Sustainability In The Digital Age
yeah thank you very much for having me
here i’m going to talk about
sustainability transformations in the
digital age
so i’m coming from the field of
sustainability transformations i’m
interested in climate change i’m
interested in tipping points in the
earth system
and today i would like to discuss how
the digital transformation might help us
to get these things done
and this is why we did from the german
advisory council on global change i was
the
chair of this advisory bodytalk german
government we did a study
towards a common digital future where we
tried to understand
the potentials but also the risks of
digital transformations
towards sustainability and you might not
believe it but in 2015 when we decided
upon these sd the sdgs the 2030 agenda
the sustainability goals
this was not only this was not even a
debate
the discussion about digitalization
artificial intelligence
was not existent and today this is
changing obviously you might have
listened to was lavender line the
commission president of the european
union
in her talk about the future of europe
she talked about the decade of the 20th
as the decade of digitalization and
sustainability
but how are we going to bring this
together this is what i would like to
reflect upon and i’m focusing on two
main questions here
and presenting then to you and heuristic
how we could
think about bringing these two mega
trends in our societies together
the first question which i would like to
ask is how could we use the powerful
technologies to change
our economies and societies towards
sustainability
and the second even deeper question is
we need to understand
how digitalization as a driver of
fundamental and deep change in our
societies
is creating a new context and we also
need to reflect about
next generation of sustainability
thinking itself so it is a paradigmatic
change needed
also on the side of sustainability
research
this slide is only show only showing
that digitalization is not a sector
digitalization is everywhere
if you look into the economy if you look
into our societies if you
reflect upon our democracy everywhere
digitalization artificial intelligence
is driving transformative processes of
change
i’m now coming to the heuristic i talked
about so a heuristic which helps us
to understand and to reflect upon the
drivers of
digitalization artificial intelligence
and how this should be brought and could
be brought together
with sustainability transformations
because as i said at the beginning
until now these two spheres are not well
interlinked
here is the heuristic we are talking
about three dynamics of the digital age
the first one is and i’m moving into it
in a second
how we can use digital technologies
to make sustainability happen the second
wave and the second dynamic girls goes
further it is about how
digitalization artificial intelligence
will change
entire societies and economies and how
we can learn
to think about a sustainable digital
society
and the third dynamic then is about the
future of humans
and you will see that for some this
debate sounds a bit utopian or dystopian
and i will tell you that all these kind
of things are already on its way in
science so we need to think about it
and we need to understand what’s going
on there to define rules of the game
towards a digital and sustainable
society
so let’s move into the first the first
dynamic here where we are asking how we
can bring together
sustainability challenges which we
define with the 2030 agenda the climate
agreement from paris
and digital dynamics and digital trends
the most important starting point i
would say is that there is no
automatism at all that digital
technologies
might help us to solve our
sustainability challenges
these technologies already started 20
years ago right
but still we do have a very resource
intensive and energy intensive and
climate destructive growth pattern
so we need to bring these trends
together to
solve the sustainability challenges we
are confronted with
our assessment is showing the following
two major observations the first one is
that
if we talk about a green economy we need
to think about decarbonization we need
to think think about
circularity of our economies we think
need to think about dematerialization
resource efficiency climate efficiency
and then monitoring and protecting
ecosystems
so if we look at the technologies now
available and emerging
our assessment is that the potential to
solve all these kind of
issues with these technologies is bigger
than without these technologies
so our assessment shows that the
opportunities are there but we need to
build the missing links
between digitalization artificial
intelligence and sustainability issues
but because still
it’s not interlinked there is a second
observation here regarding the first
dynamic when we try to think how to
bring digitalization and sustainability
challenges
together there are some risks i call
talk about
sleepy grounds no and i see four of
those and i will only mention those
what we can see is that very often
digitalization triggers new kinds of
inequalities
digital divides of many kinds we also
can see that
important parts of the economies and
industries are
from a power perspective very
concentrated this is not very good for
our democracies obviously
then there is a third dimension where we
all know that we need to find solutions
it is about privacy the right of
regarding our data
anything needs to move forward here if
not we lose privacy issues
and we lose the basic conditions for
making democracy work
and then the last element when it comes
to the risk is about governance
i can tell you because i’m working with
and for governments
that the knowledge about digitalization
artificial intelligence
blockchain machine learning in our
administrations
is very limited if we don’t get this
right we will not govern
sustainable these technologies towards
sustainability because
you cannot govern what you do not
understand no so this is
the first dynamic in which we already
are and these are the pros and cons the
opportunities and the challenges
then when i move to the second dynamic
this is about deep changes in our
societies
driven by these kind of technologies
artificial intelligence machine learning
these are not only instruments to solve
any kind of problems
these are drivers of fundamental change
and
we argue that the changes we will see
will be
evolutionary long-term and deep
shifts comparable with the industrial
revolution
comparable with the neolithic revolution
a big shift in human civilization is
what we have in front of us
and when we think about that we have
five characteristics which we found
which will make this digital
societies moving forward and i’m driving
you very rapidly
through these five main characteristics
because you will feel listening to me
how deep the changes are going to be and
my main point here is that we need to
bring these new kind
of societies which are emerging there we
need to bring this kind of thinking and
trends
together with sustainability thinking we
also need to develop further
our sustainability thinking so here are
the five characteristics
interconnectedness cognition
autonomous systems virtuality knowledge
explosion
and i’m going through that
interconnectedness is something which is
very easy
this is about internet of things this is
about quantum computing
this is about we can connect everything
around the globe with any other thing
about the
around the globe people planets
technical systems
anything and this will change our
economies it’s already changing our
economies but also our societies
the next important element the next
important
characteristic is then cognition this is
about machines and technical systems
which are going to change fundamentally
our life in the past we have been
building
machines which have hp have been helping
us physically
now we are building machines which are
themselves learning
which are having cognition which are
having intelligence
and developing its own intelligence
further we thought in the past and we
have been right for
299 000 years this is the existence of
human beings homozapians
that we are those who have cognition and
intelligence now we are building
machines capable of that
so here are some examples what machine
learning and
artificial intelligence can do already
today and we are at the beginning of an
exponential learning curve here so
ai is better in chess than we are ai is
also better in go
playing gold than we are voice
recognition and face recognition is
moving forward
we have programs translating any
language in any other language
all already today technical systems can
produce texts
you can see on the right hand side on
the bottom a book about this is a
scientific publication
by springer published and it is about
the stand of research
in battery research and this
book has been written by beta writer
beta writer as a technical system
it has not been developed by a human
being this book
and the synthesis of the work which we
brought together in this book
on battery research is being produced by
a technical system
so think about all of that you feel that
our our societies will change
fundamentally
the roles between technology and
technical systems and human beings
need to be rethought obviously at this
slide only one figure is interesting and
this figure is showing us that
ai researchers estimate that in 2040
2050 with a probability of 50 percent
the level of cognition and the level of
analytical skills
of technical systems of ai will be as
big as our own human capabilities in
this regard
and 90 of these colleagues are
estimating that
in 2075 with a probability of 90 percent
machines technical system will reach
this kind of cognition level
which human beings are representing this
will change everything which we know in
our societies production democracy
what is human-centered development about
in this kind of context
rethinking is needed then the third
element is about autonomous systems we
talk about autonomous
driving autonomous mobility but
autonomous technical systems
with autonomous decision-making systems
behind are also being used in industry
and courts in policy
policy work in human resource
processes in weapon systems and in the
management of social processes there are
some arguing that
democracy old fashioned you know our
autonomous decision making systems are
much more intelligent than
people sitting in parliaments so how far
are we going to go
and how far would we like to to drive
these kind of new technical
instruments in our social processes
optimizing
technical systems in firms in the
private sector
is different from using these kind of
instruments for optimizing our societies
so how to use those kind of technical
opportunities and how to embed those in
democratic structures
is a new question which we need to ask
ourselves and answer
the fourth characteristic is virtuality
wonderful
i mean we can visit any person
everywhere
we can drive and organize and control an
operation in a hospital
from berlin in any
country in the world so we virtual
mobility is becoming a reality
and we are moving from a
three-dimensional world into a
four-dimensional world
and this will change our thinking our
global networking
our production systems everything will
change based on virtuality
and then the last element which i will
not drive into all this will result in
an explosion of knowledge and how we use
this knowledge is still not decided no
because you can use
knowledge this is what we did during the
last 150 years you can use knowledge
for producing welfare and at the same
time destroy the planet this is the
situation in which we are in
so learning to use the knowledge and
these new technologies
for solving our problems this is what we
need to think about
but as the moderator said i’m not only
skeptical
and i’m not only mentioning the risks no
i’m also
thinking about a new humanism in the age
of
digital revolutions and here are my main
arguments because because i’m optimistic
that we can develop further our
humanistic system
no and the ideas are here the first one
is that
knowledge explosion using it right based
on education
for example no can help us to understand
much better
ourselves our societies the planet and
help to look for solutions
so knowledge explosion is one driver of
a new humanism
then there is a second very important
element which no one of us should
underestimate
transnational interconnectedness global
communication infrastructures i talked
about
virtuality i talked about meeting anyone
everywhere on earth
in virtual spaces for me this could be
using it right now the technical
infrastructure for building a
transnational global society
and for building what is urgently needed
a culture of global cooperation because
without cultures of global cooperation
we will not get sustainability
challenges right these might be the
technical instruments now to solve the
problem
there is a third element which i would
like to mention here briefly before
moving towards
the last two slides and this last
element is about maybe this
technologies no artificial intelligence
with all the capabilities of being
cognitively and analytically so strong
they might become stronger with a high
probability they will become stronger
or more capable than we as human beings
in this regard
no analytical intelligence and cognitive
capabilities
maybe these technologies help us to
understand
what the last frontier of humans and
humanity is about
no social capabilities social
intelligence
solidarity empathy love no this
is what technical systems cannot
develop this is our last frontier
and as you will remember the last era
of enlightenment was on cognition it was
on reasoning it was on our capabilities
to think
and now we might learn that our last
frontier
what makes us different comparing
ourselves with technical systems with
incredible incredible knowledge is that
we are strong at these kind of things
emotional intelligence solidarity love
how can we build this kind of knowledge
into our systems
how can we develop our development
thinking further human-centered
development
bringing these kind of reflections into
our
debates my last element here is about
the third domain dynamic which i only
would like to talk
about for the last two minutes so the
last
dynamic the third dynamic is about the
future of humans themselves no i talked
about
the first dynamic how we bring together
sustainability thinking with
technological opportunities and i see
many opportunities there
if we bring those two together together
the second one
deep changes in our society and we need
to rethink and develop further our
thinking on human-centered development
and sustainability because our societies
and economies
will be completely different the third
element is the future of humans
for those in the room who know
sustainability thinking
they know about the anthropocene debate
so the anthropocene debate is about
humans became capable of being the most
important driver of fundamental change
in the earth system itself now for
hundreds
thousands of years we have not been able
as human beings to change the
basic structures of the earth system now
we are no
and with digitalization artificial
intelligence
synthetic biology gene editing we are
now becoming
capable of transforming not only the
earth system
we are becoming capable of transforming
ourselves
no the terms which are in the in
discussion are about
artificial evolution we drive evolution
artificially driven evolution human
enhancement
human enhancement moving beyond health
and stabilizing health
asking the question how we could empower
or tune we tune we are tuning cars no
now we are
can tune our brains maybe so how far
would we like to go
and this is a normative question and
this sounds for many people
utopian or dystopian but i’m arguing as
we are already in this race
in many research projects we need to
take this on board when we think about
sustainable development
and people-centered development in the
future in a digital age because
we need to define how far we would like
to go you know
three major elements here and then i’m
done the first one is that
we need to recognize our own last
frontier this is what i already
mentioned
no so we need to develop our own
capabilities further
in the field of emotions our social
intelligence because
this is our strength being confronted
with machines which will be
as intelligent and diligent as we as we
are
the second element is here we need to
think about a.i
as a company of us supporting humans
we need to think about a human-centered
ai we need to
link our normative systems with the
technical systems
of artificial intelligence and machine
learning this is the second important
element
and then we need to decide how far we
would go when it comes to the
blurring boundaries between humans and
technical systems
there are discussions about hybrids
between humans and technical systems
so this is something which we need to
take on board concluding last sentence
you can feel and see here that our
setting and thinking of the 2030 agenda
the 17
development goals is not appropriate to
manage these kind of challenges
to even reflect upon these kind of
challenges we need a renewed
sustainability debate and a renewed
sustainability paradigm for the digital
age
thank you very much
you