Künstliche Intelligenz kann eine Chance für uns alle sein

Von Dirk Helbing 
(ETH Zürich, TU Delft, Complexity Science Hub Vienna)
 
Es war lange ein Traum des Silicon Valleys, Künstliche Intelligenz (KI) zu bauen, die intelligenter als Menschen ist und die Probleme löst, die uns Menschen über den Kopf gewachsen sind. KI hätte unsere menschlichen Fehler nicht, dachte man. Sie wäre objektiv, fair, und unemotional, könnte viel mehr Wissen überschauen, schneller entscheiden und aus Daten lernen, die in der ganzen Welt gesammelt werden. Städte könnte man mit Mess-Sensoren versehen und automatisieren. Am Ende stünde eine Smarte Gesellschaft, die sich datengetrieben und algorithmen-gesteuert optimal entwickelt. Wir müssten nur tun, was uns das Smartphone sagt. Verhaltenssteuerung durch personalisierte Information und den berühmtberüchtigten chinesischen Citizenscore, ein Punktekonto für das Wohlverhalten des Bürgers, würde für die optimale Gesellschaftssteuerung sorgen. Inzwischen ist da vielerorts Ernüchterung eingekehrt. Was einst als Utopie begann, wird heute oft als Alptraum angesehen.

Damit treten wir in eine neue Phase der Digitalisierung ein. Die Karten werden neu gemischt. Europa hat die Chance, eigene Impulse zu setzen und damit Weltmarktführer zu werden – durch Künstliche Intelligenzsysteme, die Menschen nicht überwachen und kontrollieren, sondern die Menschen befähigen und kreative Aktivitäten koordinieren. Die Rede ist nun vom „werte-sensitiven Design“. Gemeint ist: wir sollten unsere verfassungsrechtlichen, sozialen, ökologischen und kulturellen Werte in die intelligenten Informationsplattformen einbauen, damit sie uns dabei unterstützen, unsere gesellschaftlichen Ziele zu erreichen, aber Freiräume für Kreativität und Innovation lassen.

Wenn es um demokratische Werte geht, so sind etwa die folgenden Aspekte von Bedeutung: Menschenrechte und Menschenwürde, Freiheit, (informationelle) Selbstbestimmung, Pluralismus, Minderheitenschutz, Gewaltenteilung, Checks and Balances, Mitwirkungsmöglichkeiten, Transparenz, Fairness, Gerechtigkeit, Legitimität, anonyme und gleiche Stimmrechte und Privatsphäre im Sinne von Schutz vor Exponierung und Missbrauch einerseits, andererseits im Sinne eines Rechts, in Ruhe gelassen zu werden.

Im globalen Miteinander scheinen überdies folgende Werte eine vielversprechende Basis für eine erfolgreiche und friedliche, vernetze Informationsgesellschaft zu sein: Vielfalt, Respekt, Partizipationschancen, Selbstbestimmung, Verantwortung, Qualität, Awareness, Fairness, Schutz, Resilienz, Nachhaltigkeit und Compliance.

Es ist nicht leicht, diese Eigenschaften in Informationssysteme einzubauen, aber wir können es lernen. Wir können KI-Systeme bauen, welche die Welt und uns alle voranbringen, vorausgesetzt es gibt einen breiten und fairen Zugang zu den Potenzialen dieser Systeme. Stellen Sie sich vor, die KI würde Ihnen nicht sagen, was Sie tun sollen, sondern sie würde Ihnen dabei helfen, Ihre eigenen Talente zu entfalten und Ihre Ziele zu erreichen, und zwar umso mehr, je mehr sie (auch) anderen helfen – sozusagen ein Geist aus der Flasche, der Gutes tut, der uns hilft, uns selbst und anderen zu helfen.

Was sich heute noch wie Utopie oder Science Fiction anhört – schon bald könnte es Realität sein. KI ist eine Chance für die Wirtschaft, für Europa und uns alle, wenn wir nur lernen damit umzugehen – damit es nicht ausgeht wie mit Goethe’s Zauberlehrling. Die Enquete-Kommission „Künstliche Intelligenz – gesellschaftliche Verantwortung und wirtschaftliche Potenziale“ hat jetzt die Chance, die Weichen für eine vielversprechende, bessere Zukunft zu stellen.

FuturICT 2.0: Participatory Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for a Better Future

The world is faced with existential threats. The financial crisis of 2007-8 and its consequences still endanger the stability of Europe and the world economy. Resource shortages are imminent. Climate change may wipe out one sixth of all species. Terror, wars, and mass migration create increasing challenges. All of this results from our lack of sustainability. To manage scarce resources and endangered people, powerful global information systems have been built, based on Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. But at the same time, cybercrime and other misuse of Information and Communication Technologies are exploding. The before mentioned problems are still largely unsolved, and automation is expected to claim a large amount of jobs within just a few years. The digital transformation of our society progresses at full steam.

This situation inspired the FuturICT initiative back in 2010. The initiative called for a major, flagship-size effort to address these challenges by unleashing the full potential of Information and Communication Technologies. At that time, it became clear that emerging fields such as Data Science, Computational Social Science and Global Systems Science would offer promising new approaches to the above problems. However, the solutions at that time were still vague. This has changed, and that is why a FuturICT 2.0 project is timely. As Albert Einstein stressed, problems cannot be solved within the prevailing paradigm that created them. In fact, the World Economic Forum has identified 10 key global challenges, which cannot be addressed with conventional means including today's Big Data approaches, which imply problems such as over-fitting and mistaking correlations for causality. Therefore, disruptive innovations are needed.

FuturICT 2.0 offers such disruptive innovations, which addresses the root of the above problems: lack of sustainability. The combination of the Internet of Things with Blockchain Technology and Complexity Science creates an entirely new opportunity to address our challenges. We discuss this under the label "finance 4.0", which stands for a multi-dimensional incentive system to manage complex systems and promote a circular and sharing economy that would allow to create a high quality of life for more people with less resources. The finance 4.0 system is liberal, democratic, pluralistic, participatory, social and ecological. It makes use of the unlimited, immaterial nature of information, boosts combinatorial innovation and creates opportunities for all, by fostering an open and participatory information, innovation, production and service ecosystem. It realizes that our current success principles of globalization, optimization, regulation and administration have served us well, but have also reached their limits. For this reason, FuturICT 2.0 explores the potentials of complementary success principles such as co-creation, co-evolution, collective intelligence, self-organization, and self-regulation. Information and communication systems, which empower everyone to take better decisions, to be more creative and innovative, and to coordinate and cooperate with others, would lead to better business models, products and services, smarter cities and smarter societies. In other words, the combination of smart technologies with smart citizens will be the success formula for the future. Our work on governance 4.0 and on the open and participatory Nervousnet platform to create data for all by involving citizens are heading exactly in this direction.

The subjects that FuturICT 2.0 addresses are critical and urgent. The project will bring together and enlarge the communities of social (qualitative and quantitative), computational and complexity scientists, foster inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinary collaboration and exchange - and pave the way for a scientific and organizational framework for the emerging digital economy and society. On an organizational level, we will apply the instrument of jointly-supervised ICTSS projects in addition to the traditional workshops, exchanges, and meetings. On a technological level, we will bring together Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Agent-based Simulation, Internet of Things, Blockchain Technology, and Complexity Science, and assess the implications from a social science and systemic perspective. On a methodological level, we will combine mathematical modeling with massive computer simulations, data science, and large-scale experimental approaches, including laboratory and web experiments, crowd sourcing and citizen science, virtual and augmented reality, and multi-player online games. They are important building blocks of a new global ICT system and future society. Addressing these topics together will finally allow the global ICT system to adapt to social and cultural needs, react to unforeseen events and make our society more resilient. By putting together key partners with a strong involvement of industry and junior scientists from various complementary fields, we expect to make significant progress towards the ultimate goal of the FuturICT 2.0 initiative: to find a path towards understanding and managing complex, global, socially interactive systems, with a focus on sustainability, resilience, cooperation, and value creation. 

Links:

FUTURICT 2.0 
www.futurict2.eu  

JB McCarthy from UCC briefs Irish Minister for Research and Innovation on FuturICT

 JB McCarthy from University College Cork (UCC) Ireland briefed Sean Sherlock, the Irish Minister for Research and Innovation about the latest news on FuturICT.

JB explained the extent of the engagement by Irish universities and how the research agenda for FuturICT aligns with the recent national research agenda strategy document as well as with Horizon 2020.

Living Earth Simulator (LES)

The Living Earth Simulator (LES) is the FuturICT vision for how we will simulate or model complex events or scenarios. To date researchers have made great adavnces in many domain specific areas (eg Transportation, Energy, Smart Cities etc) but FuturICT wants to move this process to a new level by allowing for several domain level initiatives to share data and models. We have started using the term Exploratory as a collective term for this more advanced and comprehensive grouping. These additional data points, more complex models and much longer term view of crisis, disaster or policy and regulatory impacts on society and business help us understand interactions within our ecosystem. One of the hallmarks of the LES will be its open architecture that will allow different models and data sources to be incorporated.

The large majority of Open Data and Big Data projects that have been deployed in commercial projects are looking at historical data or at best real time data supporting a service such as parking availability, public transport schedules. FuturICT has a much longer term focus on the issues affecting society and businesses. While real time data and historical data will be used to help inform the models, the key will be to simulate our ecosystem and develop a range of possible scenarios that might emerge. We are conscious that for most foresight challenges, the answer is not a simple binary yes/no type answer. The LES will help develop the multi-disciplinary sciences supporting this area so that data sources can be private or public, Open Data or proprietary/paid for data sources, aggregated or detailed. The compute layer can be private, public, research, paid for service. The models could be open source or private or a mixture and so on. Our society and business models are many and varied, we are unsure of the impact of regulatory and policy mandates so we need to allow for any eventuality. The FuturICT technology will be built to allow for change, flexibity and choice as that is what people expect.

FuturICT and what it means for the future of Data Business

FuturICT and what it means for the future of Data Business

Over the next several weeks I will publish a series of articles on the FuturICT blog on what FuturICT means for the future of Data Business. Yes I am explicitly using the term Data Business as that is the portion of the project I am closely related to and these two words highlight the potential impact of the project for our business partners as well as broad segments of society. 

From the beginning we have always said the project is about connecting Science with Policy with Technology. The planned synthesis of these three items is not as easy as it seems so the FuturICT goal is a real “Grand Challenge”. Within the project there is a focus on leveraging ICT, Social Science and Complexity Science in order to deliver the goals of FuturICT. I like to use the slogan “Big Society, Big Problems, Big Data, Big Complexity so hence we need this new multidisciplinary approach from Big Science to help us”.

In order to understand the broad ranging concepts that are involved in FuturICT I intend to elaborate on the topics below in separate posts. Hopefully they will give you some context as to what are the most important components of the projects and how they relate to business and the jobs, growth and increased competitiveness agenda that is so badly required in the EU.

• ·         The journey from Data Warehouses to Big Data
• ·         Planetary Nervous System (PNS)
• ·         Living Earth Simulator (LES)
• ·         Global Participatory Platform (GPP)
• ·         Innovation Accelerator (IA)
• ·         The Service Economy, Knowledge Economy, Innovation Economy,....
• ·         Business Engagement and Business Impact
• ·         Building a scientific community as the first step to starting a movement that will revolutionise how we use data

·         ....and more topics to come.....