Building a Smarter Society

The Future & Emerging Technologies project Smart Society  focuses on the development of technologies which could enable the interactions among people, independently of where they are, their culture, needs, goals and any other form of diversity, towards a smarter and more inclusive society, for a better quality of life. Health, mobility and online enabled labour are some of the application domains considered.

Some of the project results feature a platform for forming collectives able to solve a given problem, an incentive platform for the voluntary involvement of people, a provenance platform for guaranteeing accountability, technologies enabling contextual privacy, technologies able to perform activity recognition compliant with the collective goals, and a platform for the development of  Smart Collectives.

The development of these technologies raised fundamental social, economic and scientific challenges which resulted in following recommendations.

Future developments should focus on technologies empowering online social relations, as the basis for more effective collaboration and service provision. Many of our everyday problems are solved by interacting and collaborating with other people. Our interactions with, for instance, our doctor, with our preferred shop sellers, our friends and relatives, are all based on a common ground of common culture and mutual understanding. This is how everything can run smoothly, without us even noticing it. For online services and the Digital Single Market to really happen, these kinds of dynamics must be enabled online.

The online empowerment of social relations can only happen if technologies understand the diversity of people and allow for service providers and service consumers to easily adapt to one another. Different types of diversity should be considered depending on the service to be delivered. For instance, competence and skill diversity will be relevant when dealing with a doctor or with a patient, with a seller or a buyer or cultural diversity when dealing with people coming from different countries. 

People are not interchangeable. They have diverse skills and abilities and operate as collectives, namely coordinated teams that structure work, while ensuring quality and resilience of service. Up to now computer systems have been blind to diversity and collectives and have often thwarted their potential. Collective Adaptive Systems provide the tools to change that. But smart collectives must be enabled under new governance rules, grounded on ethical considerations.

Smart Society is at the beginning of a major skill-intensive digital revolution which will radically change society. The overall suggestion is to focus on people rather than (only) on infrastructure and smart cities, and to aim at the development of a new Computational Humanism which should enable the development of intelligent machines which understand the world in the same way as humans and use this knowledge to help them in their social relations and interactions with the world.