MarketWatch: Opinion - Big data is making us more boring and less innovative
Prof. Helbing and Carlo Ratti wrote an opinion article for MarketWatch. "When everything is 'optimized', we don't learn anymore," they say.
external pageThe article was published in MarketWatch in August 2016. Dirk Helbing is professor of computational social science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. external pageCarlo Ratti directs the Senseable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"A certain amount of randomness in our lives allows for new ideas or modes of thinking that would otherwise be missed. And, on a macro scale, it is necessary for life itself. If nature had used predictive algorithms that prevented random mutation in the replication of DNA, our planet would probably still be at the stage of a very optimized single-cell organism. Decentralized decision-making can create synergies between human and machine intelligence through processes of natural and artificial co-evolution. Distributed intelligence might sometimes reduce efficiency in the short term, but it will ultimately lead to a more creative, diverse, and resilient society. The price of anarchy is a price well worth paying if we want to preserve innovation through serendipity."