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"Digital transformation" sounds harmless, given that the explosion
in data volumes, processing power and Artificial Intelligence has
driven humanity and the entire world to a point of no return. We
will surely see a new civilization, but we are at a crossroads. The
future needs to be re-invented, decisions must be taken. After the
automation of factories and the creation of self-driving cars, the
automation of society is on its way. But there are two kinds of
automation: a centralized top-down control of the world and a
distributed control approach, supporting local self-organization.
Using the power of today's information systems, governments and big
tech companies seem to engage in the first approach. Might they
even build a "digital Crystal Ball" that knows almost everything,
including your personality, and a super-intelligent "digital God"
to control what we do? We are much closer to such "science fiction
scenarios" than you probably think. In this much expanded second
edition of "The Automation of Society is Next: How to Survive the
Digital Revolution" (2015), the author discusses lessons learned on
digital democracy, aspects of transhumanism and far-reaching
thoughts about life in the digital age and what it may mean to be
human in the future.
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iGod (Paperback)
Dirk Helbing, Willemijn Dicke
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R405
Discovery Miles 4 050
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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.
What are the principles that keep our society together? This
question is even more difficult to answer than the long-standing
question, what are the forces that keep our world together.
However, the social challenges of humanity in the 21st century
ranging from the financial crises to the impacts of globalization,
require us to make fast progress in our understanding of how
society works, and how our future can be managed in a resilient and
sustainable way. This book can present only a few very first steps
towards this ambitious goal. However, based on simple models of
social interactions, one can already gain some surprising insights
into the social, ``macro-level'' outcomes and dynamics that is
implied by individual, ``micro-level'' interactions. Depending on
the nature of these interactions, they may imply the spontaneous
formation of social conventions or the birth of social cooperation,
but also their sudden breakdown. This can end in deadly crowd
disasters or tragedies of the commons (such as financial crises or
environmental destruction). Furthermore, we demonstrate that
classical modeling approaches (such as representative agent models)
do not provide a sufficient understanding of the self-organization
in social systems resulting from individual interactions. The
consideration of randomness, spatial or network interdependencies,
and nonlinear feedback effects turns out to be crucial to get
fundamental insights into how social patterns and dynamics emerge.
Given the explanation of sometimes counter-intuitive phenomena
resulting from these features and their combination, our
evolutionary modeling approach appears to be powerful and
insightful. The chapters of this book range from a discussion of
the modeling strategy for socio-economic systems over experimental
issues up the right way of doing agent-based modeling. We
furthermore discuss applications ranging from pedestrian and crowd
dynamics over opinion formation, coordination, and cooperation up
to conflict, and also address the response to information, issues
of systemic risks in society and economics, and new approaches to
manage complexity in socio-economic systems. Selected parts of this
book had been previously published in peer reviewed journals.
The rapidly progressing digital revolution is now touching the
foundations of the governance of societal structures. Humans are on
the verge of evolving from consumers to prosumers, and old,
entrenched theories - in particular sociological and economic ones
- are falling prey to these rapid developments. The original
assumptions on which they are based are being questioned. Each year
we produce as much data as in the entire human history - can we
possibly create a global crystal ball to predict our future and to
optimally govern our world? Do we need wide-scale surveillance to
understand and manage the increasingly complex systems we are
constructing, or would bottom-up approaches such as self-regulating
systems be a better solution to creating a more innovative, more
successful, more resilient, and ultimately happier society? Working
at the interface of complexity theory, quantitative sociology and
Big Data-driven risk and knowledge management, the author advocates
the establishment of new participatory systems in our digital
society to enhance coordination, reduce conflict and, above all,
reduce the "tragedies of the commons," resulting from the methods
now used in political, economic and management decision-making. The
author Physicist Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social
Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political
Sciences and an affiliate of the Computer Science Department at ETH
Zurich, as well as co-founder of ETH's Risk Center. He is
internationally known for the scientific coordination of the
FuturICT Initiative which focuses on using smart data to understand
techno-socio-economic systems. "Prof. Helbing has produced an
insightful and important set of essays on the ways in which big
data and complexity science are changing our understanding of
ourselves and our society, and potentially allowing us to manage
our societies much better than we are currently able to do. Of
special note are the essays that touch on the promises of big data
along with the dangers...this is material that we should all become
familiar with!" Alex Pentland, MIT, author of Social Physics: How
Good Ideas Spread - The Lessons From a New Science "Dirk Helbing
has established his reputation as one of the leading scientific
thinkers on the dramatic impacts of the digital revolution on our
society and economy. Thinking Ahead is a most stimulating and
provocative set of essays which deserves a wide audience." Paul
Ormerod, economist, and author of Butterfly Economics and Why Most
Things Fail. "It is becoming increasingly clear that many of our
institutions and social structures are in a bad way and urgently
need fixing. Financial crises, international conflicts, civil wars
and terrorism, inaction on climate change, problems of poverty,
widening economic inequality, health epidemics, pollution and
threats to digital privacy and identity are just some of the major
challenges that we confront in the twenty-first century. These
issues demand new and bold thinking, and that is what Dirk Helbing
offers in this collection of essays. If even a fraction of these
ideas pay off, the consequences for global governance could be
significant. So this is a must-read book for anyone concerned about
the future." Philip Ball, science writer and author of Critical
Mass "This collection of papers, brought together by Dirk Helbing,
is both timely and topical. It raises concerns about Big Data,
which are truly frightening and disconcerting, that we do need to
be aware of; while at the same time offering some hope that the
technology, which has created the previously unthought-of dangers
to our privacy, safety and democracy can be the means to address
these dangers by enabling social, economic and political
participation and coordination, not possible in the past. It makes
for compelling reading and I hope for timely action."Eve
Mitleton-Kelly, LSE, author of Corporate Governance and Complexity
Theory and editor of Co-evolution of Intelligent Socio-technical
Systems
What are the principles that keep our society together? This
question is even more difficult to answer than the long-standing
question, what are the forces that keep our world together.
However, the social challenges of humanity in the 21st century
ranging from the financial crises to the impacts of globalization,
require us to make fast progress in our understanding of how
society works, and how our future can be managed in a resilient and
sustainable way. This book can present only a few very first steps
towards this ambitious goal. However, based on simple models of
social interactions, one can already gain some surprising insights
into the social, ``macro-level'' outcomes and dynamics that is
implied by individual, ``micro-level'' interactions. Depending on
the nature of these interactions, they may imply the spontaneous
formation of social conventions or the birth of social cooperation,
but also their sudden breakdown. This can end in deadly crowd
disasters or tragedies of the commons (such as financial crises or
environmental destruction). Furthermore, we demonstrate that
classical modeling approaches (such as representative agent models)
do not provide a sufficient understanding of the self-organization
in social systems resulting from individual interactions. The
consideration of randomness, spatial or network interdependencies,
and nonlinear feedback effects turns out to be crucial to get
fundamental insights into how social patterns and dynamics emerge.
Given the explanation of sometimes counter-intuitive phenomena
resulting from these features and their combination, our
evolutionary modeling approach appears to be powerful and
insightful. The chapters of this book range from a discussion of
the modeling strategy for socio-economic systems over experimental
issues up the right way of doing agent-based modeling. We
furthermore discuss applications ranging from pedestrian and crowd
dynamics over opinion formation, coordination, and cooperation up
to conflict, and also address the response to information, issues
of systemic risks in society and economics, and new approaches to
manage complexity in socio-economic systems. Selected parts of this
book had been previously published in peer reviewed journals.
When I wrote the book Quantitative Sociodynamics, it was an early
attempt to make methods from statistical physics and complex
systems theory fruitful for the modeling and understanding of
social phenomena. Unfortunately, the ?rst edition appeared at a
quite prohibitive price. This was one reason to make these chapters
available again by a new edition. The other reason is that, in the
meantime, many of the methods discussed in this book are more and
more used in a variety of different ?elds. Among the ideas worked
out in this book are: 1 * a statistical theory of binary social
interactions, * a mathematical formulation of social ?eld theory,
which is the basis of social 2 force models, * a microscopic
foundation of evolutionary game theory, based on what is known
today as 'proportional imitation rule', a stochastic treatment of
interactions in evolutionary game theory, and a model for the
self-organization of behavioral 3 conventions in a coordination
game. It, therefore, appeared reasonable to make this book
available again, but at a more affordable price. To keep its
original character, the translation of this book, which 1 D.
Helbing, Interrelations between stochastic equations for systems
with pair interactions. Ph- icaA 181, 29-52 (1992); D. Helbing,
Boltzmann-like and Boltzmann-Fokker-Planck equations as a
foundation of behavioral models. PhysicaA 196, 546-573 (1993). 2 D.
Helbing, Boltzmann-like and Boltzmann-Fokker-Planck equations as a
foundation of beh- ioral models. PhysicaA 196, 546-573 (1993); D.
The essays and lectures collected in this book center around
knowledge transfer from the complex-system sciences to applications
in business, industry and society, as viewed from a broad
perspective. The contributions aim to raise awareness across the
spectrum to meet the increasing need to integrate lessons from
complexity research into everyday planning, decision making,
logistics or optimization procedures and forecasting. The writing
has been largely kept non-technical.
This Open Access book outlines ideas for a novel, scalable and,
above all, sustainable financial system. We all know that today's
global markets are unsustainable and global governance is not
effective enough. Given this situation, could one boost smart human
coordination, sustainability and resilience by tweaking society at
its core: the monetary system? A Computational Social Science team
at ETH Zurich has indeed worked on a concept and little
demonstrator for a new financial system, called "Finance 4.0" or
just "FIN4", which combines blockchain technology with the Internet
of Things ("IoT"). What if communities could reward sustainable
actions by issuing their own money ("tokens")? Would people behave
differently, when various externalities became visible and were
actionable through cryptographic tokens? Could a novel,
participatory, multi-dimensional financial system be created? Could
it be run by the people for the people and lead to more societal
resilience than today's financial system (which is effectively
one-dimensional due to its almost frictionless exchange)? How could
one manage such a system in an ethical and democratic way? This
book presents some early attempts in a nascent field, but provides
a fresh view on what cryptoeconomic systems could do for us, for a
circular economy, and for scalable, sustainable action.
Der Verkehr spielt in unserer industrialisierten Gesellschaft
zweifellos eine wichtige Rolle. Wir verdanken ihm nicht nur unsere
Bewegungsfreiheit, son- dern auch unseren Wohlstand. Seit einigen
Jahren werden jedoch die Grenzen der Mobilitat angesichts
kilometerlanger Staus und zunehmender Umwelt- probleme
uniibersehbar. Daher blieb das Thema "Verkehr" nicht mehr eini- gen
Verkehrsingenieuren vorbehalten, sondern es wurde zum
gesellschaftlich relevanten Politikum und erlangte eine breite
offentliche Aufmerksamkeit. Mittlerweile befassen sich mit ihm,
auBer renommierten Fachzeitschriften, Massenmedien aller Art.
Gleichzeitig hat das internationale Interesse an der Erforschung
des Ver- kehrs enorm zugenommen. Besonders unter Physikern ist in
jiingster Zeit ein starkes Engagement zu verzeichnen, was zu einer
rasanten wissenschaftlichen Entwicklung und einer wahren
Veroffentlichungsfiut gefiihrt hat.! Dafiir gibt es folgende
Griinde: - Einerseits besteht ein dringender Bedarf an Methoden zur
Optimierung des Verkehrsfiusses, urn die bestehende Infrastruktur
effizienter nutzen zu konnen. Entsprechende Forschungsprojekte
werden staatlich gefordert. - Andererseits verspricht man sich
durch den Verkauf intelligenter Verkehrs- leitsysteme europaweit
einen jahrlichen Umsatz von 200 Milliarden DM [434]. Das Engagement
der Industrie ist folglich ausgesprochen groB. - AuBerdem
ermoglichen moderne Computer mittlerweile umfangreiche Ver-
kehrssimulationen, so daB eine Berechnung der Verkehrsstrome
schneller als in Echtzeit in greifbare Nahe riickt, selbst fiir das
Autobahnnetz der gesamten Bundesrepublik [35]. - SchlieBlich wirft
die Verkehrsdynamik eine Vielzahl spannender Fragen auf, deren
exakte wissenschaftliche Behandlung auBerst knifHig und eine Her-
ausforderung an sich ist.
In recent years flows in networks have attracted the interest of
many researchers from different areas, e.g. applied mathematicians,
engineers, physicists, economists. The main reason for this
ubiquity is the wide and diverse range of applications, such as
vehicular traffic, supply chains, blood flow, irrigation channels,
data networks and others. This book presents an extensive set of
notes by world leaders on the main mathematical techniques used to
address such problems, together with investigations into specific
applications. The main focus is on partial differential equations
in networks, but ordinary differential equations and optimal
transport are also included. Moreover, the modeling is completed by
analysis, numerics, control and optimization of flows in networks.
The book will be a valuable resource for every researcher or
student interested in the subject.
Der Verkehr spielt in unserer industrialisierten Gesellschaft
zweifellos eine wichtige Rolle. Wir verdanken ihm nicht nur unsere
Bewegungsfreiheit, son- dern auch unseren Wohlstand. Seit einigen
Jahren werden jedoch die Grenzen der Mobilitat angesichts
kilometerlanger Staus und zunehmender Umwelt- probleme
uniibersehbar. Daher blieb das Thema "Verkehr" nicht mehr eini- gen
Verkehrsingenieuren vorbehalten, sondern es wurde zum
gesellschaftlich relevanten Politikum und erlangte eine breite
offentliche Aufmerksamkeit. Mittlerweile befassen sich mit ihm,
auBer renommierten Fachzeitschriften, Massenmedien aller Art.
Gleichzeitig hat das internationale Interesse an der Erforschung
des Ver- kehrs enorm zugenommen. Besonders unter Physikern ist in
jiingster Zeit ein starkes Engagement zu verzeichnen, was zu einer
rasanten wissenschaftlichen Entwicklung und einer wahren
Veroffentlichungsfiut gefiihrt hat.! Dafiir gibt es folgende
Griinde: - Einerseits besteht ein dringender Bedarf an Methoden zur
Optimierung des Verkehrsfiusses, urn die bestehende Infrastruktur
effizienter nutzen zu konnen. Entsprechende Forschungsprojekte
werden staatlich gefordert. - Andererseits verspricht man sich
durch den Verkauf intelligenter Verkehrs- leitsysteme europaweit
einen jahrlichen Umsatz von 200 Milliarden DM [434]. Das Engagement
der Industrie ist folglich ausgesprochen groB. - AuBerdem
ermoglichen moderne Computer mittlerweile umfangreiche Ver-
kehrssimulationen, so daB eine Berechnung der Verkehrsstrome
schneller als in Echtzeit in greifbare Nahe riickt, selbst fiir das
Autobahnnetz der gesamten Bundesrepublik [35]. - SchlieBlich wirft
die Verkehrsdynamik eine Vielzahl spannender Fragen auf, deren
exakte wissenschaftliche Behandlung auBerst knifHig und eine Her-
ausforderung an sich ist.
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