use and opportunities for everyone to contribute to society and pursue flourishing lives.[19] The Planetary Nervous System would use the sensor networks behind the Internet of Things and potentially also the sensors in our smartphones (currently about 15) to measure the world around us and build a data commons together. The critical question is how this can be done in a way that respects our privacy and minimizes misuse as compared to the benefits the system would create. It is time to learn how to do this.

The Nervousnet project[20] has started to work on this. It aims to create an open and participatory information platform such as Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap, but for real-time data. In favor of security, scalability and fault tolerance, Nervousnet is based on distributed data and control. It will be run as a Citizen Web, i.e. built and managed by the users. This gives us maximum control over the data traces we produce. Each sensor can separately be turned on or off. External sensors (e.g. for smart home applications) can be added. Users can also decide what data to share and how frequently to record them. The shared data are anonymized, and they are deleted after a short period of time.

Nervousnet invites everyone to contribute to the creation of this powerful, but distributed and trustworthy information platform for the age of the "Internet of Everything".[21] It is an open platform that will allow developers to add own measurement procedures and Apps on top. These can be scientific applications, games, or business applications. This will allow everyone to provide data-driven services or products and establish own companies. In other words, Nervousnet could once be a global catalyst to create an information, innovation and production ecosystem that will produce new jobs and societal benefits. There is still a lot to be done though. We are currently working on end-to-end data encryption. We need to add multi-dimensional reputation, incentive and payment systems. We also plan to add a personal data store, as it was proposed by Sandy Pentland and others.[22]

In perspective, Nervousnet will allow everyone to make better-informed decisions. It will offer five main functionalities. First, it will configure the sensor network to answer specific questions based on real-time measurements. For example, it will allow us to quantify the externalities of the interactions around us, which will make it possible to improve economic systems. Second, these measurements will be able to reveal the hidden forces underlying socio-economic change and other important intangible factors such as reputation and trust. This will fuel a better understanding of our complex, interdependent world, as it is now studied by Global Systems Science.[23] Third, the Planetary Nervous System will create awareness about the problems and opportunities around us. Fourth, it will enable self-organizing systems through real-time feedbacks such as self-organized traffic light controls, industry-4.0-kind-of production systems, or new solutions to socio-economic problems based on locally applied interaction mechanisms. So, 300 years after the invention of the invisible hand, we can finally make it work for us, by combining real-time measurements with suitable feedbacks, as advised by complexity science and enabled by multi-dimensional incentive and exchange systems. Finally, Nervousnet will allow one to build digital assistants supporting collective intelligence. This is needed to master the combinatorial complexity of our increasingly interdependent world. So, an entirely new age with amazing new possibilities is ahead of us, fueled by information. 

It is now within reach to build an information system that finally brings everything together: science, politics, business, and society. We can create self-organizing and self-improving systems with massively increased efficiency. The approach I propose is based on participation and compatible with democratic principles. It respects the autonomy of decision-making and supports free entrepreneurship, while considering externalities. Therefore, I also expect benefits for our environment and society. In particular, the information age may allow us to reduce the level of conflict, because information is an unlimited resource that offers endless creative possibilities. The digital economy is everything but a zero-sum game. Information can be reproduced as often as we like. To get more of it for us, we don't have to take it away from others. Furthermore, considering that money is just a coordination mechanism to organize the distribution of scarce resources, we can now build a better, multi-dimensional money and incentive system that rewards digital co-creation. 
So, what are we waiting for? Let's build the digital society together! [24]

Dirk

---

[1] D. Helbing, Thinking Ahead (Springer, Berlin, 2015)

[2] D. Helbing, Crystal Ball and Magic Wand - the Dangerous Promise of Big Data http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2502561

[3] N. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Da Capo Press, Boston, 1954); E. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries (MIT Press, 2011)

[4] A.D.I. Kramer, J.E. Guillory, and J.T. Hancock, Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111, 8788-8790. This experiment was highly controversial, see http://www.wsj.com/articles/furor-erupts-overfacebook-experiment-on-users-1404085840

[5] Baidu welcomes China's military to join China Brain project on AI systems, see http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20150307000015&cid=1101

[6] China rates its own citizens - including online behaviour, see http://www.volkskrant.nl/buitenland/china-rates-its-own-citizens-including-online-behaviour~a3979668/ ; China: Kontrolle über alles, see http://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2015-07/china-plangesellschaft-xi-jinping

[7] see http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kant-kants-principles-of-politics-including-his-essay-on-perpetual-peace/simple and http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-social-political/

[8] I. Kondor et al. Strong random correlations in networks of heterogeneous agents, J. Econ. Interact. Coord. 9, 203-232 (2014).

[9] S. Lämmer and D. Helbing (2008) Self-control of traffic lights and vehicle flows in urban road networks. JSTAT P04019; D. Helbing (2013) Economics 2.0: The natural step towards a self-regulating, participatory market society. Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review 10, 3-41; see also http://www.stefanlaemmer.de/

[10] D. Lazer, R. Kennedy, G. King and A. Vespignani, The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis. Science 343, 1203-1205 (2014).

[11] see http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory

[12] Foreign Policy, The Social Laboratory (July 29, 2014), see http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/29/the-social-laboratory/

[13] J. Lorenz, H. Rauhut, F. Schweitzer, and D. Helbing (2011) How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS) 108(28), 9020-9025

[14] C. Andris et al., The Rise of Partisanship and Super-Cooperators in the U.S. House of Representatives, PLoS ONE 10(4): e0123507, see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0123507

[15] S.E. Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (Princeton University, 2008)

[16] R.M. May, S.A. Levin, and G. Sugihara, Complex systems: Ecology for bankers, Nature 451, 893-895 (2008)

[17] J. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Penguin 2011); J.A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University, 1990)

[18] C.B. Frey and M.A. Osborne (2013) The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation? See http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

[19] F. Gianotti et al., A planetary nervous system for social mining and collective awareness, Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 214, 49-75 (2012)

[20] see http://www.nervous.ethz.ch/ and http://www.futurict.eu, also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKcWPdSUJVA

[21] The Nervousnet app can be downloaded via Apple's app store and Google's play store. You can contact us at nervousnet@ethz.ch

[22] Y.-A. de Montjoye, E. Shmueli, S.S. Wang, and A.S. Pentland, openPDS: Protecting the privacy of metadata through SafeAnswers, PLoS ONE 9(7): e98790, http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0098790

[23] D. Helbing (2013): Globally networked risks and how to respond. Nature 497, 51–59; you may also want to see this movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHp0lV6ppQQ

[24] Preprint version D.Helbing, The Automation of Society Is Next (2015); You may also want to watch this related movie list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgVBob5HIm8&list=PLDmlT_Ptfv0fcMD29kNKOIhV0yK9AhyQl