Open Source Urbanism: Beyond Smart Cities

Sergei Zhilin (TU Delft), Jeroen van den Hoven, Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich/TU Delft/Complexity Science Hub Vienna)

Open Source Urbanism can help mitigate the migration crisis and improve living conditions all over the world.

The dream of building “good cities” is old¹. Since the 20^th century, there have been many attempts to create, develop or shape cities, sometimes even from scratch. Examples range from gigantic modernistic approaches known from Brasilia and Chandigarh, to more radical, but theoretical concepts aimed at changing society and engineering social order, such as Ecotopia or the Venus project. Recent developments are driven by the planetary trend towards urbanization, mass migration, and the need for sustainability. New visions of a global urban future were developed, such as “Sustainable”, “Eco”, or “Resilient” Cities, typically based on a top-down approach to the design of urban habitats.

Cities created from scratch heavily depend on massive private investments, for example, Songdo in South Korea or Lavasa in India. Despite ambitious goals and many technological innovations, their long-term success cannot be taken for granted, as they are often conceived by urban planners without the participation of people who later live in these cities. Such projects are typically implemented without much feedback from citizens. This makes it difficult to meet their needs. In fact, some of these cities have ended as “ghost cities”.

In the wake of the digital revolution, data-driven approaches promised to overcome these problems. “Smart cities”, “smart nations,” and even a “smarter planet” were proposed. Various big IT companies decided to invest huge amounts of money into platforms designed to run the “cities of the future”. Fuelled by the upcoming Internet of Things, cities would be covered with plenty of sensors to automate them and thereby turn them into a technology-driven “paradise.” So far, however, these expectations have not been met.² Why?

Geoffrey West points out that cities cannot be run like companies.³ A company is oriented at maximizing profit, i.e. a single quantity, while a city must balance a lot of different goals and interests. This tends to make companies efficient, but vulnerable to mistakes. Cities are often less efficient, but more resilient. Driven by diverse interests, cities naturally do not put all eggs in one basket. This is why cities typically live longer than businesses, kingdoms, empires, and nation states.⁴

Importantly, cities are not just giant supply chains. They are also not huge entertainment parks, in which citizens consume premanufactured experiences. Instead, they are places of experimentation, learning, social interaction, creativity, innovation, and participation. Cities are places, in which diverse talents and perspectives come together, and collective intelligence emerges. Quality of life results, when many kinds of people can pursue their interests and unfold their talents while these activities inspire and catalyse each other. In other words, cities partly self-organize, based on a (co-)evolutionary dynamics.^5,6

While rapid urbanization comes with many problems, such as the overuse of resources, climate change and inequality,⁵ cities become ever more important, as they are motors of innovation.^3,5 Presently, more than half of humanity lives in cities, and the urban population is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. To meet the social, economic, and ecological challenges, innovation must be further accelerated, as the UN Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals stress.

Given the digital revolution and the sustainability challenges, we now have to re-invent the way cities and human settlements are built and operated, and how cities can contribute to the solutions of humanity’s present and future existential problems. In the past, we had primarily two ways of addressing such issues: (1) nation-states (and their organization in the United Nations) and (2) global corporations. Both have not managed to deliver the necessary solutions on time, e.g. to problems such as climate change and lack of sustainability. Therefore, we propose a third way of addressing global problems: through networks of cities. ⁷ So, how to unleash the urban innovation engine?

CITY CHALLENGES

“City Olympics” or “City Challenges” could boost innovation on a cross-city level involving all stakeholders. They would be national, international or even global competitions to find innovative solutions to important challenges. Competitive disciplines could, for example, be the reduction of climate change, the development of new, energy-efficient systems, sustainability, resilience, social integration, and peace. The solutions would be publicly funded and should be Open Source (for example, under a Creative Commons license) in order to be reused and developed further by a multitude of actors in all cities i.e. by corporations, SMEs and spin-offs, researchers, NGOs and civil society. In this way, the potential of trends such as Open Source Movement, Hackathons, Fablabs, MakerSpaces, Gov Labs and Citizen Science would be raised to an entirely new level, creating the potential for civil society solutions. The new success principles would be collaborative practices such as co-learning, co-creation, combinatorial innovation, co-ordination, co-operation, co-evolution, and collective intelligence.

Increasing the role of cities and regions as drivers of innovation would allow innovative solutions and initiatives to be launched in a bottom-up way. All interested circles could contribute to City Challenges. Scientists and engineers would come up with new solutions and citizens would be invited to participate as well, e.g. through Citizen Science. Media would continuously feature the efforts and progress made in the various projects. Companies could try to sell better products and services. Politicians would mobilize the society. Overall, this would create a positive, playful and forward-looking spirit, which could largely promote the transformation towards a digital and sustainable society. In the short time available (remember that the UN wants to accomplish the sustainability goals by around 2030), the ecological transformation of our society can only succeed if the majority of our society is taken on board, and if everyone can participate and profit.

OPENSOURCING URBAN INNOVATIONS

Cities are the places where the engagement of citizens can have the greatest impact. The most liveable cities manage to create opportunities to unfold the talents of many different people and cultures and to catalyse fruitful interactions among them. Opportunities for participation and co-creation are key for success.

Alexandros Washburn⁸ said about the design process of New York City that he could not control anything, but influence everything; successful urban design required the right combination of top-down and bottom-up involvement. It is therefore essential that urban development involves all stakeholders including citizens. Vauban, a quarter of the city of Freiburg, Germany, is a good example for this. The city council encouraged the citizens to actively participate in land-use planning and city budgeting. Sustainability and new energy-saving technologies were a primary focus of the planning strategy. In two new districts (Rieselfeld and Vauban), self-built and community architecture was created, which led to urban environments conceived and designed by future inhabitants according to their own vision. Now, Freiburg counts as benchmark city. Its concepts of sustainable urban planning and community participation are widely used by other cities all over the world.

So far, most urban planning professionals do not pay much attention to long-term involvement of citizens in urban development. With the ubiquity of information and communication technologies, our cities are getting smarter, but not automatically more inclusive, just, and democratic. The Citizen Score, a surveillance-based approach to control the behaviours of people, shows how easily technological progress may lead to technological totalitarianism. In the private sector as well, global corporations, geared towards profit, can turn into threats of democracy and human rights. When services are free, people are the product, data can fall into the wrong hands, and human dignity, autonomy, and freedom will be compromised. In data-rich societies, where people are measured and watched, profiled and targeted, this problem is quite significant. If cities of the future were run like businesses, based on surveillance, driven by data and controlled by algorithms, liberty, democracy, and human rights might quickly erode.

The application of open source principles to the co-creation of urban environments could overcome these problems by supporting active participation, technological pluralism and diversity. Thereby, it would also avoid technological lock-ins and dead-ends. The open source movement, which started with opening software (see the example of GitHub) now promotes the co-production of open content (Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap), open hardware (3D-printer RepRap), and even open architecture (WikiHouse). Open Source Urbanism would be the next logical step of this open source trend.

In 2011, Saskia Sassen wrote: “I see in Open Source a DNA that resonates strongly with how people make the city theirs or urbanize what might be an individual initiative. And yet, it stays so far away from the city. I think that it will require making. We need to push this urbanizing of technologies to strengthen horizontal practices and initiatives.”⁴

Yochai Benkler argues that open source projects indicate the beginning of a social, technological, organizational and economic transformation of the society towards a new mode of production.⁹ This new mode, called commons-based peer production, is a collective activity of volunteers, usually coordinated via the Internet, producing free-to-use knowledge. Open Source Urbanism, as a new way of urban development, would therefore build on concepts such as Open Source Innovation and Commons-Based Peer Production.

In fact, citizens are keen to be not just consumers, but co-producers of their urban habitats. Some of them already experiment with open-sourcing urban design by collecting, improving, and sharing their Do-It-Yourself design blueprints and manuals on the Internet. The “Nation of Makers” initiative promotes community-driven design, prototyping, and fabrication as well in order to solve local and global challenges by improving lives in local communities around the planet.

Such examples are presently still rare and dispersed, and, therefore, not yet able to shift cities towards more inclusive urban development on a global scale. For this, one would need a socio-technical platform to consolidate and strengthen the nascent movement. Such a platform could promote the exchange of best practices and solutions to frequently occurring problems. The results would be digital commons designed to satisfy citizens’ needs¹⁰.

The proposed approach pushes for a new paradigm of globalisation, which one may call “glocalisation”. It would be based on thinking global, but acting local (and diverse), on experimentation, learning from each other, and mutual support. The approach would be scalable. It would be more diverse and less vulnerable to disruptions. It would promote innovation and collective intelligence, while being compatible with privacy, freedom, participation, democracy, and a high quality of life. If cities would open up and engage in co-creation and sharing, they would quickly become more innovative and efficient. Open Source Urbanism could take our cities and societies to an entirely new level and also help to create better living conditions in developing countries and regions suffering from war more quickly.  

References

1.        Sennett, R. Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018).

2.        Hugel, S. & Hoare, T. Disrupting cities through technology, Wilton Park. (2016).

3.        West, G. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. (Penguin, 2017).

4.        Sassen, S. Open Source Urbanism. Domus (2011). Available at: http://www.domusweb.it/en/op-ed/2011/06/29/open-source-urbanism.html. (Accessed: 16th November 2016)

5.        Bettencourt, L. M. A. & West, G. A unified theory of urban living. Nature 467, 912–913 (2010).

6.        Batty, M. Cities and complexity: understanding cities with cellular automata, agent-based models, and fractals. (The MIT press, 2007).

7.        Barber, B. R. If mayors ruled the world: Dysfunctional nations, rising cities. (Yale University Press, 2013).

8.        Washburn, A. The nature of urban design: A New York perspective on resilience. (Island Press, 2013).

9.        Benkler, Y. Freedom in the Commons: Towards a Political Economy of Information. Duke Law J. 52, 1245–1276 (2003).

10.      Schrijver, L. in Handbook of Ethics, Values, and Technological Design: Sources, Theory, Values and Application Domains (eds. van den Hoven, J., Vermaas, P. E. & van de Poel, I.) 589–611 (Springer Netherlands, 2015). doi:10.1007/978-94-007-6970-0_22

The Blockchain Age: Awareness, Empowerment and Coordination

It may be the next step in human, social, cultural evolution

(Pdf of of this article can be downloaded here)

Currently there’s a lot of hype surrounding blockchain technology. But the best ways to use it are still to come. Blockchain is often seen as a revolutionary technology, a public decentralized registry that allows for trusted peer-to-peer transactions without middlemen such as banks or other institutions. Blockchain technology is used for new kinds of money and payment systems such as Bitcoin and Ether. However, it also enables to create distributed autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Besides the financial sector, blockchains may revolutionize supply chains, the health system, administrations, humanitarian aid and law enforcement. Like any other technology, however, one must pay attention to possible side effects and ethical implications. For example, if you are late paying the interest rates of your loan, you may not be able to rent a car, or your access to other services might be blocked.

In an over-regulated world, strict law enforcement might even make our economy and society inefficient and dysfunctional. Our old world used to be a world where it was possible to do things that were morally undesirable. With blockchain we are moving to a world where the morally undesirable is made impossible. Even though this may sound good at first, it may actually prevent learning from mistakes and, furthermore, seriously obstruct innovation – since innovation always challenges established solutions.

A further concern is the tendency that non-commercial content in the Internet may gradually be crowded out. Before we are able to get creative, we may then have to deal with a lot of intellectual property rights. To illustrate the implications, just imagine how ineffective it would be, if we had smart contracts for use of language and, therefore, had to pay for every word we use, when communicating with other people. This would be the end of shared culture as we know it.

Over-commercialization and loss of creative freedoms are, therefore, seriously issues to be considered. This is particularly important in times where automation is forcing us to be more creative, and access to data is very limited for ordinary people, start-ups, small and medium-size businesses. According to the WEF and OECD, wealth inequality is already a serious obstacle to economic growth. However, the inequality in accessible data volumes in today’s attention economy is even greater.

Nevertheless, if properly used, blockchain technology is a possible means to reach the next level of human, social, cultural evolution. It can provide society with awareness and collective memory, if the slowness and significant energy consumption of today’s blockchains can be overcome. It could be used to boost creativity, innovation, coordination, sustainability and resilience, hence, enable an entirely new, efficient and trustable organization of the world’s societies at large.

Human evolution depends on the ability to coordinate people with diverse interests and goals. When genetic favouritism (giving advantages to relatives) was partially replaced by direct reciprocity (“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”), societies reached the next level of cooperation. In the past centuries, cultural evolution has further progressed with the implementation of more sophisticated cooperation mechanisms such as “indirect reciprocity” (i.e. reputation- and trust-based systems). Now, with the invention of the blockchain and similar technologies, the next level of society appears to be within reach, as it is possible to establish trust in a peer-to-peer way even between selfish actors, without the need of intermediary institutions.

Blockchain is giving societies an unalterable ledger of our dealings with each other – a veritable registry, on the basis of which reputations can be assessed, and deceit can be unmasked. It is now possible to create collective awareness of how events are actually playing out and how they come about. Blockchain allows one to build a digital society, in which the legitimacy of interactions can be checked and verified.

Delft University of Technology has years of experience with primitive ledgers to record interactions. For instance, the BarterCast ledger records who shared Internet bandwidth with whom. Even when interactions are anonymous, such as in Bittorrent peer-to-peer file sharing environments, using interaction records it is easy to identify and discourage unfair, non-reciprocal use of resources in the system (here: bandwidth).

So, what does this ultimately imply for the way we may all interact in future societies? With the concept of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), blockchain technology can not only cure all sorts of blown-up bureaucratic structures, by coordinating people, resources, and processes in more transparent and efficient ways. It will even allow one to build a new form of socio-ecological, liberal, efficient and democratic kind of capitalism. This will consider externalities of everyone’s activities on their environment and others by combining blockchain technology with the Internet of Things, creating a socio -ecological finance system. In such a way, it is possible to boost a sustainable circular and sharing economy, with a variety of incentives, i.e. new socio-economic feedbacks.

Evolutionary biology shows that human language has evolved to give us the ability to talk about each other. This has boosted survival in a life-threatening world. Next, social intelligence evolved. Now, blockchain technology may create a new basis of truth and trust. A tamper-proof escape from lying, cheating, and hurting others would be a major leap forward in human evolution. We can do this now.

Today’s world lacks memory and awareness of the reality we influence and which influences us. With blockchain technology this can now be changed. However, given that there are different ways of building a blockchain-based society, we must avoid to fall into the trap of a totalitarian post-privacy world, in which people might be restricted – and unnecessarily restrained in unfolding their knowledge, ideas, and talents. If we want to see a world with a level playing field for everyone, we need to insist on responsible blockchain innovations and on using distributed ledger mechanisms for the greater good, rather than allowing them to be usurped and harnessed by a very limited group of people for private interests.

It is important to figure out (e.g. by means of multi-player online games or Virtual Reality experiments) what information should be disclosed to whom and at what point in time, while avoiding harmful information asymmetries. Human dignity, socio-economic diversity, and the outcomes of social self-organization may significantly depend on this.

The digital society we have in mind would offer protection and fair opportunities to all, while fostering collective intelligence, based on the sharing of knowledge and ideas. Openness, interoperability, fair access, and participatory opportunities would allow everyone to stand on the shoulders of others, thereby boosting a thriving society without avoidable shortages. This new digital age would empower everyone to be better informed and more innovative. With a subsidiary form of organization, it would allow everybody to participate in the co-creation of the spheres of life we care about, while helping us to coordinate our creative forces. By considering externalities, this can now be done in a way that minimizes harm to the environment and others while maximizing beneficial effects. So, what are we waiting for? Let’s build the blockchain age together!

Authors

Jeroen van den Hoven is full professor of Ethics and Technology at Delft University of Technology and editor in chief of Ethics and Information Technology.

Johan Pouwelse is an associate professor of computer science at Delft University of Technology. He is founder of the TU Delft Blockchain Lab.

Dirk Helbing is full professor of Computational Social Science at ETH Zürich.

Stefan Klauser is a political scientist and fintech expert at ETH Zurich.

Responsible IT Innovation: How to digitally upgrade our society?

by Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich/Delft University of Technology) and 
Jeroen van den Hoven (Delft University of Technology)

Why is the world confronted with so many problems, even though we have more data and better technology than ever? We are not using it rightly.

When Chris Anderson postulated "the end of theory" in 2008, there was no public outcry. While the new field of Big Data analytics spread, altogether it seems that scientists did not pay much attention to the claim that "the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete".[1] This was a big mistake - not only because it weakened the role of science, but also because of the implications for society at large.  

In the meantime, IT companies and governments around the world have made huge investments in infrastructures and machine learning tools to store and mine Big Data. There are entirely new approaches such as predictive policing, "big nudging"[2] (the large-scale manipulation of individual emotions, opinions, decisions and behaviors[3] using knowledge from behavioral economics and massive amounts of personal data), and citizen scores[4] (rewarding and punishing citizens for specific behaviors and those of their friends). Even the idea of predictive sentencing (based on the likelihood of future offenses) is spreading.[5] This questions human rights, the separation of powers, democracy and justice - achievements of hundreds of years of human cultural, political and institutional history, lessons learnt from many conflicts and wars.

It is time to make up our minds and respond to the novel, data-driven reality with a constructive operational framework that enables sustainable new modes of political thinking. Digital technologies and data science are now used to shape our societies, to constitute the very fabric of our sociality, often circumventing science and democratic decision-making.[6] Data-driven updates of historical ways of running societies are now in the making, for example, fascism 2.0 (a big brother and brave new world society), communism 2.0 (distributing rights and resources based on a paternalistic "benevolent dictator" approach), feudalism 2.0 (based on a few monopolies and a new kind of caste system), and capitalism 2.0 (discussed below). Moreover, cybernetic concepts of society, which use automated feedback loops, have spread from Chile to Singapore to other countries.[7] Google is aiming to build the operating system of the digital society,[8] and IBM's Watson is proposed for US president.[9] Some experts even suggest, Artificial Intelligence will solve the world's problems, once machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence.[10] Is this a reasonable expectation?

We must question such overly optimistic claims and projections. Even strong supporters of new technologies such as Big Data and Artificial Intelligence should better acknowledge their limitations and side effects. One would think that, before one tries to turn the world into a "data-driven paradise", one would demonstrate the feasibility of this idea and the superiority of the new approach. However, none of the leading IT nations has succeeded in contributing to the top 10 most livable cities on our planet. In addition, the world is in pretty bad shape, in spite of the fact there are more data and better technologies than ever. Financial crises, violent conflicts, mass migration around the planet, increasing cyber threats, dangerous global warming and emerging shortages of resources are just a few examples of problems, for which data-driven solutions have not been found. We also have not managed to overcome the last financial, economic, and public spending crisis, while the next one seems to be looming already. 

The fact that we are far from solving these problems is actually not by chance.

First, conventional Big Data analytics must be improved in various aspects. So far, there is a lack of quantitative indicators to judge the quality of Big Data analyses. The bigger a data set the more spurious correlations and meaningless patterns occur. For instance, most patterns of stars one sees in the sky do not have scientific relevance. Given such "over-fitting" problems, how significant are Big Data results from a statistical point of view? How much are they biased by the data providers and those who build and choose the algorithms? To what extent do information systems help people to take well-informed, conscious and responsible decisions, and to what extent do they opinionate or manipulate them?

Second, how robust are the results of Big Data analyses, given the issue of parameter sensitivity? For example, how much do classification results and error rates depend on the classification method and model parameters applied? In fact, for every terrorist there are hundreds of people on the lists of terror suspects, who will never commit a serious crime. More generally, how often do Big Data analyses discriminate people, and how to protect or compensate them?[11] For instance, what if health insurance rates would depend on the food that people eat: would it be fair to charge women and men, Jews, Christians and Muslims different amounts (on average)?

Third, going one step further, how much trust, how much solidarity and other social capital is destroyed or exploited by today's data-driven business models?¹¹ This is important to know if we want to avoid the risk that public interests are undermined and public values corroded. For example, there is increasing awareness that "big nudging" weakens critical thinking and resistance to propaganda, social cohesion, informational self-determination, and the self-control of our lives.² Thus, how well are the implications of Big Data algorithms compatible with democracy, freedom, fairness, human rights, and the separation of powers? Scientists should start to measure these things. One urgently needs ways to assess the quality of data and algorithms - to be precise: various kinds of qualities. And one needs different standardized ways to look at data: digital filters providing pluralistic perspectives.

A system that is oriented at a single indicator (such as gross national product per capita or a citizen score) does not serve humans well. It is crucial to create tools and institutions, which support the transparent design of technological systems that are compatible with the moral, social and cultural values of a society. For example, system designs for efficiency may look different from designs for sustainability, usability, flexibility, resilience, fairness, equality, justice, transparency, accountability, (informational) self-determination, self-organization, democracy, inclusion, dignity, happiness, well-being, inspiration, creativity, innovation, safety, security, health, empathy, friendship, solidarity, participation, or peace. Virtual Reality may now help to make these various perspectives understandable.

Importantly, Responsible Data Science and Responsible AI require value pluralism.[12] Therefore, the use of Big Data and AI should be opened up beyond the circles of big corporations, secret services and the military, as the openAI initiative demanded as well. The complexity of modern societies requires the ability to see and judge the world from various perspectives and to bring them in a suitable balance, otherwise a society becomes dysfunctional sooner or later. To achieve a high quality of life, one needs pluralistic, flexible, adaptive, context-dependent and culturally fitting schemes of governance, which offer diverse opportunities for many different groups of people. Compared to this, today's data-driven schemes to govern societies are overly simplistic. While they claim to be human-centric, the great majority of people has actually no say in how the new operating system would work and what would be its goals.

However, it is important to understand that society is not a machine. Automating and running it like a modern production line is not adequate. For example, it would not be enough to simulate majority decisions in a computer using digital doubles. This would mean to turn average behaviors into social norms or standards, which would constitute something like a majority dictatorship with little protection of minorities - certainly not a desirable governance approach. The long-term consequences could be a loss of socio-economic diversity, a decline in the innovation rate, the loss of economic efficiency, and socio-political instability, potentially leading to war. To achieve culturally fitting, sustainable and legitimate results, deliberation processes are crucial. By identifying solutions that are satisfactory from various perspectives they manage to serve different functionalities at the same time. Moreover, by combining and integrating various perspectives, they create innovative solutions that manage to bring different interests under one roof.[13] This calls for suitable deliberation platforms enabling democracy 2.0,[14] which support the emergence of collective intelligence, i.e. of solutions that are better than any single solution by unleashing the potential of diversity. Civil society is still an underused resource.

Of course, governments should utilize the possibilities of data and information technologies. However, it is highly non-trivial what constitues a responsible and good use. The statement "code is law" reflects the fact that algorithms increasingly shape our reality.[15] While the behavior of people is regulated by hundreds of laws, algorithms are subject to very few regulations, even though they may have super-human powers. This is inappropriate and dangerous, as actors without legitimate grounds can increasingly interfere with the lives of millions of people, often without their knowledge. Altogether, this does not seem to be helpful. Humans are increasingly losing control over the information and communication technologies they have created. For instance, cybercrime costs us 3 trillion dollars annually, and it is increasing exponentially. Therefore, our judgment is that companies and institutions are just at the beginning of making good use of Big Data and AI. The application of these technologies is not yet mature. They lack participatory opportunities, transparency, and mechanisms to promote fact-based, responsible, ethical and legitimate use.

While many countries and companies may have put in place IT infrastructures to control society with the very best intentions, these imply serious new threats. Imagine, for example, that political extremists would gain control over today's powerful IT tools, which enable effective and hard-to notice censorship and propaganda. It is clear that this could have catastrophic and irreversible consequences. For such reasons, one must ensure that the use of powerful IT tools will be soon embedded in a suitable institutional framework. Improvements are urgently needed, including parliamentary control, scientific use, ethical oversight, transparency, and compensation of victims. In some democratic countries one can already see what can happen if one does not take care of these things. A gradual restriction of democratic principles or even a transition to a totalitarian state appear to be entirely possible.

In summary, super-intelligent systems will certainly help us to solve a number of difficult problems, but not all. Social capital, culture, security, peace, financial stability, mass innovation, and thriving lives (including jobs for all) seem to be out of scope. To address these issues, there is a need to digitally upgrade our socio-economic system. It is important to understand that the digital transformation of societies takes place in two phases: The first phase is based on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and top-down solutions, but it is likely to destroy more jobs than it creates. The second phase will add open and participatory bottom-up structures and create a decentralized information, innovation, production and service ecosystem, using a combination of the Internet of Things, Complexity Science, FinTech (e.g. Bitcoin-inspired block chain technologies), and new kinds of Social Technologies such as personal digital assistants. 

As Albert Einstein said: "One can not solve our problems with the same kind of thinking that created them." To fix our problems, there is a need for a new paradigm, otherwise societies will fail. Therefore, we propose to digitally upgrade capitalism, the so far most successful economic system, which is based on bottom-up self-organization, entrepreneurial and individual freedom, competition, high innovation rates, efficiency, flexibility, and resilience. Now, one needs to add a liberal and democratic framework supporting "(eco-) systems thinking", co-creation, co-evolution, and collective intelligence. 

The Internet of Things will finally allow us to measure external effects of interactions, to price such positive and negative externalities, and to trade them in a multi-dimensional way - a system we propose to call "finance 4.0". This will create entirely new markets, but first of all, promote resource efficiency, a circular economy, sharing, and cooperation. In this multi-dimensional exchange system, additional kinds of "money" can be created in a bottom-up way. This can generate a living for everyone and public resources in times, where progressive automation is threatening incomes, taxes, and consumption, i.e. the basis of our economy. Let us now build the framework for the digital society to come. There is no time to lose.

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[1] C. Anderson, The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete, Wired Magazine (June 23, 2008), see http://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/

[2] D. Helbing et al., Digitale Demokratie statt Datendiktatur, Spektrum der Wissenschaft (January 2016), see http://www.spektrum.de/pdf/digital-manifest/1376682

[3] R.M. Bond et al., A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization, Nature 489, 295-298 (2012); A.D.I. Kramer et al. Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks, PNAS 11, 8788-8790 (2014); R. Epstein and R.D. Robertson, The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcome of elections, PNAS 112, E4512-E4521 (2015).

[4] ACLU: Orwellian citizen score, China's credit score system, is a warning for Americans, Computerworld (October 7, 2015), see http://www.computerworld.com/article/2990203/security/aclu-orwellian-citizen-score-chinas-credit-score-system-is-a-warning-for-americans.html

[5] A.M. Barry-Jester et al., Should prison sentences be based on crimes that haven't been committed yet? FiveThirtyEight (August 4, 2015), see http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/prison-reform-risk-assessment/

[6] D. Lazer, The rise of the social algorithm, Science 348, 1090-1091 (2015).

[7] E. Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile, MIT Press (2014); S. Harris, The social laboratory, Foreign Policy (July 29, 2014), see http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/29/the-social-laboratory/

[8] A. Lobe, Google möchte den Staat neu programmieren [Google wants to re-program the state], Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (October 14, 2015), see http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/google-gruendet-in-den-usa-government-innovaton-lab-13852715.html

[9] K. Noyes, Forget Trump and Clinton: IBM's Watson is running for president, PCWorld (February 8, 2016), see http://www.pcworld.com/article/3031137/forget-trump-and-clinton-ibms-watson-is-running-for-president.html

[10] S. Dörner, In 29 Jahren sind die Probleme der Menschheit gelöst [In 29 year the problems of humanity will be solved], Die Welt (February 14, 2016), see http://m.welt.de/wirtschaft/webwelt/article152198869/In-29-Jahren-sind-die-Probleme-der-Menschheit-geloest.html

[11] D. Helbing, Thinking Ahead: Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society (Springer, 2015), Chapter 10: Big Data Society.

[12] J. van den Hoven, The use of normative theories in computer ethics, in: The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics, edited by L. Floridi (Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 59-76

[13] J. van den Hoven, Engineering and the problem of moral overload, Sci. Eng. Ethics (2011), see http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11948-011-9277-z#/page-1

[14] D. Helbing and E. Pournaras, Build digital democracy, Nature 527, 33-34 (2015).

[15] L. Lessig, Code and other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0 (Basic Books, 2006).