Tough Decisions Ahead: How to Get the World on a Sustainable and Peaceful Path

Abstract

Even though the expected sustainability crisis was anticipated in the early 70ies, the world has not made enough progress towards its solution in the past. As a consequence, humanity is  faced with serious existential threats. I will try to identify mistakes that have been made, depict  an alternative organisation of the world that would be sustainable, resilient, and peaceful, and suggest a path towards its implementation.

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About the lecturer

Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences and affiliate of the Computer Science Department at ETH Zurich. In January 2014 Prof. Helbing received an honorary PhD from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Since June 2015 he is affiliate professor at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft, where he leads the PhD school in “Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible Digital Future”.

The work of Prof. Helbing is documented by hundreds of media reports and publications, among them more than 10 papers in Nature, Science, and PNAS. He won various prizes, including the Idee Suisse Award. He co-founded the Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems, the Risk Center, the Institute for Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP) and the Decision Science Laboratory (DeSciL). While coordinating the FuturICT initiative (www.futurict.eu), he helped to establish data science and computational social science in Europe, as well as global systems science. A further result is the Nervousnet platform (nervousnet.info). Helbing is an elected member of the German Academy of Sciences “Leopoldina” and the World Academy of Art and Science. He worked for the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems. He was elected member of the External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute and now belongs to the External Faculty of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. He sits in the Boards of the Global Brain Institute in Brussels and the International Centre for Earth Simulation in Geneva. Recently, he is also involved in the area of Citizen Science, the activities of the “Staatslabor” (a Swiss gov.lab) as well as the establishment of the Blockchain [X] initiative and the Blockchain Lab in Delft. Last but not least, he is also a member of federal and academy-of-science committees addressing the digital transformation of our society.