Ref. Ares(2021)6133247 - 08/10/2021
communication infrastructure it can rely on. Europe can do this. For this, I recommend to build
on three pil ars: (1) the emerging "Internet of Things", (2) Open Data, and (3) socially oriented,
value-sensitive ICT. Such a large-scale, concerted ICT effort would also create many new jobs,
thereby countering Europe's unemployment crisis.
The "Internet of Things" is just about to emerge, giving Europe a second chance to establish
leadership in some area of ICT - namely collaborative data creation and data analytics.
Communication standards for sensor networks are now being developed. Based on the Internet
of Things, Europe could build a new, trustable, transparent, participatory and privacy-respecting
Web that is better protected against cyberwar and cybercrime than the communication systems
of today. Building and running this as a Citizen Web would avoid large infrastructure costs for
European states. Establishing the principle of a Personal Data Purse would give users control
over their personal data.
Europe could also produce the hardware and software to establish a Planetary Nervous System,
allowing one to measure the state of the world in real-time, thereby enabling better-informed
policy and business decisions. Building a Universal Reputation System, together with a number
of other measures, would help to promote responsible data use and decision-making.
Furthermore, Europe could follow an Open Data strategy, to unleash the full power of data for
everyone - politics, business, science, and citizens. Openness has many advantages: (1) data
accumulate more quickly, (2) everyone can benefit from them, (3) quality standards of data
algorithms rise by competition, (4) transparency creates trust and helps to reduce the level of
misuse. McKinsey has just published a report enumerating the economic value of Open Data
with 3-5 bil ion dollars annually. Europe could get a big piece of this. Combining this with the
Innovation Accelerator strategy worked out by the FuturICT initiative would accelerate progress
in research and development.
If the right kinds of decisions were taken, a European or even global-scale team could quickly be
set up - the concept is ready to go. The European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT)
could play a central role in driving such a large-scale concerted effort. This would create
international visibility, while enabling new approaches to tackle some of our most burning
questions: global warming, the financial crisis, and the transition towards renewable energy
system. So, why don't we start this today?
Thank you very much for your kind consideration.
Sincerely yours,
Short summary of international foresight activities and ICT trends:
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The foresight activities in the USA are certainly the most advanced. Besides those performed by
the various secret services, there are also a number of relevant companies, such as Recorded
Future or Palantir, which are aimed at predictive intelligence, sometimes phrased as a "crystal
ball" (for a discussion see the book Das Ende des Zufalls). Furthermore, Sentient World is a
project aimed at creating a mirror world. It is claimed by some people that the project feeds
personal data into massive agent-based simulations to run simulations of the real world with
personalized agents on a global scale, i.e. involving bil ions of simulated individuals. This may be
viewed as a kind of war game at grandest scale, but for all kinds of applications, including
business-related ones, which are fed with Big Data of all kinds.
The FuturICT project was often perceived as a European copy of the above kinds of projects.
However, it has a number of important distinguishing features such as the focus on ethical and
privacy-protecting information and communication technologies (ICT) and the creation of
transparent, trustworthy and participatory platforms to unleash the power of the information age.
Many FuturICT ideas have recently been copied by a number of countries, including Japan,
China, and Russia. In this connection, I have been repeatedly contacted by research teams and
public media, particularly TV.
The Qatar Computing and Research Institute, with the full support of the Qatar government,
currently looks for a world-class Research Director for their Social Computing department to lead
a research group of up to 50 people and work with "unlimited access to funds and data".
In the USA, Prof. Chris Barrett from Virginia Tech is involved in a center spending 50 mil ion
dollars annually on social simulation. This is just one of the large-scale social simulation
activities run in the US. There are other activities around Joshua M. Epstein and at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory, and a number of IARPA projects.
To anticipate upcoming developments in industry, it is worth focusing on google's activities,
which encompass more than 50 software platforms. Google has probably all the intelligence of
the NSA. Moreover, within just one year, they have announced the self-driving google car,
heavily invested into robotics, and started a google brain project to turn the Internet into an
intelligent creature. Google has also just invested 3.2 bil ion dollars into the "Internet of Things",
buying Nest Labs. Furthermore, google has started a large-scale research effort targeted at
immortality. Google is furthermore financially connected with Recorded Future and with
23andMe, a company dedicated to collecting personal genetic and health data. Moreover,
google X is reported to work on about 100 secret projects.
IBM, in comparison, has decided to invest 1 bil ion dollars into their Watson computer, which
understands spoken language and comes so close to human intelligence that it is already used
for phone-based customer service. The company Enterra Solutions goes a step further by
combining Watson's capabilities with common sense anthologies and at least 100 Petabytes of
Big Data to create something that may be called a reasoning machine or inference engine.
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