Simulating Social Complexity
The Automation of Society is Next: How to Survive the Digital Revolution
von Dirk Helbing, 2015
Draft auf Researchgate, 2015
(Cache)
CONTENTS
1 THE DIGITAL SOCIETY: A better future or worse? 11
2 COMPLEXITY TIME BOMB: When systems get out of control 27
3 SOCIAL FORCES: Revealing the causes of success and disaster 45
4 GOOGLE AS GOD? The dangerous promise of Big Data 71
5 GENIE OUT OF THE BOTTLE: Major socio-economic shifts ahead 93
6 DIGITALLY ASSISTED SELF-ORGANIZATION: Making the invisible hand work 113
7 HOW SOCIETY WORKS: Social order by self-organization 137
8 NETWORKED MINDS: Where human evolution is heading 157
9 ECONOMY 4.0: A participatory market society is born 181
10 THE SELF-ORGANIZING SOCIETY: Taking the future in our hands 209
Excerpts from
Chapter 3: SOCIAL FORCES: Revealing the causes of success and disaster
page 50
The sensor networks, on which the "Internet of Things" is based, will enable us to perform real-time measurements of almost everything. They can be used to build a "Planetary Nervous System" (PNS), an intelligent information platform proposed by the FuturICT project The In fact, my team has started to develop such an information platform, called Nervousnet.67 Nervousnet will harness the power of the Internet of Things for everyone's benefit and will be built and managed in a participatory way, as a "Citizen Web".68 We Similar to OpenStreetMap, we will develop this system together with an emerging network of volunteers, who are committed to developing the project further.
This collaborative approach will give citizens control over their personal data, in accordance with their right of informational self-determination, and create new opportunities for everyone. Nervousnet will not only offer the possibility to contribute to the measurement of our world, in order to jointly create something like a real-time data Wikipedia. Nervousnet will also establish a social mining paradigm, where users are given freedom and incentives to collect, share and use data in ways that do not aim to undermine privacy. Appendix 3.1 provides further information on the platform. With your help, it may very well become a cornerstone of the public information infrastructure of the emergent digital society. So why don't you join us in building the Nervousnet platform or in measuring the world around us?iv
pages 67 - 68
APPENDIX 3.1: Nervousnet: A decentralized digital nervous system
(see YouTube Video. The Nervousnet app can be downloaded via Apple's AppStore and Google's play.)
The Nervousnet project, has started to work on such an open and participatory, distributed information platform for real-time data.xiii Nervousnet is an open source project, which believes in the importance of privacy, informational self-determination and trust. If you download the Nervousnet app to your smartphone, you can choose to turn about 10 different sensors separately on or off, such as the accelerometer, light or noise sensors. You can measure data about your environment for yourself (kept on your smartphone) or share it with others (as decided by yourself). External sensors for 'smart home' and other applications can be added (for example, weather or health sensors). To maximize informational self- control, the user can also determine the recording rate, and soon also the storage time after which the data will be deleted. Shared data are anonymized. In addition, we are working on data encryption and plan to add a personal data store,108 which will allow you to determine what kind of data you want to share with whom, for what purpose, and for what period of time.
Nervousnet will be run as a Citizen Web, built and managed by its users. It will allow all developers to add measurement procedures and apps. For example, you may run games, scientific measurement projects, or business applications on top of the Nervousnet platform. So, anyone can add data- driven services and products. For security and conceptual reasons (such as scalability and fault-tolerance),
Nervousnet is based on distributed data and control. To promote responsible use, Nervousnet will integrate reputation, qualification, and community-based self-governing mechanisms, determining accessible sensors, data volume and functionality. All this is intended to catalyze a novel information, innovation and production ecosystem to create societal benefits, business opportunities, and new jobs.
Nervousnet will offer five main functionalities.
Excerpts from
Chapter 7: HOW SOCIETY WORKS: Social order by self-organization
pages 153 - 154
Digital assistants
When two people or companies interact, there are just four possible outcomes, which relate to coordination failures and conflicts of interest.
The above-described Social Technologies can now be built. Smartphones are already becoming digital assistants to manage our lives. They help us to find products, nice restaurants, travel routes and people with similar interests. They also enable a real-time translation from one language to another. In future, such digital assistants will pay more attention to the interactions between people and companies, producing mutual benefits for all involved. This will play an important role in overcoming cultural barriers and in minimizing environmental damage, too.
Eventually, Social Technologies will help us to avoid bad interactions, to discover and take advantage of good opportunities, and to transform potentially negative interactions into mutually beneficial cooperation. In this way, the "interoperability" between diverse systems and interests is largely increased, while coordination failures and conflicts are considerably reduced. I am, therefore, convinced that Social Technologies can produce enormous value, both material and immaterial. Some social media platforms are now worth billions of dollars. How much more value could digital assistants and other Social Technologies create?
page 155
APPENDIX 7.2: Towards distributed security, based on selforganization
Let me finally address the question whether bottom-up self-organization is dangerous for society? In fact, since the Arab Spring, governments all over the world are afraid of "twitter revolutions". Therefore, are social media destabilizing political systems? Do governments need to censor free speech or control the algorithms that spread messages through social media platforms? Probably not. First, the Arab Spring was triggered by high food prices,239 i.e. deprivation, and not by anarchism. Second, encroaching on free speech would obstruct our society's ability to innovate and to detect and address problems early on.
But how to reach a high level of security in a system which is based on the principle of distributed bottom-up self-organization? Let me give an example. One of the most astonishing complex systems in the world is our body's immune system. Even though we are bombarded every day by thousands of viruses, bacteria and other harmful agents, our immune system protects us pretty well for about 50-100 years. Our immune system is probably more effective than any other protection system we know. What is even more surprising is that, in contrast to our central nervous system, the immune system is organized in a decentralized way. This is no coincidence. It is well known that decentralized systems tend to be more resilient to disruptive events. While targeted attacks or local disruptions can make a centralized system fail, a decentralized system will usually survive such disruptions and recover. In fact, this is the reason why the Internet is so robust.240 So why don't we protect information systems using in-built "digital immune systems"?241 This should also entail a reputation system, which could serve as a kind of "social immune system". In the following, I will describe just a few aspects of how this might work.
page 156
Community-based moderation
Information exchange and communication on the Web have quickly changed. In the beginning, there was almost no regulation in place. These were the days of the Wild Wild Web, and people often did not respect human dignity and the rights of companies when posting comments. However, one can see a gradual evolution of self-governance mechanisms in open and participatory systems over time.
Early on, public comments in news forums were published without moderation. This led to a lot of low-quality content. Later, comments were increasingly checked for their legality (and for their respect of human dignity) before they went online. Then, it became possible to comment on comments. Now, comments are rated by readers, and good ones get pushed to the top. The next logical step is to rate commenters generally242 and rate the quality of judgments of those who rate others (by "karma points"). Thus, we can see the gradual evolution of a self-governing system that constructively channels free speech. Therefore, I believe that it is possible to encourage responsible use of the Internet, mainly through self- organization.
The great majority of malicious behavior can probably be controlled using crowd-based mechanisms. Such approaches include reporting inappropriate content and ranking user-generated content based on suitable reputation mechanisms. To handle the remaining, complicated cases, one can use a system of community moderators and complaints procedures. Such community moderators would be determined based on their performance in satisfying lower-level community expectations (the "local culture"), while staying within the framework set by higher-level principles (such as laws and constitutional principles). In this way, community moderators would complement our legal framework, and most problems could be solved in a community-based way. Therefore, only a few cases will require legal mediation. Most activities would be self-governed through a system of sanctions and rewards by peers. In the following chapters
I will explain in more detail how information technology will enable people and companies to coordinate their interests in entirely new ways.
Excerpts from
Chapter 8: NETWORKED MINDS
Where Human Evolution Is Heading
pages 158 - 159
Today, we have a much more nuanced understanding of crowds and swarm intelligence. We can explain why crowds are sometimes benign, but cause trouble in other circumstances. For the wisdom of crowds to work, first, independent information gathering is crucial. Second, opinion formation should be decentralized, drawing on local knowledge and specialization. Third, a larger diversity of opinions tends to increase the quality of the outcome. The same applies to the diversity of in communication patterns. Too much communication, however, can make the group as a whole less intelligent.
In fact, if people collect information and evaluate it independently from each other, and if these diverse streams of information are suitably aggregated afterwards, this often creates better results than even the best experts can produce. This is also more or less the way in which prediction markets work. These markets have been surprisingly successful in anticipating election outcomes or the success of new movies, for example. Interestingly, prediction markets were inspired by the principles that ants and bees use to find the most promising sources of food. Such complex self-organizing animal societies have always amazed people, especially because they are based on surprisingly simple rules of interaction.
In contrast, the "wisdom of the crowd" is undermined, if people are influenced by others while searching for information or making up their minds. This can sometimes create very bad outcomes, as misjudgments can easily spread if individuals copy each others' opinions. For example, in Asch's conformity experiments, people had to publicly state which one of three lines was equal in length to another line presented to them. Before the participant answered the question, other people gave incorrect answers (as they were instructed). As a consequence, the participant typically answered incorrectly, too, even though the recognition task was simple. Recent experiments that Jan Lorenz, Heiko Rauhut, Frank Schweitzer and I performed, show that people are even influenced by the opinions of others when they are not exposed to social pressure. This demonstrates that the wisdom of crowds is sensitive to manipulation attempts and social influence, and that's why one shouldn't try to influence how people search for information and make decisions, as nudging does.
... we need to find out how growing amounts of information and the increased interconnectedness of people create new opportunities. It becomes possible, for example, to overcome "tragedies of the commons" and to support the generation of collective intelligence.
page 159
Impossibility of one unifying utility function
The "utility function" supposedly quantifies
of every actor. Any behavior deviating from such selfish utility maximization is believed to be irrational and to create disadvantages ("economic Darwinism").
[But] self-regarding rational choice (homo economicus: humans and firms are completely egoistic, rationally striving to maximize their utility in every situation) is just one possible mode of decision-making. Human decisions are often driven by other factors in ways that make it impossible to integrate them all in one "utility function". Trying to do this, as it is common, compares "apples with oranges".
Instead, I claim that people are driven by a variety of different incentive systems, and that they switch between them. ... Many of them are related with intrinsic hormonal, emotional, and nervous processes (the latter include the "amygdala" area of the brain and the part of the nervous system called the "solar plexus"). If we neglect these factors, we cannot gain a good understanding of human behavior. ...
In addition, the importance of the different reward systems varies from one person to the next. This implies different preferences and personalities ("characters"). ... it is not possible to define one personal utility function, which stays constant over time (or changes slowly). Instead I believe that, at any point in time, one kind of reward is given priority and the others are temporarily relegated. Once this reward has been gained, another desire is given priority to and so on. This might be compared to how competing traffic flows are managed at an intersection Ð temporarily prioritizing one flow after another. Once a queue of vehicles has been cleared, another one is prioritized by giving it a green light. Similarly, when one of our desires has been satisfied, we give priority to another one et cetera, until the first drive becomes strong again and demands our attention. ... If [we] cannot derive pleasure from consumption and possessions, from social recognition, or from intellectual activities, then, sexual adventures, adrenaline flashes or other kicks may become more important.
pages 163 -164
Being social is rewarding, too
Humans are not only driven by the reward systems mentioned above. We are also social beings, driven by social desires and that's why social media are so successful and changing our behavior, too. In fact, most people have empathy (compassion) in that they feel for others. Empathy is reflected by emotions and expressed to others by gestures and facial expressions. It even seems that all humans on our globe share some fundamental facial expressions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise). According to Paul Ekman (*1934), these expressions are universal, as they are independent of language and culture.
P. Ekman, W. V. Friesen and P. Ellsworth, Emotion in the Human Face: Guidelines for Research and a Review of Findings (Pergamon, New York, 1972); P. Ekman and W. Friesen, Facial Action Coding System: A Technique for the Measurement of Facial Movement (Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, 1978); Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Joseph C. Hager, Facial Action Coding System: The Manual on CD ROM (A Human Face, Salt Lake City, 2002)
However, our social desires go further than that. For example, we seek social recognition.
The main reason for the propensity of humans to network is that we are fundamentally social beings. In some sense, we are all "networked minds". The increasing tendency of many people to form networks using social media such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp underlines and reinforces this. It has even the potential to fundamentally change the way our society and economy work. Social networking through information and communication systems can stimulate our curiosity, strengthen our social desires, and support collective intelligence.
The evolution of "networked minds" - A Computer Model
It's interesting to ask why humans are actually social beings at all? Why do we have social desires? And how is this compatible with our hypothetical selfishness and the principle of the survival of the fittest? To study this, we developed a computer model which simulates the interactions between utility-maximizing individuals exposed to the merciless forces of evolution. Specifically, we simulated the "prisoner's dilemma", a special kind of social dilemma. Here, two actors engage in a social interaction where it would be favorable for everyone to cooperate, but non-cooperative behavior is tempting and, hence, cooperative behavior is risky.
In such scenarios, the selfish "homo economicus" would never cooperate, as non-cooperative behavior yields a higher payoff than cooperation in every single decision. This undermines cooperation, and the result is a "tragedy of the commons": the most favorable situation Ð where everyone cooperates Ð does not occur naturally, because it is unstable, and the resulting outcome is undesirable. The reasons are similar to why free- flowing traffic breaks down when a road is too busy.
In our own computer simulations of the prisoner's dilemma, we distinguished between the actual behavior of simulated individuals (cooperative or not) from their individual preferences. We assumed that the preferences result from a trait called "friendliness", which governs how likely somebody is to consider the consequences of their own actions on others (how "other-regarding" they are).
To be consistent with mainstream economics, the computer agents representing individuals were assumed to maximize their utility function, given the behavior of the "neighbors" they were interacting with. The utility function was specified in such a way that individuals could consider more than just their own payoff from an interaction. They could also give some weight to the payoffs of their interaction partners. This weight was proportional to the "friendliness" of the individual and was set to zero for everyone at the beginning of the simulation. Thus, initially, everyone was absolutely selfish, and the payoff that others received from an interaction was given no weight (corresponding to what we call "homo economicus").
Additionally, [in our computer simulations of the system's evolution over time, including from generation to generation] we assumed
Results
The following video of a typical run of our computer simulations illustrates this well (see also Fig. 8.2 in here).
Emergence of the homo socialis and cooperation between strangers (video)
Agents play a spatial Prisoner's Dilemma with their direct meighbors again and again. They generate offspring and die.
In the beginning nobody is cooperative (i.e. all are defectors) [red squares: family with friendliness 0.2, orange circles: family with friendliness 0. |
Shapes: Other-regarding preference
Colors: Cooperative vs. non-cooperative behavior
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As soon as the simulation is started, agents maximize their individual utilities.
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Results 1:
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Results 2:
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Chapter 10:
The Self-Organizing Society
pages 209 f
pages 213
Immanuel Kant, one of the masterminds of the age of enlightenment, argued that a state that decides how its citizens should be happy is a despot. He wrote: "It thus becomes evident that the principle of Happiness, which is properly incapable of any definite determination as a principle, may be the occasion of much evil in the sphere of political Right, just as it is in the sphere of morals. And this will hold good even with the best intentions on the part of those who teach and inculcate it. The sovereign acting on this principle determines to make the people happy according to his notions, and he becomes a despot", see here. In fact, the greatest humanitarian disasters in our history were caused by people who wanted to impose a better world order on a large number of people, see here. Socioeconomic misery or war were frequent medium-term outcomes. These resulted from reduced diversity and damage to the (eco-)systemic organization and self-organized functionality of society. Social networks and cultural norms can be very effective in creating social order and resilience.
page 214
Thus, we need institutions that can help us establish and maintain a proper balance between various interests and to foster the self-organization of our society and economy.
To understand the complexity of our world and turn it into our advantage we need collective intelligence, which requires diversity rather than conformity. In order to manage our future in an increasingly complex society, it is important to encourage and consider multiple perspectives. A symbiotic relationship with digitally literate citizens, customers and users is key to success. Our society can only live up to its capacity, if it makes best use of the skills, ideas and resources of its citizens. It will be of strategic importance to offer participatory social, economic, and political opportunities. In future, those societies will be leading, which manage to create a win-win-win situation business, citizens, and state.
page 215
... simulations tell us that the negative outcomes of self-organization can often be avoided by changing the interaction rules, i.e. the mechanisms by which the components of the system interact. In some cases such as traffic flows or the financial system, simply altering the system's parameters (such as the vehicle density or interest rate) can avoid or reduce undesirable consequences. In fact, while the "invisible hand" (which may be seen as another term for "self-organization") often fails if network effects or externalities matter, we can now overcome such failure.
page 216 - 217
Interactions between the components of a complex dynamical system produce "externalities", i.e. external effects such as reputation, happiness, or wealth, emissions, waste, or noise, or other consequences that affect the environment or others in a positive or negative way. These externalities can be altered by introducing or modifying feedback loops in the system, for example, by introducing value exchange. Such feedbacks allow the system components to adapt to the local conditions in ways that produce or restore the desired functionality. In economic systems, feedback mechanisms are often produced by financial costs or rewards, while in social systems it is common to use incentives or sanctions. However, certain kinds of information exchange and coordination mechanisms can be even more efficient ("altruistic signaling", for instance). It is also important to consider that the use of a single feedback mechanism (such as money) is usually too restricted to let a complex socio-economic system self-organize successfully, and therefore we need a multi-dimensional incentive and value exchange system (see item 6. below), as I have proposed before.
To allow for real-time measurements of our world, my collaborators and I have recently started to build a distributed "Planetary Nervous System" as a participatory citizen web. With this enabling technology, called Nervousnet (Appendix 3.1, p. 67 ff), we can measure externalities and feed them back to the decision-making entities in such a way that efficient and desirable outcomes are produced. For example,
These "Social Technologies" would help one to ensure favorable outcomes of interactions for all sides. In fact, interactions between two entities (be it people, companies, or institutions) can basically have four possible outcomes:
1. If an interaction would be unfavorable for both entities, as is often the case in conflicts and wars, the interaction should be avoided.
2. If the interaction would be favorable for one side, but bad for the other and negative overall, the interaction should also be avoided. To ensure this, the second entity should be protected from exploitation by the first one.
3. If the interaction would be favorable for one side and bad for the other, but positive overall, it can be turned into a win-win situation by means of a value transfer.
4. Finally, if the interaction would be beneficial for both sides, one should engage in it, but one might still decide to share the overall benefits in a fairer way by means of a value exchange.
Digital assistants could support us in all these situations. They could help us to create situational awareness, including the potential side effects and risks implied by certain decisions and (inter)actions. Without such assistants, we would certainly overlook many opportunities for beneficial interactions we could actually engage in. Digital assistants could also help us to organize protection against exploitation, which would otherwise deteriorate the overall state of the system.
And finally, Social Technologies could support us with multi-dimensional value exchange, as I discussed before (appendix 9.2). Social Technologies can assist us particularly in avoiding the systemic instabilities which are the main source of our unsolved problems.
pages 218 - 219
The secrets of self-organization
At times, self-organization seems to be almost magic. So, how does it work? Surprisingly, it is often based on simple local interactions which enable mutual adaptation. Social norms, for example, are akin to the physical forces governing the universe. They determine our everyday lives based on compliance mechanisms such as sanctions and rewards. In contrast to physics, however, the socio-economic forces governing the structure, dynamics, and functions of our society may change due to innovation.
Besides negative compliance mechanisms such as peer punishment, money is an important reward mechanism in our society, but not the only one. Indeed, social reward mechanisms can be even more effective than money. The weakness of today's financial system is that money is de facto one-dimensional. In future, we will need a more diverse, multi-dimensional incentive and exchange system to manage complex dynamical systems. These can now be created, because the virtual world offers novel ways to create incentive mechanisms. Reputation systems, ratings and scores are good examples.
Finally, self-organization requires suitable sets of rules to work well. But how to foster self-organization and the emergence of societally beneficial interaction rules? Over time, top-down regulation has produced overregulation and inequality. A self-organization approach, in contrast, may overcome these problems (at least to some extent), as it aims at maximizing opportunities rather than hampering them through standardization and unsatisfactory compromises (see Appendix 10.2). Self-rule fosters socioeconomic diversity, innovation, happiness and the resilience of the overall system. Local experimentation supports socio-economic and cultural evolution. However, favorable self-organization requires an active endeavor to find and implement suitable sets of rules. This is not trivial and its importance should not be underestimated.
Cultures as collections of invisible success principles
In the past, humans haven't been very good at identifying suitable interaction rules, which has impeded self-organized and decentralized governance approaches. Fortunately, recently developed tools can help us to identify suitable institutional settings and interaction rules ("rules of the game") that can produce favorable self-organization. For example, one can perform experiments more easily than ever before. In fact, we can test out different permutations and combinations of various new rules in advance with the aid of computer simulations, lab or web experiments, interactive multi-player online games, or Virtual Worlds. We can also try to identify the hidden mechanisms on which the cultures of the world are based. These cultural mechanisms, in fact, are highly important for the success of wellfunctioning societies and their resilience to disruptions. Surprisingly, most of these success principles are not explicitly known, but are "internalized" subconsciously while we grow up. This situation may be compared with the time when we didn't have alphabets to express our knowledge in writing. However, if we managed to explicate and formalize the success principles of the world's cultures, we could combine them in entirely new ways. The project which I propose to achieve this might be called "Culturepedia" or "Cultural Genome Project".
The above implies three important differences with conventional policymaking as we know it today.
page 221
Why shouldn't we have an alliance of cities that takes a lead in supporting better, climate-friendly technologies? Just suppose that cities next to rising oceans, such as New York City, Singapore, London, Hamburg, Sydney, and a few others would start this together. Wouldn't that create a first-mover advantage, which others would soon seek to copy?
pages 222 -230
How to manage our future: some proposals for immediate action
Dictatorship 4.0: How the digital revolution threatens out freedom - and what our alternatives are
by Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich/TU Delft), June 2017 (in cache)
... Each one of us has a digital double. This is a kind of blackbox, which is fed with our personal data. This data has usually been tapped without our knowledge and, thanks to machine learning, the resulting double behaves similar to us. What is the intended purpose of such digital doubles?
World simulations such as "Sentient World" can simulate global war games on computers. But your digital double could also be used
Since the "Arab Spring", such technologies have increasingly been used to destabilize states or to stabilize autocratic regimes. Since then, they have been continuously improved. Now, such cyber weapons are also applied to the own citizens. These technologies are suited to replace democracy Ð which many IT visionaries have called an "outdated technology" - with a data-driven "benevolent dictatorship". All that is needed for this is a big disaster or crisis fueling a public outcry for "more security". Then, the technological instruments of the "brave new world" might be fully used. Read the book "iGod" by Willemijn Dicke to understand how this could end. ItÕs an urgent warning, a final wake-up call!
In the event of a crisis, the Chinese "Citizen Score" would probably be applied, too. The Citizen Score boils all of your data down to a single number (which by the way encompasses your health data, which can continuously be monitored and evaluated by your smartphone). This number comprises all of your activities and your social network as well. You repaid your loan with a delay? Minus points! You read critical news about your government? Minus points! You have the ÒwrongÓ friends? Minus points! [Even if your behavior is perfectly ok, the behavior of your friends or neighbors could mess up your entire life. (Helbing, May 2017)] In any case, the resulting Citizen Score would determine your interest rates, the jobs offered to you, and travel visa for other countries - at least in China.
A similar system exists in the UK, where the Citizen Score is called "Karma Police". It also evaluates the videos you watch on the Internet and the radio programs you hear. DonÕt believe such scoring systems do not exist everywhere by now! What is their purpose, you might ask? The Citizen Score would serve to decide who will get access to what kinds of resources, when they get scarce! Such scarcity may also be artificially produced, for example, to reach the goal of reducing global CO2 emissions and mitigate climate change. It is said that a related resolution of the UN General Assembly will be adopted on September 23, 2017.
As a result, the Citizen Score would lead to a neo-feudal society. You can imagine who is most enthusiastic about the prospect of this system and who has brought it to life... If you have a high score, you will get everything you desire, no matter how bad the situation in the rest of the world are. The people who commissioned the system would certainly be among this tiny elite. For the rest of us, it would depend on our Citizen Score whether we could still have a car, obtain certain medicine, or eat meat regularly. In order to get plus rather than minus points, many would not question the instructions through their smart devices Ð they would just follow them. Thus, people may soon be turned from citizens into subordinates again.
This sounds like a terribly dystopian science fiction - but unfortunately it is not! The technologies described above are available and ready for use. You might wonder why all this has been developed? The answer is that our economy is not sustainable! The world consumes 1.5 times the resources that are renewable. A typical European country consumes 3.5 times as much, and the USA 4.5 times as much. In order to avoid serious crises and disasters, humanity must quickly reduce this factor to one. The Citizen Score might help to get in this direction, but we would then live in a digital command economy with digital food stamps - a more totalitarian world than ever! For the most part, this would not be a life worth living anymore - we would simply struggle for survival.
There are much better ways to create a sustainable world by 2030! So far, however, these alternatives have been blocked by people with vested interests who care more about power and wealth than about our future. Here are some options:
These are just some of the untapped opportunities we have. All of these proposals are perfectly compatible with the fundamental values of our society. Democracy and capitalism - so far the two most successful forms of organization in human history - could be Òhappily marriedÓ with each other and digitally upgraded. In this way, we could tackle the problems of the future more successfully - and reach the next level of our economic, social, political and cultural system. A new chapter of the history is about to begin. It's now up to us to write it!
Version: 24.5.2018
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