Socio-Economic Implications of the Digital Revolution

Abstract

The digital revolution is reinventing business models, reshaping economic sectors, and changing entire societal institutions. Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, profiling and targeting, and several other technological developments are now fundamentally changing the ways economies work. This contribution discusses opportunities and threats of the "Attention Economy" and "Surveillance Capitalism", focusing on systemic changes. These are associated with developments such as "more data", "more speed", and "more networking". This contribution will also compare two paradigms: one that is based on a data-driven, AI-controlled, and largely centralized vision of society and its optimization, and one that is focused on empowerment, coordination, cooperation, self-organization, self-regulation, co-evolution, and collective intelligence in a distributed framework. It will be illustrated that suitable network effects are critical to a more cooperative and sustainable economy. Based on these insights, the possibility of a new, circular, and synergistic organization of supply chains and a new, symbiotic economy will be highlighted.