Is the Data-Driven Paradigm of Managing the World Driving Us to the Brink of Apocalypse?

The idea that more data will automatically produce a better picture of the world and of the future must be critically reflected. It is a future vision of the past. In the last 10 years, we have learned a lot about the pitfalls of big data and machine learning - many of which have not yet been fixed yet.

The biggest commercial machine learning models currently in use learn a trillion parameters or so (assuming measurements are unbiased and reliable, which is often not the case). However, whatever the maximum number of parameters may be, when modeling the world in this way, there are many orders of magnitudes of interaction effects which are not captured, hence neglegted, and that will produce a wrong picture and bad forecasts. For example, even forecasts of the COVID-19 pandemic, of global warming, or peak oil have been consistently unreliable.

Or let us take the forecast of the world's population and carrying capacity. According to the Club of Rome’s simulations and other statistics/projections,about one third of the world’s population is overpopulation and would die early of resource shortages. However, these simulations did not consider new forms of energy production. More importantly, they do not consider the possibility of reorganizing the economy towards a circular and sharing economy. If we had done this already, the world may not be overpopulated at all. Hence, „over-population“ may just be a matter of bad economic organization. That is why I am stressing the need of nature-inspired and social innovation so much [1], in particular the socio-ecological finance system [2] and interaction support processor [3], which would introduce new incentives and feedback effects that would promote the co-evolution towards a circular and sharing economy. And I stress the importance of digital democracy [1,4] and democratic capitalism [1,5] to unleash the transformative power of civil society.

If one, instead, would take a military top-down approach, say, using something alike a "digital crystal ball" and a "war room“ to decide how to manage the planet, then the positive interaction and feedback effects would be neglected or even eliminated. One would see a much worse future than we could have, and the decisions resulting from this might actually cause avoidable depopulation events. In other words, the wrong use of Big Data may not only see an „apocalyptic" future, which might be avoidable, it may even cause it, because of oversimplifications made by the tools used. The digital "crystal ball" will not see the alternative economy that might save us, because it is not in the data of the past. It requires innovation and systemic change.

[1] Next Civilization https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030623296 [2]

Finance 4.0: Towards a Socio-Ecological Finance System Book

[3] Interaction Support Processor, https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160350685A1/en

[4] Build Digital Democracy: https://www.nature.com/articles/527033a

[5] Socio-Economic Implications of the Digital Revolution, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348742263