This new collection of essays follows in the footsteps of the successful volume Thinking Ahead - Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society, published at a time when our societies were on a path to technological totalitarianism, as exemplified by mass surveillance reported by Edward Snowden and others.
Meanwhile the threats have diversified and tech companies have gathered enough data to create detailed profiles about almost everyone living in the modern world - profiles that can predict our behavior better than our friends, families, or even partners. This is not only used to manipulate peoples' opinions and voting behaviors, but more generally to influence consumer behavior at all levels. It is becoming increasingly clear that we are rapidly heading towards a cybernetic society, in which algorithms and social bots aim to control both the societal dynamics and individual behaviors.
However there are also silver linings: most of the threats that have accumulated over the past years have been identified and regulations are on the way to being introduced. Furthermore, entirely novel approaches based on blockchain technology and other developments derived from complexity science offer the possibility of entirely redefining collective trust and building platforms to support our core societal values.
Dirk Helbing is Professor of Sociology, in particular of Modeling and Simulation, at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences and member of the Computer Science Department at ETH Zurich, as well as co-founder of ETH Zurich's Risk Center. He is internationally known for the scientific coordination of the FuturICT Initiative (http://www.futurict.eu), which focuses on the understanding of techno-socioeconomic systems, using Smart Data. Helbing is elected member of the German Academy of Sciences 'Leopoldina' and worked in the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems. He is also a board member of the Global Brain Institute in Brussels and of the International Centre for Earth Simulation (ICES) in Geneva.
