Chapter 11
The Self-Organizing Society
Taking the Future in Our Hands
We are faced with the growing complexity and diversity of an increasingly interdependent
world. But Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, while potentially powerful and useful, are
not a panacea for our problems. The idea of super-governments or multi-national companies
running the world like a perfect clockwork is doomed to fail. Therefore, we must learn to
turn complexity and diversity into our advantage. This requires a distributed governance
approach. Now, the „Internet of Things“ enables self-organizing systems, which can create
socio-economic order and many benefits from the bottom-up. While solving the problem
of over-regulation, this can harness diversity and foster innovation, collective intelligence,
societal resilience, and individual happiness.
In the course of this book, we have made a number of unexpected discoveries
1 :
• Having and using more data is not always better (e.g. due to the problem of
“over-fitting”, “spurious correlations”, or classification errors, which can make
conclusions meaningless or wrong).
2
• Even if individual decisions can be correctly predicted in more than 95% of all
cases, this does not mean that the macro-level socio-economic outcome would be
predicted well.
3
• In complex dynamical systems with many interacting components, even the
perfect knowledge of all individual component properties does not necessarily
allow one to predict what happens if components interact.
4 In fact, interactions
may cause new, “emergent” system properties.
1 The following points have first been presented in a contribution on Societal, Economic, Ethical
and Legal Challenges of the Digital Revolution to Jusletter IT (May 21, 2015), see http://
jusletter-it.weblaw.ch/issues/2015/21-Mai-2015.html and http://papers.ssrn.com/soL3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=2594352.
2 Having a greater haystack does not make it easier to find a needle in it.
3 Maes and Helbing [1].
4 Assume we exactly know the psychology of two persons, but then they accidentally meet and fall
in love with each other. This incident can change their entire lives, and in some cases it can change
history too (think of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, for example, but there are many similar cases). A
similar problem is known from car electronics: even if all electronic components have been tested
well, their interaction often produces unexpected outcomes. In complex systems, such unexpected,
“emergent” system properties are quite common.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
D. Helbing, Next Civilization,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62330-2_11
225
The Self-Organizing Society
Taking the Future in Our Hands
We are faced with the growing complexity and diversity of an increasingly interdependent
world. But Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, while potentially powerful and useful, are
not a panacea for our problems. The idea of super-governments or multi-national companies
running the world like a perfect clockwork is doomed to fail. Therefore, we must learn to
turn complexity and diversity into our advantage. This requires a distributed governance
approach. Now, the „Internet of Things“ enables self-organizing systems, which can create
socio-economic order and many benefits from the bottom-up. While solving the problem
of over-regulation, this can harness diversity and foster innovation, collective intelligence,
societal resilience, and individual happiness.
In the course of this book, we have made a number of unexpected discoveries
1 :
• Having and using more data is not always better (e.g. due to the problem of
“over-fitting”, “spurious correlations”, or classification errors, which can make
conclusions meaningless or wrong).
2
• Even if individual decisions can be correctly predicted in more than 95% of all
cases, this does not mean that the macro-level socio-economic outcome would be
predicted well.
3
• In complex dynamical systems with many interacting components, even the
perfect knowledge of all individual component properties does not necessarily
allow one to predict what happens if components interact.
4 In fact, interactions
may cause new, “emergent” system properties.
1 The following points have first been presented in a contribution on Societal, Economic, Ethical
and Legal Challenges of the Digital Revolution to Jusletter IT (May 21, 2015), see http://
jusletter-it.weblaw.ch/issues/2015/21-Mai-2015.html and http://papers.ssrn.com/soL3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=2594352.
2 Having a greater haystack does not make it easier to find a needle in it.
3 Maes and Helbing [1].
4 Assume we exactly know the psychology of two persons, but then they accidentally meet and fall
in love with each other. This incident can change their entire lives, and in some cases it can change
history too (think of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, for example, but there are many similar cases). A
similar problem is known from car electronics: even if all electronic components have been tested
well, their interaction often produces unexpected outcomes. In complex systems, such unexpected,
“emergent” system properties are quite common.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
D. Helbing, Next Civilization,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62330-2_11
225