Category: Future

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Does the Wild wild web come to an end — rethinking the platform ideology

It seems that the WWW in its original idea as the Wild Wild Web is coming to an end. The tech industry’s decade-long experiment in unregulated growth and laissez-faire platform governance is being questioned in the light of recent political and social developments, polarization, fake news, etc. As the internet giants are unwilling to make rules, the WWW has slided into a state of “out of control”. Users as well as regulators are stipulating more responsibility and a new culture that is more accountable, more self-aware, and less willfully naïve.

see: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/technology/goodbye-to-the-wild-wild-web.html

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Emergent Innovation: From innovation as extrapolating from the past to learning from the future as it emerges

How do we want to innovate in the next 10 years? What does innovation mean in an exponential and digital (platform) economy and how are we dealing with an uncertain and almost unpredictable and complex future as we are experiencing it right now? How can we bring about innovations „with purpose“, that “make sense”, that are sustainable and have a positive impact?

Most of our innovations are driven by past experiences these days, as this seems to be the only “solid” source that we can rely on. We will show, however, we can go beyond this strategy by tapping into future potentials leading us the way to “learning from the future as it emerges”.

http://www.thelivingcore.com/en/innovation-strategies-part-1/

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On Futures Literacies

Most academic and business curricula offer a good training in analytical thinking, critical thinking, planning, or making predictions. Although these skills are somehow concerned with “future issues”, they are implicitly or explicitly based on the assumption that the status-quo and/or on extrapolating past experiences or trends into the future can predict the future. However, our current world is highly unpredictable and follows an exponential dynamic leading to a high level of uncertainty (“VUCA world”). It can be shown that these classic tools simply do not work any longer in such an environment. Riel Miller at al. introduces the concept of futures literacy as a discipline of anticipation, which can be trained and refined to establish familiarity with the unfamiliar and with an unknown and uncertain future. This article develops this discipline and shows why it is key for any business and innovation process having the aspiration to shape the future in a thriving manner.

https://medium.com/copenhagen-institute-for-futures-studies/what-is-futures-literacy-and-why-is-it-important-a27f24b983d8

See also R.Millers (open source) book on “Transforming the future” https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000264644

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How ethics, AI, Europe’s Green Deal, and COVID-19 are connected

In their critical review of the European Commission’s White Paper on Artificial Intelligence (Feb 2020) two members of the High-Level Expert Group for AI (HLEG AI), Mark Coeckelbergh and Thomas Metzinger, come to the conclusion that “Europe needs more guts when it comes to AI ethics”. On the one hand, they highlight positive aspects of this paper, such as the emphasis on trustworthiness or the importance of recognizing psychological risks that are induced by excessive application of AI. On the other hand, they complain about the fact that the ethical dimension is almost absent in this document and that there are no plans to develop educational ecosystems training future interdisciplinary experts in AI ethics.
In the context of COVID-19, the authors point to interesting emerging opportunities of merging Europe’s Green Deal with an ambitious European AI approach as one strategy to recover from this crisis.

See: https://background.tagesspiegel.de/digitalisierung/europe-needs-more-guts-when-it-comes-to-ai-ethics

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Towards a culture of flourishing. Reflections on designing our complex future with machines, exponentiality, and singularity

How should we design our futures? What is the role of technology, and, more specifically, of Artificial Intelligence and cognitive technologies in this context?

In his manifesto “Resisting Reduction”, Joichi Ito points us a way—not blindly following the “new religion” of singularity and exponentiality—into a future that is taking seriously the insights from complex adaptive systems and second-order cybernetics. He describes how we can transform complex, self-adaptive systems by intervening not primarily with a strategy of problem solving and optimizing, but by following a more organic and evolutionary approach aiming at regulating growth, increasing diversity and complexity, and enhancing the system´s  own resilience, adaptability, and sustainability. It turns out that changing parameters or even rules is not nearly as powerful as changing the system’s purpose, goals, and paradigms, if we want to engage in creating a culture of flourishing.

https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/resisting-reduction