TOWARDS DEMOCRATIC SUSTAINABILITY

by Dirk Helbing [1]

1. City Olympics Proposition

Competitions for the best kinds of technologies, solutions for resource shortages, and a quick implementation of new solutions can be achieved through Global City Olympics.

Comments: Cities and social communities can be important agents of global change. A combination of competition and collaboration among cities can advance us in our efforts to solve the challenges of the 21st century. Thus, I follow Elinor Ostrom and suggest a "polycentric" approach to solving global problems [1]. The idea of "City Olympics" [2] may become a powerful tool. City Olympics would have a sportive spirit. Cities all over the world would engage in friendly competitions to achieve the best scientific and technological progress, as well as mobilize collective action to counter climate change. They would reach the highest possible degree of citizen engagement. After the competitive phase of each Climate Olympics, there would be a cooperative phase, where the best ideas, technologies and urban governance concepts would be exchanged among the participating cities. 

For a more detailed explanation of this idea click this link

2. Digital Upgrade of Democracy Proposition 

Digital technology allows to design a new form of democracy with transparent, uncensored, fair and moderated discourses, in which AI is used to support the constructive exchange of ideas and the identification of different perspectives that need to be integrated. Responsible behavior and high-quality contributions would be promoted.

Comments: More and more people claim that digital democracy is the evil that makes our world ungovernable [3]. Modern mass media and social media tend to create ‘filter bubbles’, which are reinforcing opinions, while reducing the ability to handle different points of view. Digital information becomes increasingly personalized, manipulative, and deceptive.

But instead of trying to revive governance principles of the past, which have failed to embrace the complexity and diversity of modern societies, we should engage in digitally upgrading democracy through the use of Massive Open Online Deliberation Platforms (MOODs) [4]. Letting people decide about “yes” or “no” is not enough. Citizens should be able to continuously engage in online deliberation processes, where they can feed in their ideas and voice their preferences on different aspects of a topic. A refined, more inclusive process would enable people to learn about and to unfold the different aspects of a complex political topic.

For a more detailed explanation of this idea click this link

3. Finance 4.0+ Proposition 

In order to solve the challenges of the 21st century, the financial system has to be altered into a multi-currency system representing different positive and negative externalities and incentivizing behavior that is aligned with our societal goals and values.

Comments: Computer simulations about the world’s future predict severe resource shortages –and linked to this – an economic collapse. This is known at least since “The Limits to Growth” study commissioned by the Club of Rome, and the “Global 2000” study issued by the US government. The UN Sustainability Agenda 2030 is giving the world less than 15 years of time to solve this problem.

It is necessary to create a multi-dimensional incentive and reward system beyond money. We call this system finance 4.0+. This can now be built by combining the Internet of Things, blockchain technology and complexity science. To boost a circular economy, we need a system that can measure, value and trade positive and negative externalities – external effects of interactions between people, companies and the environment. Desired values can be agreed on in a participatory, subsidiary way, as suggested in proposition 2.

For a more detailed explanation of this idea click this link 

4. Democratic Capitalism Proposition [2]

The digital technology has the potential to reinvent the money system such that it empowers people to be innovative and to engage in social and environmental projects. Moving beyond venture capitalism towards crowd funding for all would enable participatory budgeting and democratic capitalism. 

Comments: One cannot put the interests of a few hundred people over the well-being of society as a whole. As long as the mechanisms of the monetary and financial system don’t benefit everyone, the world will not be stable and sustainable on the long run. Fortunately, there are alternatives. The failed approach of pumping trillions into the economy from the top by means of “quantitative easing” could be replaced by a new approach, where the money is created from the bottom. The idea is [5] that everyone would regularly get an “investment premium”, which would have to be distributed to people, companies or institutions with good ideas, or those who are engaged in social or environmental projects. Then money and resources would flow into the activities we find most important. This would boost innovation in a pluralistic manner. Such an approach would combine our two most successful organizing principles – democracy and capitalism – in a new way, and replace today’s market-driven democracy, where capitalism threatens to destroy democracy.

For a more detailed explanation of this idea click this link

References:

[1] Ostrom, E., A polycentric approach for coping with climate change. Ann. Econ. Finance, 2014. 15(1): p. 71-108.

[2] Helbing, D., City Olympics, 2017 

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di_Qf1nR_XA. 
Uploaded on May 20, 2017

[3] Jaishankar, D., Brexit: The First Major Casualty Of Digital Democracy. June. 27, 2016.  
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.in/dhruva-jaishankar/brexit-the-first-major-ca_b_10695964.html

[4] Helbing, D. and S. Klauser, How to make democracy work in the digital age. 2016, ETH Zurich.  
Link:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305571691_How_to_make_democracy_work_in_the_digital_age.

[5] Helbing, D., Digitization 2.0: A New Game Begins. June 2017
Link:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317279118_Digitization_20_A_New_Game_Begins

[1] Affiliation: ETH Zürich, Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences, Computational Social Science, Clausiusstrasse 50, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland. mailto: dirk.helbing@gess.ethz.ch

[2] An extensive explanation of these propositions can be found in [1].

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