Chapter 6
A Planetary-Scale Threat
How Much Worse Can it Get?
We have had so much hopes in the positive potentials of the digital revolution, and the
biggest threat most people can imagine is an Internet outage or a hacking attack. However,
it appears that Social Media—once seen as an opportunity for fairer, participatory society—
have (been) turned into promoters of fake news and hate speech. It also turns out that Big
Data has empowered businesses and secret services, while in comparison citizens have
probably lost power. Exposed to an attention economy and surveillance capitalism, people
may become objects of algorithms in an increasingly data-driven and AI-controlled world.
Therefore, the question is: After the digital „singularity”, will we be „Gods” in a „digital
paradise”—or submitted to a superintelligent system, without fundamental rights, human
dignity, and freedom? It is time for an intermediate summary and assessment.
6.1 Big Data
The digital revolution progresses at a breath-taking speed. Almost every year, there
seems to be a new hype.
1 Laptops, mobile phones, smartphones, tablets, Big Data,
Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, 3D Printing, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality,
Internet of Things, Quantum Computing, and Blockchain Technology give only a
partial picture of the developments. People, lawyers, politicians, the media—they
all seem to struggle to keep track of these emerging technologies, while more are to
come. Can we create the needed governance frameworks in time?
While many people consider Big Data to be the “oil” of the digital revolution,
they consider Artificial Intelligence to be its “motor”. It has become a sport to collect
as much data as possible, since business opportunities appear to increase with the
amount of data at hand. Accordingly, many excuses have been found to collect data
about basically everyone of us, at any time and anywhere. These reasons include
1 See the Gartner Hype Cycle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
D. Helbing, Next Civilization,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62330-2_6
105
A Planetary-Scale Threat
How Much Worse Can it Get?
We have had so much hopes in the positive potentials of the digital revolution, and the
biggest threat most people can imagine is an Internet outage or a hacking attack. However,
it appears that Social Media—once seen as an opportunity for fairer, participatory society—
have (been) turned into promoters of fake news and hate speech. It also turns out that Big
Data has empowered businesses and secret services, while in comparison citizens have
probably lost power. Exposed to an attention economy and surveillance capitalism, people
may become objects of algorithms in an increasingly data-driven and AI-controlled world.
Therefore, the question is: After the digital „singularity”, will we be „Gods” in a „digital
paradise”—or submitted to a superintelligent system, without fundamental rights, human
dignity, and freedom? It is time for an intermediate summary and assessment.
6.1 Big Data
The digital revolution progresses at a breath-taking speed. Almost every year, there
seems to be a new hype.
1 Laptops, mobile phones, smartphones, tablets, Big Data,
Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, 3D Printing, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality,
Internet of Things, Quantum Computing, and Blockchain Technology give only a
partial picture of the developments. People, lawyers, politicians, the media—they
all seem to struggle to keep track of these emerging technologies, while more are to
come. Can we create the needed governance frameworks in time?
While many people consider Big Data to be the “oil” of the digital revolution,
they consider Artificial Intelligence to be its “motor”. It has become a sport to collect
as much data as possible, since business opportunities appear to increase with the
amount of data at hand. Accordingly, many excuses have been found to collect data
about basically everyone of us, at any time and anywhere. These reasons include
1 See the Gartner Hype Cycle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
D. Helbing, Next Civilization,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62330-2_6
105