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Introduction—Have We Opened Pandora’s Box?

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Thinking Ahead - Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society

Abstract

The first of the contributions in this booklet dates back to March 2008, when Markus Christen, James Breiding and myself became concerned about the stability of the financial system that we felt urged to write a newspaper article to alert the public (see the English translation in Chap. 4). Unfortunately, at that time, the public was not ready to listen. Newspaper editors found our analysis too complex. We responded that a financial crisis would be impossible to prevent, if newspapers failed to explain the complexity of problems like this to their audience. Just a few months later, Lehmann Brothers collapsed, which gave rise to a large-scale crisis. It made me think about the root causes of economic problems and of global crises in general (see Chaps. 4, 5, and 7). But my collaborators and I saw not only the financial crisis coming. We also voiced the surveillance problem early on and the political vulnerability of European gas supply. We studied conflict in Israel, the spreading of diseases, and new response strategies to earthquakes and other disasters. Shortly after, all of this turned out to be highly relevant, almost visionary…

This chapter first appeared in the FuturICT Blog on September 10, 2014, see http://futurict.blogspot.ch/2014/09/have-we-opened-pandoras-box_10.html , and is reproduced here with minor stylistic improvements. Acknowledgments: I would like to thank many friends and colleagues, in particular the world-wide FuturICT community, for the inspiring discussions and the continued support. I am also grateful to Stefano Balietti, James Breiding, and Markus Christen for their reprint permissions regarding two of the chapters in this booklet.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Just imagine the mass surveillance data would get in control of extreme political parties, and they would use these to terrorize the people. Germany has had a Nazi and a Stasi regime, and knows, how terrible this can end.

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    Dirk Helbing

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Helbing, D. (2015). Introduction—Have We Opened Pandora’s Box?. In: Thinking Ahead - Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15078-9_1

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