NGI Meetup @ Lyon

What kind of a smart society do we want?

PANEL

• Loretta Anania, Scientific Officer at DG Connect
• Rob van Kranenburg, Founder of Council #IOT
• Marco ‘Radium’ Sachy, Hackivist of dyne.org and the DECODE project.

FOCUS OF THIS EVENT

The EU is not an integrated community if it has no agency over data of people, machines and processes. These are predominantly in the hands of commercial “over the top” non-EU players. Aggregated data leads to new combined services that generate and produce more data. This cycle leaves full innovation capabilities outside of a direct strong response (regulation is a weak response that cannot be a basis for a de jure situation). In the EU consumer expenditure accounts for about 56% of GDP . These consumer actions will increasingly be carried out in the context of the IoT as personalized dynamic pricing is extended down to the smallest purchase (not just airline seats, but washing powder and also meals in restaurants…). At the 2012 Rome ‘Transformational Technologies #4: Seminar Implications for an Expanding Threat Environment’ five breakout groups (senior intelligence, police and military) produced scenarios of major threats: only one was military, two were about DIY (Do It Yourself) Bio and two about breakdown of society, because of the inability of current institutions to deal with the digital. At the “Inspiring Leaders – Executive Summit, Milano, December 1, 2016 on Forecast 2017: megatrends for the next Century” Franco Bruni highlighted the Rodriks trilemma that shows that democracy, national sovereignty and hyper globalization cannot go together. He maintained that if we want more globalisation, we must either give up some democracy or some national sovereignty. He points to the fact that the EU was created to avoid war and conceived with a mission to become a single architectural entity through protocols like the euro.

In times of perpetual innovation (not at the edges, but at the core of developments), populist movements on the rise, people worried about their jobs, pensions, everyday expenses, untenable inequality gaps, energy uncertainties, it seems that the single layer governed Asian tigers are finding more productive political answers to ensure a balance between centralization (on infrastructure and sustainable policies) and decentralization (innovation on applications and services). It is not the best balance. They need to engineer a move towards more decentralisation that is incompatible with their political heritage and mind set. There is a strong tendency to also control data and information on top of owning internet (of things) architectures and media production capabilities.

We Europeans, however, can envisage the Next Generation Internet as a coherent set of centralized protocols that can be operationalized in a fully decentralized way; a new conception of the techno-political landscape tuned to the reality of what is happening in every domain of human activity; to be supported, assisted and guided by secure real time data streams of sensor input, to bring big data, AI and dynamic analytics into the heart of decision making and to eventually reform the EU as a platform of services for all.