The digital revolution is likely to bring about one of the biggest transformations in human history. Since the Snowden revelations, we have learned about mass surveillance, predictive policing, mass mind manipulation, and data-driven, algorithmically controlled societies such as the one in China, which is testing a Social Credit Score system similar to the citizen score of the Karma Police program of the British secret service. Besides, one may say, the digital revolution has brought about a new kind of money, namely data (and, of course, Blockchain-based currencies, too). There is also a new kind of economic system, the so-called attention economy. With „Big Nudging“, politics it trying to steer the behavior of their citizens as well as the course of societies. And, in a sense, there is also a new legal system, because „code is law“. Despite all this, there is not just one way of running a data-empowered society. It is possible, for example, to digitally upgrade democracy and capitalism, by supporting collective intelligence and combinatorial innovation. This talk will, therefore, sketch a variety of possible digital societies. The choice is yours…
Dirk Helbing is Full Professor of Computational Social Science at ETH Zurich and affiliate professor at ETH’s Computer Science Department and the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft, where he is coordinating the PhD school “Engineering Social Technologies” for a Responsible Digital Future. He is also External Faculty of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Before, he was Full Professor of Sociology at ETH Zurich and Managing Director of the Institute for Transport & Economics at Dresden University of Technology. Helbing is also an elected member of the German Academy of Sciences “Leopoldina” and of the World Academy of Arts and Science. In 2014, he received an honorary PhD at TU Delft. He is a member of the Swiss Federal Committee on the Future of Data Processing and Data Security and of committees on the “Digital Society” and on “Digitization and Democracy” of the German Academies of Science.
