This topic emerged through a screening of emerging issues in science, technology and society in the context of the FET CSA OBSERVE.

http://www.horizon-observatory.eu/radar-en/index.php

The big picture

Complexity is increasingly recognised both as a challenge and an opportunity in a wide range of science and practice domains. In the very rich and often controversial debate three aspects could be distinguished: Recognising and observing complex processes, decision making in the face of uncertainty and approaches to embracing and even governing complexity. A central crosscutting aspect is the exploration of human thinking, decision making and behaviour as such.

The following individual elements that emerged in the OBSERVE screening gave rise to the suggestion of this topic:

Rise of complexity sciences: Advanced control systems (such as aircraft cockpits) master increasingly complex control tasks. They are however unable to fully deal with complexity and uncertainty of the real world in particular of human behaviour. While the science of complex systems has been around for 35 years now, it has more recently seen a rise of centres and institutes all around the world and is expanding to include more social sciences and sustainability. Several research activities in machine learning are aiming at contributing to the challenge of handling complexity. Examples are emotional recognition used to steer machines, pricing of basketball players based on moving dot analysis and development of mental clones acting in cooperation with ourselves. Further contributions to better understanding the relationships of elements in complex systems are made by research on swarm intelligence, swarm robotics, self-organizing systems, adaptive systems, evolutionary computation, systems biology and affective computing.

Multi-disciplinary simulation research: There is a call for better modelling, simulation and visualization of complex multi-disciplinary systems such as turbulent aerodynamics. At the same time philosophers and social scientists point to the societal transformations associated with simulation based technology.

Intelligent combination of sensor-data replaces traditional technologies for authorization, monitoring and observation: Instead of highly visible and electricity-consuming video cameras or pattern recognition computers, sensors tracking motion, noise, temperature, weight, etc. can be used. This requires that the sensors are connected to each other and that their data is being combined in an intelligent way. New network setups and algorithms will be developed which will enable these sensor networks to identify persons, activities and objects with more precision and much less power-consumption than traditional methods.

Data vs. Intuition? With ever more data available the question arises how to strike the right balance between data and intuition in decision-making. Data seems the way to go; but data can only go so far. Data-driven decision-making relies on intuitions about what to measure and why; it tends to overweight things because they are measurable; and data sees only the past, the future involves guesswork.

Freakthinking: The books Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have been worldwide sensations, selling tens of millions of copies. They have come to stand for challenging conventional wisdom using data rather than emotion. Questions they examine are typically: Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? How much do parents really matter? Why is chemotherapy prescribed so often if it’s so ineffective?

Making human impact visible: The artists Helen Evans & Heiko Hansen(HeHe) study the effect on the environment of clouds resulting from human activities linked to the production and consumption of energy. The work Fleur de Lys presented in the 2015/16 exhibition: A brief history of the future illustrates the otherwise invisible radioactive cloud from a nuclear power station after an accident. The exhibition presents the work in section III "an endangered planet".

Brain understanding: The Observe webmining revealed a surge in new insights into the way the brain works. A particular focus was on memory but also on spatial mapping, timing, vision, decision making, emotional experience assignment, social prediction, hearing, tinnitus, pattern recognition and aging.

Understanding and influencing human behaviour: Several researchers across disciplines are investigating ways to understand and influence human thinking and behaviour; The field is highly interdisciplinary ranging from AI, NPL, data analytics, game design and neuroscience to sociology, pedagogies and economics. Computational neuroscience in particular aims for a better understanding of the human brain and cognition.

Faster computers and newly available massive data hold the key for problems deemed too difficult to solve in the past: Many scientific undertakings like formalizing tacit knowledge, simulating complex organ functions or mapping evolutionary developments in biology were once considered too complex either because there was not enough data available or the computing capacity was not sufficient to run the necessary programs. Several projects submitted to FET expect that with increasing computation power and the availability of new mass data which is often made automatically available by new devices many old problems can now be solved.

Global ethics: One of the 15 global challenges identified by the Millenium Project is dealing with global ethics covering questions like: How can ethical considerations become more routinely incorporated into global decisions? Unethical decisions (like economical ones) are mostly independent from ethics. Collective responsibility for global ethics issues like waste handling is needed.

Global foresight/collective intelligence: One of the 15 global challenges identified by The Millenium Project is global decision making: Decision makers need tools to analyze, synthesize, and make good decisions. We need collective intelligence systems, that we may know, what is truly significant and to create synergies among brains, software, and information for securing agreement to make necessary changes.

New kinds of sensors and their smart connection will give us a new level of control over our surroundings: Several reserarchers submitting or running FET projects argue that the reason why the Internet of Things still seems to be distant promise today is that there is not enough smart and connected data available. Thus, research needs to be encouraged in the area of sensing devices and technologies to analyze and exploit the data collected in the various fields. This research includes new kinds of biosensors, lab-on-a-chip technologies, wireless sensor networks, remote sensing, environmental monitoring, smart textiles and RFID.

Hyperconnected sustainable planet

Demos Helsinki has identified 10 principles to guide development towards a hyperconnected, sustainable planet.

Distributed collaboration platforms Around the world citizens self-organize to research and address certain challenges such as energy-supply, waste-disposal, weather- and threat-monitoring or bee dying. These "peer2peer" initiatives need platforms to safely collect, manage and process data and resources in a distributed and collaborative way. At the same time technical solutions that allow orchestrating large numbers of distributed specialists at short notice and thereby enable new collaboration and service models such as Application Program Interfaces (API) and blockchain technology are receiving a lot of attention.

The work needed

As the high diversity of voices illustrates, this topic is spanning across a wide range of S&T disciplines from aircraft engineering, sensor technology, computing and data analytics via neurosciences, psychology, game development and sustainability studies to philosophy, economy, sociology and political sciences. Several questions in this domain such as e.g. the limits to data based decision making and concepts like “resilience” or "collective intelligence" and even the very notion of complexity are highly contested. At the same time investigating human capacity to make decisions and intervene into the world is clearly central to humanity’s future. This is not least because a number of “grand societal challenges” such as sustainability, peace or health heavily depend on human decision making capacity. The main challenge will be to identify fruitful shared research questions across these very diverse research and innovation communities.

Selected voices

http://www.ccs2015.org/

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/features/data-or-hunch?page=full

http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/how-to-think-like-a-freak-make-smarter-decisions-freakonomics-stephen-j-dubner-steven-d-levitt/

https://www.ted.com/talks/rajiv_maheswaran_the_math_behind_basketball_s_wildest_moves

http://caps-conference.eu/

http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/the-extreme-present-an-evening-of-self-help-for-planet-earth/

https://twitter.com/fineartsbelgium/status/653438882000842753

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150217-how-smart-is-your-subconscious?ocid=twfut

http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/7/9272581/apple-hiring-machine-learning-experts

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150106-the-jet-cockpits-of-tomorrow?ocid=twfut

http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/17844?utm_content=bufferea4a3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

http://discoversociety.org/2015/07/30/the-growing-power-of-the-data-analytics-industry/?utm_content=bufferac7d0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

http://isa-global-dialogue.net/the-futures-we-want/?utm_content=bufferdc9f0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=plus.google.com&utm_campaign=buffer

http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/10-nordic-principles-for-a-hyperconnected-planet

http://www.iftf.org/future-now/article-detail/new-paths-out-of-poverty-25-future-zones-of-innovation/

The Millennium Project-Global Futures System:

https://themp.org/#group_id=4f98b195e3dfc62b2e00018b&section=report

https://themp.org/#group_id=4f98b226e3dfc62b2e000195&section=report

Chandler (2014): http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21693293.2013.878544