Socio-Economic Implications of the Digital Revolution

Dirk Helbing & Carina Ines Hausladen | ETH Zurich

Quelle: researchgate.net

The digital revolution is reinventing business models, reshaping economic sectors, and changing entire societal institutions. Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, profiling and targeting, and several other technological developments are now fundamentally changing the ways economieswork. This contribution discusses opportunities and threats of the “Attention Economy” and “Surveillance Capitalism”, with a focus on systemicchanges. These are associated with developments such as “more data”,“more speed“, “more networking“. This contribution will also comparetwo paradigms: one that is based on a data-driven, AI-controlled, andlargely centralized vision of society and its optimization, and one thatis focused on empowerment, coordination, cooperation, self-organization, selfregulation, co-evolution, and collective intelligence in a distributed framework. It will be illustrated that suitable network effects are critical to a more cooperative and sustainable economy. Based on these insights, the possibility of a new, circular and synergistic organization of supplychains and a new, symbiotic economy will be highlighted.