Build Digital Democracy Open Sharing of Data That Are Collected with Smart Devices Would Empower Citizens and Create Jobs, Say Dirk Helbing and Evangelos Pournaras
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COMMENT IMAGINECHINA/CORBIS Many choices that people consider their own are already determined by algorithms. Build digital democracy Open sharing of data that are collected with smart devices would empower citizens and create jobs, say Dirk Helbing and Evangelos Pournaras. ridges, coffee machines, toothbrushes, our decisions, we need information sys- predictable. Our behaviour is increasingly phones and smart devices are all now tems that are transparent, trustworthy and steered by personalized advertisements and equipped with communicating sensors. user-controlled. Each of us must be able to search results, recommendation systems FIn ten years, 150 billion ‘things’ will connect choose, modify and build our own tools for and emotion-tracking technologies. Thou- with each other and with billions of people. winnowing information. sands of pieces of metadata have been col- The ‘Internet of Things’ will generate data vol- With this in mind, our research team at lected about every one of us (see go.nature. umes that double every 12 hours rather than the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in com/stoqsu). Companies and governments every 12 months, as is the case now. Zurich (ETH Zurich), alongside international can increasingly manipulate our decisions, Blinded by information, we need ‘digital partners, has started to create a distributed, behaviour and feelings1. sunglasses’. Whoever builds the filters to privacy-preserving ‘digital nervous system’ Many policymakers believe that personal monetize this information determines what called Nervousnet. Nervousnet uses the sen- data may be used to ‘nudge’ people to make we see — Google and Facebook, for exam- sor networks that make up the Internet of healthier and environmentally friendly ple. Many choices that people consider their Things, including those in smartphones, to decisions. Yet the same technology may own are already determined by algorithms. measure the world around us and to build a also promote nationalism, fuel hate against Such remote control weakens responsible, collective ‘data commons’. The many chal- minorities or skew election outcomes2 if eth- self-determined decision-making and thus lenges ahead will be best solved using an ical scrutiny, transparency and democratic society too. open, participatory platform, an approach control are lacking — as they are in most The European Court of Justice’s ruling that has proved successful for projects such private companies and institutions that use on 6 October that countries and companies as Wikipedia and the open-source operating ‘big data’. The combination of nudging with must comply with European data-protec- system Linux. big data about everyone’s behaviour, feelings tion laws when transferring data outside the and interests (‘big nudging’, if you will) could European Union demonstrates that a new A WISE KING? eventually create close to totalitarian power. digital paradigm is overdue. To ensure that The science of human decision-making is Countries have long experimented with no government, company or person with far from understood. Yet our habits, rou- using data to run their societies. In the 1970s, sole control of digital filters can manipulate tines and social interactions are surprisingly Chilean President Salvador Allende created 5 NOVEMBER 2015 | VOL 527 | NATURE | 33 © 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved COMMENT computer networks to optimize industrial does not hold. Although we have never had vision; none has its scope. They focus on productivity3. Today, Singapore considers so much information, we face ever more participatory data collection; decentral- itself a data-driven ‘social laboratory’4 and global threats, including climate change, ized communication services; or big-data other countries seem keen to copy this model. unstable peace and socio-economic fragility, analytics. Nervousnet is designed to meet The Chinese government has begun rating and political satisfaction is low worldwide. all three objectives. It will also enable real- the behaviour of its citizens5. Loans, jobs and About 50% of today’s jobs will be lost in the time measurement and feedback to support travel visas will depend on an individual’s next two decades as computers and robots self-organizing systems. For example, self- ‘citizen score’, their web history and political take over tasks. But will we see the macro- controlled traffic lights responding to local opinion. Meanwhile, Baidu — the Chinese economic benefits that would justify such vehicle flows can reduce urban congestion equivalent of Google — is joining forces with large-scale ‘creative destruction’? And how and outperform today’s centralized systems. the military for the ‘China brain project’, can we reinvent half of our economy? Nervousnet uses distributed data storage using ‘deep learning’ artificial-intelligence The digital revolution will mainly benefit and distributed control, so that it is resilient algorithms to predict the behaviour of people countries that achieve a ‘win–win–win’ situ- to attacks and centralized manipulation on the basis of their Internet activity6. ation for business, politics and citizens alike10. attempts, easy to scale up, and tolerant to The intentions may be good: it is hoped To mobilize the ideas, skills and resources faults. Because data encryption is not enough, that big data can improve governance by of all, we must build information systems a secure personal-data store will be needed overcoming irrationality and partisan inter- capable of bringing to allow each user to determine which data ests. But the situation also evokes the warn- diverse knowledge “Big data to share with whom, and for what purpose. ing of the eighteenth-century philosopher and ideas together. should be Attracting users is a challenge. We will Immanuel Kant, that the “sovereign act- Online deliberation used to solve be adding elements of gaming to make ing … to make the people happy according to platforms and recon- the world’s participation more enjoyable, as well as a his notions … becomes a despot”. It is for this figurable networks of problems.” micro-payment system to reward and incen- reason that the US Declaration of Independ- smart human minds tivize digital co-creation. Because critics may ence emphasizes the pursuit of happiness of and artificially intelligent systems can now worry about the responsible use of bottom- individuals. be used to produce collective intelligence up systems, Nervousnet will integrate repu- Ruling like a ‘benevolent dictator’ or ‘wise that can cope with the diverse and complex tation systems, qualification mechanisms king’ cannot work because there is no way challenges surrounding us. and self-governance by community mod- to determine a single metric or goal that a erators. leader should maximize. Should it be gross A DIGITAL NERVOUS SYSTEM In the long run, measurements tailored domestic product per capita or sustainability, The Nervousnet project is working on this. to specific purposes and a combination of power or peace, average life span or happi- It began as a tool for scientists to experiment crowdsourced data generation, curation and ness, or something else? with the Internet of Things. For example, analysis will outperform the currently fash- Better is pluralism. It hedges risks, pro- social interactions can be studied by anony- ionable big-data analytics approach. Just as motes innovation, collective intelligence and mously tracing the physical proximity of peo- the open standards of the World Wide Web well-being. Approaching complex problems ple (given their informed consent). created unprecedented opportunities and a from varied perspectives also helps people to Nervousnet now enables anyone to meas- multibillion-dollar economy, the right frame- cope with rare and extreme events that are ure and analyse aspects of the world in real work for the Internet of Things and digital costly for society — such as natural disasters, time. The Nervousnet app allows users to society could foster an age of prosperity. ■ blackouts or financial meltdowns. activate or deactivate about ten smartphone Centralized, top-down control of data has sensors that measure, for example, accelera- Dirk Helbing is professor, and Evangelos various flaws. First, it will inevitably become tion, light and noise. A range of other func- Pournaras is a postdoctoral researcher, in corrupted or hacked by extremists or crimi- tions are being shaped by the core research computational social science at the Swiss nals. Second, owing to limitations in data- and development team at ETH Zurich and Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, transmission rates and processing power, about a dozen research groups in Europe, Switzerland. top-down solutions often fail to address local Japan and the United States. The project is e-mail: [email protected] needs. Third, manipulating the search for funded by the European Commission, Delft 1. Kramer, A. D. I., Guillory, J. E. & Hancock, J. T. information and intervening in individual University of Technology in the Netherlands Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 8788–8790 choices undermines ‘collective intelligence’7. and philanthropists. It is also supported by (2014). Fourth, personalized information creates volunteer developers. We aim for global col- 2. Epstein, R. & Robertson, R. E. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. 8 USA 112, E4512–E4521 (2015). ‘filter bubbles’ . People are exposed less to laboration and benefits, even if there will be 3. Medina, E. Cybernetic Revolutionaries (MIT Press, other opinions, which