Are upload filters and the EU’s new copyright law misguided? Shouldn’t we instead re-invent innovation?

Compared to material goods, information is a special resource. While material goods are limited, which can lead to resource conflicts, information can be reproduced cheaply and as often as we like. Nevertheless, current intellectual property rights treat digital goods more or less like material goods. I believe, a different kind of intellectual property right (IPR) would dramatically accelerate innovation and create many more jobs. While we have to catch up with the pace at which our world is changing, the current IPR regime creates major obstacles. Therefore, we need a new paradigm which will allow collaborative creation ("co-creation") to flourish.

In fact, we could fundamentally change the way we foster innovation. Currently, many people don't like to share their best ideas, because they don't want other people to become rich on the back of their research, while getting very little compensation. As a result, it often takes years until an idea is shared with the world through a publication or patent. But what if we innovated cooperatively from the very first moment? Let us assume an idea is born in America, and it is shared with others through a public portal such as github. Afterwards, experts from Asia could work on these ideas within hours, then experts from Europe could build on their results, and so on. In this way, we could create a research and development paradigm that never sleeps, that overcomes the limits of a single team, and that embraces "collective intelligence".

Such an approach would produce considerable synergy effects. My colleagues Didier Sornette and Thomas Maillart recently demonstrated that, by collaborating, two people can produce open-source software that otherwise would have required 2.5 developers ("1+1=2.5").[1] Geoffrey West, Luis Bettencourt and I, together with some others discovered a similar pattern in cities: productivity that depends on social interactions tends to disproportionately increase with population size.[2] For example, a city with two million inhabitants would be about 20 percent more productive per 1 million inhabitants than two cities of one million. This is probably the main reason for the rapid and on-going urbanization of the world.

Interestlingly, Internet forums of all kinds have nowadays created something akin to virtual cities. Many citizen science projects (and also the famous Polymath project on collaborative mathematics) underline that a crowd-based approach can complement or even outperform classical research and development approaches.[3]

Given the great advantages of collaboration, what are the main obstacles? A central problem is the lack of incentives to share. Currently, researchers are motivated by two kinds of rewards: they receive a basic salary and they earn the recognition of their peers in the form of citations of their published work. For this reason, many scientists do not share their ideas until they have been published.

Patents are a further obstacle to the sharing and widespread implementation of good ideas. While patents are actually intended to stimulate research and development by protecting the commercial value of ideas, in the digital economy patents seem to hinder innovation more than they foster it. It is as if everyone would own a certain number of words and could charge others for using them – this would certainly obstruct the exchange of ideas considerably. However, it has recently become difficult to legally enforce hardware and software patents, and there have been an increasing number of patent deals between competing companies. The electric car company Tesla has even decided to allow others to use their patents.[4] All this might indicate that a paradigm shift in terms of intellectual property rights is just around the corner.

Moreover, it has become increasingly difficult to earn large amounts of money by publishing music, movies or news. This is not just a problem of illegal downloads. In contrast to material resources, information is becoming an abundant resource. Given that every year, we produce as much data as in the entire history of humankind, information will become increasingly cheaper.

Micropayments would be better

So why not pursue an entirely different IPR approach, perhaps in parallel to the current intellectual property regime? By it's very nature, information "wants" to be free and to be shared. Every culture is based on this. Information is a virtually unlimited resource, which in principle can be reproduced almost for free. In contrast to material resources, this allows us to overcome scarcity, poverty and conflict. Nevertheless, we currently try to prevent people from copying digital products. What if we simply allowed copying, but introduced a micropayment system to ensure that every copy generates revenue for the content creator (and those who help to spread content)? Under such circumstances, we would probably love it when others copy our work!

Rather than complaining about people who copy digital products, we should make it easier to pay for the fruits of creativity and innovation. Remember that, some time back, Apple's iTunes made it simple to download and buy songs, for 99 cents each. It would be great to have a similarly simple, automatic compensation scheme for digital products, ideas and innovations. Modern text-mining algorithms could form the basis of a system, where content creators and companies would be automatically paid whenever their ideas are used. This payment could be calibrated according to the scale of the initial investment, the age of the invention and its "innovativeness", i.e. the degree to which it made advances over already existing solutions. This would encourage cooperative innovation without providing a disincentive for new research.

Establishing a micropayment system would also allow companies and citizens to earn money on the data they generate and exchange. Then, everyone could benefit from contributing to the global information ecosystem. This would create an incentive system that would reward the sharing of data. But to get paid for every copy, one would need a particular file format. Copies ("offspring") of data would have to be linked with their respective source ("parent") via a kind of "data cord", so that micro-payments between the owners and users of the data can be processed.[5] In fact, a "Personal Data Store" would be needed to execute these payments.[6]

The above text is the content of Information Box 9.1. of the book „The Automation of Society Is Next: How to Survive the Digital Revolution"

https://www.amazon.com/Automation-Society-Next-Survive-Revolution/dp/1518835414/

The title has been changed.


[1] D. Sornette, T. Maillart, and and G. Ghezzi, How much is the whole really more than the sum of its parts? 1+1=2.5: Superlinear productivity in collective group actions, PLoS ONE 9(8): e103023, see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0103023

[2] L. M. A. Bettencourt, J. Lobo, D. Helbing, C. Kühnert, and G. B. West (2007) Growth, innovation, scaling and the pace of life in cities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS) 104, 7301-7306

[3] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project , http://polymathprojects.org/ , http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1979213

[4] Why Elon Musk just opened Tesla's patents to his biggest rivals, see http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-06-12/why-elon-musk-just-opened-teslas-patents-to-his-biggest-rivals

[5] J. Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (Simon & Schuster, 2014)

[6] Another function of this Personal Data Store would be to give each user control over his or her own personal data. Whenever personal data would be (intentionally or accidentally) produced about someone, it would have to be sent to that person's data store (which would be like a mailbox for data). The person could then determine what kind of data they are willing to share, with whom, for what period of time, and for what purposes.

THE GOLDEN AGE – How to Build a Better Digital Society

by Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich/TU Delft)

Introduction: Another Revolution or War?

PDF of article can be downloaded here

As it turns out, we are in the middle of a revolution – the digital revolution. This revolution isn’t just about technology: it will reinvent most business models and transform all economic sectors, but, it will also fundamentally change the organization of our society. The best way to imagine this transition may be the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. In a few years, the world will look very different…

This does perhaps sound exaggerated – but then again, probably not. We are now seeing a perfect storm that has been created by the confluence of many powerful new digital technologies. This includes social media, cloud storage and cloud computing, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and cognitive computing, robotics, 3D printing, the Internet of Things, Blockchain Technology, and Virtual Reality. Smartphones are just one example of a technology deemed science fiction two decades ago, but is now real and ubiquitous. Many people cannot imagine an existence without these technologies anymore.

The digital technologies described above now reorganize our world. Companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, established 15 to 40 years ago, often in garages by students without academic degrees, are now among the most valuable companies of the world. By way of disruptive innovations, these technology giants have overtaken the traditional large corporations in the oil or car industries.

The company AirBnb is now challenging the hotel business. Uber is troubling the taxi, transport and logistics sectors. Bitcoin, the digital currency, threatens the big banks. With its fashionable electric cars, Tesla makes classical car companies look out-dated. Google plans to replace today’s individual vehicle traffic by promoting “transport as a service” based on self-driving cars. We may soon have the same level of mobility that we have today while using only 15 percent of today’s vehicles. Parking lots, garages, traffic police and more, may soon be things of the past. 3D printers enable the cheap production of personalized products. In perspective, global mass production will be gradually replaced by individually customized, locally created products.

These are just some of the notable trends. However, anyone who thinks that the digital revolution is just about faster Internet, smarter devices, more data, better services, and new business models largely underestimates the “creative destruction” that comes along with digital technologies.

Thanks to new machine learning approaches such as “deep learning”, recent progress in the area of Artificial Intelligence has been remarkable. These systems learn by themselves, and they are getting smarter at an exponentially accelerating pace. By now, intelligent computer algorithms can perform as well as humans in terms of reading text, understanding spoken language, or recognizing patterns. They can also learn repetitive and rule-based procedures. They tend to make less mistakes, do not get tired, and do not complain. They also do not have to pay taxes. In other words, it is only a matter of time until they will replace human jobs. This will also hit many middle-class jobs. Later on, however, I will explain how we can turn this into an opportunity.

Some people hope that, for each job lost, a new one will be created, and that these jobs will be better than those today as economic progress advances. However, people may forget that the transition from the agricultural to the industrial society, as well as the transition from there to the service society, was accompanied by serious financial and economic crises, by revolutions and wars. Many countries are already in the midst of a financial and economic crisis, and in some countries, the unemployment rate of young people has passed 50 percent. In many places, the effective incomes in the lower and middle class have been stagnant or decreasing, while the level of inequality has grown dramatically.

In 2016, Oxfam revealed that 50 percent of the world’s property was in the hands of 62 people. By 2017, half of the world’s property had ended up in the hands of only 8 people. Four of them are Americans running big IT companies. In the meantime, the level of inequality is comparable to the situation before the French revolution. This implies that the purchasing power of people is eroding, such that further economic development is obstructed. Consumers can no longer afford buying all the products that companies can provide. Many companies and banks could cease to exist, and the richest segment of people (“the elite”) start to worry about an impending revolution. The current situation is highly unstable and does not seem to serve anyone well. The rise of populism is one result of this.

So it appears that the current world order is breaking down. Even though we have better technologies and more data than ever before, these have been accompanied by increased global challenges. As the world becomes more networked, systemic complexity is growing faster than the data available to describe it, and the amount of data is accumulating faster than the data we can process and transmit. Paradoxically, even though technological solutions are more powerful than ever, attempts to control the world in a top-down way appear to fail. At the World Economic Forum in 2017, representatives of the elites could no longer deny the impending crisis. The success principles of the past – globalization, optimization and regulation – did not seem to work well nor to persuade people anymore. After president Trump’s inauguration, the German Minister of Exterior, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and chancellor Angela Merkel both announced the end of a historical era. This may be the end of globalism and capitalism as we know it.

There are several reasons for these developments, and they are all based on self-created problems. The first reason is that, as we go on networking the world, the complexity is increasing factorially, at an amazing pace. Importantly, in a highly connected world, the intended effects will often not result because of side effects, feedback effects, domino effects, and cascading effects. Cascading effects, in particular, can easily get out of hand through a series of coupled events, which may end disastrously. Electrical blackouts are one example.

The second reason is the attempt to steer each individual’s behaviour (I will discuss this later in detail). Today, those who run our societies change their “commands” at the same speed at which individuals are trying to adjust to them. This undermines a hierarchical organization, which requires a slower speed of change on the controlling “top” level as compared to the controlled “bottom” level. Natural hierarchies exemplify this, as they occur in physics (atoms, molecules, solid bodies, planets, solar systems, galaxies) and biology (cells, organs, organisms, social communities, organizations, societies).

We are living in times where our employers, the state, and companies are all the time trying to make us do all sorts of things. This obviously causes a fragmentation of attention and action, distraction and chaos. This will be elaborated in more detail later. One result of this development is, that we are increasingly locked in informational filter bubbles or personalized echo chambers. This makes us lose our ability to understand other points of view, or to find reasonable compromises and consensus. Consequently, conflict and extremism in our societies have increased, which in turn undermines social cohesion. One might say that our society is increasingly divided into social atoms, which are now trying to find new bonds. Populism is a side effect of this.

I must stress that this has created a highly dangerous situation, which has the potential to collapse today’s social order and also that of the world. This development was predicted years ago, but little has been done to stop the underlying cascading effects. Now that we are at the tipping point, this means that our future is more uncertain and unpredictable than ever. As a consequence, people may lose orientation. For example, we may end up with a data-driven version of fascism (a big brother society or “brave new world”), or of communism (a “benevolent dictatorship” that believes it knows what would be best for everyone and imposes this on us), or of feudalism (a “surveillance capitalism” that serves us according to our “personal value”, as measured by a “citizen score”).

However, we may also make the conscious decision to upgrade democracy and capitalism as we know it, by digital means. On the whole, standing at a tipping point creates unprecedented opportunities for mankind to re-invent society, and to build a better world. However, if we continue as before, we may stand to experience the breakout of large-scale wars. Such wars are quite likely, and they may break out for several reasons:

• The new wave of automation driven by artificial intelligence and robotics may cause unemployment to sky-rocket, and undermine the stability of societies, which can easily lead to a war.

• The spread of populism and nationalism implies dangers for peace as well, as it often values people of different ethnic origin and cultural background differently. Cultures that consider themselves superior, however, tend to wage wars against those they consider inferior. This tendency is further nourished by the claim that “war is the mother of invention” (Heraclitus even said, “of everything”).

• The probability that we may see a financial and economic collapse is also quite high. In fact, the Limit to Growth study, which tries to anticipate the future fate of our planet, predicts such collapse in the imminent future. The on-going financial crisis makes it clear that capitalism as we know it, is failing. Mass unemployment in many countries, public and private debt levels, low economic growth rates and negative interest rates indicate that we have reached a point of no return. At the 2017 Davos meeting, many have concluded that capitalism 1.0 is losing support – it will (have to) be replaced by something else.

• Impending future resource shortages will cause further problems, which can also precipitate a war.

• Climate change could instigate wars as well, namely by desertification, the deterioration of once fruitful soil, or natural disasters (e.g. floods). It is also expected that climate change may cause the largest loss of species since the extinction of the dinosaurs, which may undermine our ecosystem and our food chain. 

• Furthermore, we may see cultural or religious clashes, and this seems to be already happening.

•  A worrying concern is poor maturity in the constructive use of social media and digital technologies. Shit storms, hate speech, and fake news are illustrations of this. We have to look back in history to the days when the printing press was invented. One result was the 30-year war that claimed the lives of 5-8 million people. Similarly, the invention of the radio was an important factor in the success of the Nazi regime. Radio enabled the spread of propaganda on a previously unprecedented scale, from which people were not able to distance themselves enough. This result was the Holocaust and World War II, which claimed up to 80 million lives. Today social media news has become the battlefield of a world-wide disinformation war. Shit storms, hate speech, and fake news appear to get out of hand. How will this play out?

In conclusion, there are multiple factors present that can contribute towards large-scale wars. Given the “nuclear overkill”, this could claim an unprecedented number of victims and, in all likelihood, make large swathes of our planet uninhabitable. Should this happen, it would be the most shameful event of human history, and we would never be able to believe in human values or civilisation again.

What makes me optimistic, however, is the fact that we know about all these dangers and we have history to learn from.

Solving the above problems is not a trivial exercise. However, new solutions have been recently proposed. The crucial issue for us is whether these new ideas spread quickly enough, and whether politics will have the courage to implement them now.

Making the right decisions and taking appropriate actions has become a matter of life and death. If we go on as before, we will probably experience a number of global disasters. I am convinced, however, that the time to create a framework for global prosperity and peace has come.

In the following chapters, I will describe the issues with our current socio-economic approach in further detail, and why it is outdated and destined to fail. I will also present an alternative vision of a better future for everyone – one that is based on the success principles of co-creation, co-evolution, collective intelligence, and self-organization. I am convinced that these principles are able to lift our economy and society to the next level. This should make society more resilient to unexpected developments and shocks (sometimes called “black swans”). Without a doubt, we have arrived at a crossroad. The question we must now ask ourselves is: Will we have the courage follow a new path, or will we continue our old path and fall off the cliff?

(Comments and inputs to dhelbing@ethz.ch are welcome!)