Given the on-going digital revolution and our present-day sustainability challenges, we have to reinvent the way cities and societies are operated. I propose that the requirement of organizing societies in a more resilient way implies the need for distributed solutions, based on digitally assisted self-organization, and that this concept is also compatible with sustainability requirements and stronger democratic participation. In particular, I will discuss the role that self-control approaches can play in the age of AI. Regarding traffic light control, I conclude that 1) self-control approaches perform surprisingly well when compared to machine learning solutions, 2) combining both methods delivers superior performance and much shorter convergence times, 3) analytic approaches are not dead, but hybrid approaches are best.
Speaker: Dirk Helbing
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
