The Birth of a Digital God

By Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich/TU Delft/Complexity Science Hub Vienna)

It is finally happening! At the annual meeting of the Swiss Civil Society Association on November 11, Professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht gave a memorable speech – a “mass,” as some listeners thought. It was not just about trying to create a super-intelligent system with consciousness. No, the goal was now to create a God-like being with superhuman knowledge and abilities to guide our human destiny. However, there is the risk that this God might turn against humanity, he continued, even though it was man-made. The statement that this should free us from Biblical sin was even more surprising.

Gumbrecht is not the first one to raise the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as God. Just recently, the Guardian, under the title ”Deus Ex Machina,” announced that ex-Google collaborator Levandowski wanted to register Artificial Intelligence as religion.[1] Shortly later, Google announced its latest triumph. They had succeeded in building an AI system that learned to win the strategy game “Go” by itself – so well in fact that it could beat the world champion. At the same time, it was suggested that one had now found an approach that would sooner or later solve all the problems of humanity, including those that surpassed our intellectual capacities.

Just a few days later, Spiegel Online wrote: ”God does not need any teachers.”[2] Already in 2013, I discussed the opportunities and risks of the information age in an article entitled “Google as God?”[3] Furthermore, in 2015, the Digital Manifesto asked: “Let us suppose there was a super-intelligent machine with God-like knowledge and superhuman abilities: would we follow its instructions?”[4]

Some readers found the question ridiculous at that time. Not anymore! Because search engines and intelligence services know almost everything about us. We have been living in a Big Brother world already for some time. George Orwell's dystopian novel “1984,” written in 1948, was meant as a warning. But more and more often we get the feeling the bestseller was actually used as an instruction manual.

Today’s data-driven world has two main principles: “Data is the new oil” and “Knowledge is power.” Little by little, and almost unnoticed, this has created a fundamentally new society. There is a new currency, “data,” which replaces classical money. There is a new economic system: the “attention economy,” where our attention is sold by auctions in split seconds. In addition, the companies of “surveillance capitalism” are measuring our behavior, our personality and our lives in ever more detail. In times of free services, we have become a product ourselves. Last but not least, the principle “code is law” has established a new legal system, which bypasses our parliament.

Are we in danger of losing our liberties, human rights and participation step by step, almost imperceptibly? Are we giving up on things that are important to us, just because we fear terrorism, climate change, and cybercrime? Are self-determined citizens in a danger to be turned into remotely controlled subjects?

In fact, this isn’t just fantasy! China is already testing a Citizen Score,[5] i.e. every citizen is rated, has a certain number of points. Minus points will punish those who do not pay for their loan immediately, cross the street during a red light, have the “wrong” friends or neighbors, or reads critical news. The Citizen Score then determines the job opportunities, loan conditions, access to services, and mobility restrictions. Great Britain seems to go even a step further. It measures its citizens including the videos they watch and the music they hear. The system is called “Karma Police.”[6] So, will it punish thought crimes, you may ask? Or is “Karma Police” a kind of “Judgment Day” waiting to come down on us any time?

Do we have to accept this? Computers make better decisions, it is often said. In fact, computers have been the better chess players for years. In many areas they are better workers. They don’t get tired, do not complain, do not go on vacation, and do not have to pay taxes and contributions to social security. Soon they will be better drivers. They diagnose cancer better than physicians and answer questions better than people – at least those that have already an answer.

When will robots become our judge and hangman? When will they start to “fix the overpopulation problem”? (Autonomous killer robots with face recognition probably exist already or could at least exist soon – see the recent movies on slaughterbots and robot swarms.[7]) When will robots replace us? Not just our work… A newspaper article recently suggested that the descendants of humans will be machines.[8] In other words, humanity will be replaced by robots. Is this really our human destiny? Should we build a future for robots or for humans? Isn’t it time to wake up from the transhumanist dream?[9]

Back to the initial question: Is Google creating a digital God? With its Loon project, the company at least tries to be omnipresent. With its search engine, language assistants and measurement sensors in our rooms, Google wants to be omniscient. While the company is not yet omnipotent, it is at least answering 95 percent of our questions, and with personalized information, Google is increasingly steering our thinking and actions. Furthermore, the Calico project is also trying to make people immortal. Therefore, in an overpopulated world, would Google be the judge over life and death?

Whatever, someone recently suggested an AI God would soon write a new Bible.[10] So would he (or she) set the rules we would have to live by? Do we soon have to worship an AI algorithm and submit ourselves to it? No question, some already seem to dream of a digital God who will guide our human destiny. What for some is the invention of God through human ingenuity, however, must be the ultimate blasphemy for Christians – in some sense the rise of the Antichrist.

Whatever one may think about all this, the phrase “knowledge is power” has certainly blown some people’s minds. Google, IBM and Facebook are said to be working on a new operating system for society.[11] Democracy is defamed as outdated technology.[12] They want to engineer paradise on Earth – a smarter planet where everything will be automated. So far, however, the plan did not really work out.[13] The world’s cities with the highest quality of life are located everywhere, but in the leading IT nations. And even in the Silicon Valley, the heart of the digital revolution, and other IT hotspots, experts start to worry…

Elon Musk, for example, fears that Artificial Intelligence could become the greatest threat to humanity. Even Bill Gates had to admit that he was in the camp of those who were worried about superintelligence. The famous physicist Stephen Hawking warned that humans would not be able to compete with the development of Artificial Intelligence. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak agreed: “Computers are going to take over from humans, no question,” he said, but: “Will we be the gods? Will be the family pets? Or will be ants that get stepped on? I don’t know…”[14] Jürgen Schmidhuber, German AI pioneer, believes to know – from a robot’s perspective, we will be like cats.[15]

Of course, the worry that technology could turn against us is already old. Besides George Orwell’s “1984” and “Animal Farm,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” warned us of the danger of rising totalitarianism. Suddenly people also remember “The Machine Stops” by Edward Morgan Forster in 1909 (!). More recent books are Dave Egger’s “The Circle,” “Homo Deus” by Yuval Noah Harari and Joel Cachelin’s “Internet God.” If you like science fiction, you might love “QualityLand” by Marc-Uwe Kling or “iGod” by Willemijn Dicke.

A question, which not only science fiction lovers should ask, is: What future do we want to live in? Never before have we had a better chance to build a world of our liking. But for this we have to take the future into our hands. It’s high time to overcome our self-imposed digital immaturity. To free ourselves from the digital shackles, digital literacy and enlightenment are needed. So far, we are living in a market-conform democracy, where the markets are driven by technology. Instead, we should build an economy that serves to reach the goals of people and society. Technology should be a means of achieving this. This requires a fundamental redesign of our monetary, financial and economic system based on the principle of value-sensitive design. In “The Globalist,” I have recently outlined how this could be done.[16] Maybe you have your own ideas of how to use Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. But in any case, a better future is possible! Let’s demand this better future! Let’s co-create it! What are we waiting for?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/28/artificial-intelligence-god-anthony-levandowski
[2] http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/kuenstliche-intelligenz-gott-braucht-keine-lehrmeister-kolumne-a-1175130.html
[3] https://www.nzz.ch/google-als-gott-1.18049950
[4] http://www.spektrum.de/thema/das-digital-manifest/1375924, English translation: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/will-democracy-survive-big-data-and-artificial-intelligence/
[5] https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21711902-worrying-implications-its-social-credit-project-china-invents-digital-totalitarian
[6] https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-track-web-users-online-identities/
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGAk5gRD-t0
[8] https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/unsere-nachfahren-werden-maschinen-sein-ld.1322780
[9] https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/kommentare/die-gefaehrliche-utopie-der-selbstoptimierung-wider-den-transhumanismus-ld.1301315, http://privacysurgeon.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Human-manifesto_26_short-1.pdf
[10] https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/02/an-ai-god-will-emerge-by-2042-and-write-its-own-bible-will-you-worship-it/
[11] http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/google-gruendet-in-den-usa-government-innovaton-lab-13852715.html, https://www.pcworld.com/article/3031137/forget-trump-and-clinton-ibms-watson-is-running-for-president.html, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/17/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-rule-world-president, http://theconversation.com/if-facebook-ruled-the-world-mark-zuckerbergs-vision-of-a-digital-future-73459
12] Hencken, Randolph. 2014. In: Mikrogesellschaften. Hat die Demokratie ausgedient? Capriccio. Video, veröffentlicht am 15.5.2014. Autor: Joachim Gaertner. München: Bayerischer Rundfunk.
[13] https://www.wiltonpark.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/WP1449-Report.pdf
[14] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2901679/steve-wozniak-on-ai-will-we-be-pets-or-mere-ants-to-be-squashed-our-robot-overlords.html
[15] http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/ueberwindung-des-menschen-durch-selbstlernende-maschinen-15309705.html
[16] https://www.theglobalist.com/author/dirk-helbing/

A PARTICIPATORY SYSTEM TO MONITOR AND FIGHT THE FLU: Influenza season is in full swing and you can help to fight it!

A team of researchers led by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and the University of Geneva launched Grippenet.ch, a webpage and mobile App based platform aimed at providing participatory monitoring of Influenza. Your participation can contribute to enhance this system for better Flu monitoring and to develop novel approaches to prevent epidemics.

The Flu is a major public health issue, resulting in increased medical care consumption, absenteeism and mortality, to name a few. Along with several partners, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) and the University of Geneva (UNIGE) developed and deployed Grippenet.ch, the Swiss component of a European initiative for participatory influenza surveillance called Influenzanet. Through this system, data on Flu is contributed directly by citizen participants, contrary to Sentinella, the epidemiological surveillance system active in Switzerland since 1986, where reports of Flu are reported by health practitioners.

Results show that Grippenet.ch could prove faster, more flexible, and a useful supplemental tool for early detection and monitoring of infectious outbreaks. The Swiss researchers and their collaborators have also released a mobile App, which allows participants to contribute measurements made by their mobile phone sensors. This data could allow scientists to better understand the transmission of the virus and to leverage information technologies and human behavioral responses to help contain epidemics.

Each year in Switzerland, the Flu causes anywhere from 112,000 to 275,000 medical consultations, as well as an excess of mortality among the elderly and additional 97 million francs costs to the health care system. Absenteeism-related costs amount to an additional 200 million francs. All these reasons and more motivated the start of the Grippenet project in December 2016, allowing the monitoring of influenza epidemics though the direct action of Swiss citizens and residents. Based on the European Influenzanet platform that started in 2003 in the Netherlands and Belgium, Grippenet.ch was implemented and launched in Switzerland by the Professorship of Computational Social Sciences (ETHZ), the Institute of Global Health of the Faculty of Medicine at UNIGE, the Digital Epidemiology Laboratory (EPFL, Lausanne) and the National Reference Center for Influenza (HUG, Geneva).

"The principle is very simple. After an anonymous and free registration on grippenet.ch, participants receive a short survey on a weekly basis, enquiring about whether they suffered from potentially Flu-related symptoms" explains Aude Richard, Coordinator for the French speaking Grippenet platform at the Institute of Global Health at the Faculty of Medicine of UNIGE. Throughout the winter of 2016-2017, 342 Swiss residents informed researchers about the presence or absence of Flu-like symptoms in themselves and in those living with them.

An interactive information platform

The website is also an educational and information platform. "The more aware and informed people are, the better they can protect themselves," says Dirk Helbing, Professor of Computational Social Science at the ETH Zurich. "I am thinking, for example, about measures such as vaccination, avoiding intense contact with crowds, and better hand hygiene.” Contributors can view a map of Switzerland to see the Flu levels reported by the community in different cantons, including their own, as well as other statistics on Flu incidence. They can also access more information about influenza and preventive measures.

Predicting and containing Influenza through social-sensing

The Grippenet.ch team just launched a new Android App (currently in German and English but soon appearing in French also), initiating a research study with the aim to develop cutting-edge Machine Learning models to predict Flu exposure through sensor data. Flu transmission is driven by human mobility and contact patterns, which can be inferred using measurements made through mobile phone sensors. Furthermore, this is done in a privacy preserving fashion by aggregating and anonymizing the data that is shared with researchers. “If enough people contribute their measurements, we might be able to build a system that learns to make accurate predictions of who is at high risk of being sick, using regularities in the data. This requires user trust and the utmost respect for their privacy”, explains Olivia Woolley, who runs the Grippenet.ch team at ETH Zurich. “Our ultimate goal is to create a tool that gives people accurate information about their exposure to the Flu so that they have the power to take smart actions to protect themselves and avoid spreading the Flu to others.” The App and study are developped in collaboration with the the Computational Epidemiology Laboratory (ISI, Turin), and the center for Embeded Intelligence (DFKI, Germany) and partially funded by the European Communities H2020 Program, namely the project called CIMPLEX: Bringing CItizens, Models and Data together in Participatory, Interactive SociaL EXploratories (http://www.cimplex-project.eu).

Grippenet.ch, a complement to the Sentinella system

In Switzerland, the Sentinella epidemiological surveillance system has been monitoring Flu outbreaks since 1986. Based on weekly reports by doctors, it provides a continuous observation of influenza viruses circulating in the country. The Sentinella platform works in the monitoring of many acute communicable diseases and is used for research in general medicine. Since its start, 150 to 250 GPs participate voluntarily in the Sentinella system each year.

If Sentinella is a well-established and effective system, then why was grippenet.ch developed? "Unlike the Sentinella network that relies on medical practitioners for the declaration of cases of Flu, grippenet.ch gets its data directly from the population, explains Antoine Flahault, Director of the Institute of Global Health at the Faculty of Medicine of UNIGE. This provides us with a monitoring system that could potentially be faster and more flexible than Sentinella, and allows for direct international comparisons of Flu epidemics, since the data is directly comparable with other European countries. In addition, not everyone who gets the Flu sees a doctor, which is why Grippenet.ch is complementary to Sentinella. "The comparison of the two systems gives us important insights for the planning and prioritization of the public health epidemic response, allowing us, for example, to estimate the percentage of people who do not consult a doctor in case of Flu-like symptoms", adds Antoine Flahault.

A precursor system

Thanks to demographic and geographical localization data allowing greater insight into the causes and localization of rising disease clusters, grippenet.ch could give rise to novel research on the transmission and risk factors of influenza epidemics. "Ultimately, our hope is to better prevent and control the course of the epidemic, as well as its negative consequences" explains Antoine Flahault. In the future, this precursor system could be extended to the surveillance of other diseases, including emerging diseases, providing more reactive data than current surveillance systems, thus allowing earlier action.

If you wish to help grippenet.ch by participating in the project, you can

Download the mobile app here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.dfki.grippenetch.

Or use the web-based platform here: http://www.grippenet.ch/

Contact:

Olivia Woolley, owoolley@ethz.ch

Dirk Helbing, dhelbing@ethz.ch

Lloyd Sanders, lloyd.sanders@gess.ethz.ch

Antoine Flahault, Antoine.Flahault@unige.ch

Aude Richard, aude.richard@unige.ch

Marco Hirsch, marco.hirsch@dfki.de

Paul Lukowicz, paul.lukowicz@dfki.de

ON ANTS AND HUMANITY: Collective Intelligence vs. Superintelligence

Ants and humans are equally successful on Earth in terms of biomass. They are in fact the two most successful species, and both are social, i.e. being social is the reason for their phenomenal success.

Ant colonies can contain up to millions of ants, i.e. they are comparable to large cities. An ant has about 250,000 neurons, and their brain weighs less than a gram. A human brain has between 100 billion and 1 trillion neurons and weighs about 1.5 kilograms.

The number of neurons in an ant colony is therefore up to 250,000 * 1,000,000 = 0.25 trillion neurons. That’s roughly comparable to a human brain. Nevertheless, their distributed brain manages to run an entire society, including division of labour. Moreover, in contrast to humans, they managed to survive for 140 million years.

In fact, the recipe for survival is resilience, and resilience benefits from a decentralised organization. For example, our immune system is decentrally organised, in contrast to the central nervous system. Otherwise, we would probably live much shorter than 100 years.

So, those who think that we now need to build an AI brain running humanity as if each of us were like a cell in a human body, will be proven wrong by history.

Note that the difference between ants in an ant colony and humans is that ants are more or less identical genetically while humans are diverse. That’s why human societies are quickly evolving over time while ants aren’t. Diversity is another resilience mechanism, but even more so, it is a motor of innovation, hence a motor of cultural evolution rather than just genetic evolution. Cultural evolution is obviously much faster, i.e. diversity benefits us. That’s also evidenced by economic studies.

Of course, diversity implies challenges such as complexity and of conflicts of interest, so we need to find suitable coordination mechanisms. Personal digital assistants (potentially using AI technology) could do the job, creating collective intelligence that outsmarts the smartest individual and the smartest AI assistant.

In conclusion, a decentralized organization of humanity is advised, and sociodiversity should be protected like biodiversity, if we do not want sustainability, innovation, economic power, and hence the carrying capacity of the Earth to drop.

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.