This is
the text of the speech that I gave this morning in Maribor, Slovenia at the Out of the Box Conference 2012- Special session with World Thinkers
Since the origin of human civilization, there
is a continuous struggle between chaos and order. While
chaos may stimulate creativity and
innovation, order is needed to coordinate
human action to create synergy effects, more efficiency, and common goods
such as our transportation infrastructures, universities, schools, and
theaters, institutions (like parliaments and courts), but also language and
culture.
According
to Hobbes, civilization started with everyone fighting against everybody else
(“homo hominis lupus”). Even today, civilization
is highly vulnerable, as the outbreak of war in former Yugoslavia has
shown, but also the situation in many countries today, particularly after
natural disasters.
On the
one hand, we are struggling with
conflicts, which are the result of suppression and lack of participation,
and of sanctioning people who are not part of the mainstream culture. On the
other hand, we are suffering of many
social dilemmas, such as the exploitation and destruction of our
environment, global warming, overfishing, tax evasion, exploitation of social
benefit systems, and other tragedies of the commons.
In order
to mitigate problems like these, we need
to learn how to understand and manage complexity in our
techno-socio-economic-environmental systems. For this, we need to think out of the box, because complex
systems work differently from what our intuition suggests.
Complex systems are often hard to predict and hard
to manage. And they behave in surprising ways. Their
behavior is NOT well understood from the properties of their COMPONENTS. It’s
rather the INTERACTIONS between these components, which we need to focus on,
because they are the basis of the self-organization
of complex systems and of new, so-called emergent
properties, which cannot be understood from the component properties. Society is more than the sum of its parts.
The change of perspective from a
component-oriented to an interaction-oriented view may be AS hard and
revolutionary as the transition from the
geo-centric to the helio-centric worldview, which made modern physics
possible, and many of the benefits that came with it. This new systemic view
will enable us to find new solutions to old problems such as social conflicts
and tragedies of the commons.
Let me
stress that economic value generation
would not be possible without many kinds of social capital, such as trust, solidarity, social values, norms,
and culture. While absolutely crucial for social well-being and the functioning
of society, social capital is largely
invisible, and hardly understood. We know, however, that it is the result of our social network interactions.
But social capital may be damaged or
exploited, as the environment has been damaged and exploited. Hence, we need to learn how to value and protect
social capital. The evaporation of trust during the financial crisis may
serve as a warning example. It caused the evaporation of thousands of billions
of dollars in the stock markets and elsewhere.
In order
to learn how to protect social capital, we need, first of all, a global systems science, which allows us
to gain a holistic understanding of
our world, of systemic risks, and how integrated systems design can create more
resilient and sustainable systems. Changing
interactions in the system can mitigate problems, since the current kinds
of interactions are causing them. In fact, unstable interactions cause problems
such as tragedies of the commons, segregation, conflict, revolutions, wars, and
cascading effects causing extreme events and disasters. Moreover, our global markets are constructed in a way
that ethical behavior tends to have a
competitive disadvantage – that’s why ethical behavior has so hard times to
survive and spread.
We may
understand such systemic instabilities
as situations, in which a situation gets out of control even, if everyone is
trying to do his/her best. Take dense, but continuous traffic flow on a circular road as an example. Sooner or later, the
traffic flow will break down, creating a traffic jam, although everyone tries
to avoid it. In other words, systemic
instabilities makes systems largely uncontrollable. But to some extent, this
can be changed!
Societies have found many ways to create social
order. The most archaic one is the creation of
families and tribes, which builds on the mechanism of genetic inheritance.
Neighborhood interactions (even with strangers) and direct reciprocity based on
repeated interactions (I help you and you help me) is a more modern mechanism
to promote social cooperation. Furthermore, humans have created sanctioning
institutions (including the police). And last but not least, cooperation and
social order may be promoted by reputation mechanisms. To counteract global
destabilization, we are currently seeing a growth in sanctioning efforts, but
reputations systems are also quickly spreading, e.g. in the internet.
To stabilize our ever more complex systems, we
will have to integrate decentralized management elements into our management
approaches, utilizing the principle of self-organization.
New information and communication technologies make it possible to overcome
barriers to social, economic and political participation. They could also
support fair ways of sharing. Again, the interaction rules are crucial here. If
someone who cuts a cake can take the first piece, it will often be the biggest
one. If the person, who cuts the cake takes the last piece, he/she will be very
careful to cut it in a fair way, with all pieces having an equal size.
New information and communication technologies can
also promote an inter-cultural understanding (via an
intercultural translator), facilitate social money (with a memory and
reputation), or value-sensitive action. They can furthermore promote
accountability and awareness.
Awareness helps
to avoid many mistakes one would otherwise make. The FuturICT project plans to
create a Planetary Nervous System, which will support such awareness of the
state of the world, including the value of social capital. FuturICT’s Living
Earth Simulator will help to anticipate possible scenarios (as we have done it
by mental simulation in the past for much simpler situations). This can warn us of systemic risks, but also
point us to new opportunities. And finally, FuturICT’s Global Participatory
Platform will make these new instruments, which serve to gain insights into our
complex world, accessible to everyone.
Remember,
most people DO want to appear attractive
and beautiful. If we manage to create awareness of the implications of
their decisions and actions, they will change their behavior. I am deeply
convinced that we CAN create a better world – if we create suitable
instruments, gain better insights, and do it together.
Thank
you!
