“There’s a new kind of socio-inspired technology coming up, now. Society has many wonderful self-organization mechanisms that we can learn from, such as trust, reputation, culture. If we can learn how to implement that in our technological system, that is worth a lot of money; billions of dollars, actually. We think this is the next step after bio-inspired technology. (…) If those computers interact with each other, it’s creating an artificial social system in some sense. (…) That tells us something that we need to change our perspective regarding these systems. Those complex systems are not characterized anymore by the properties of their components. But they’re characterized by what is the outcome of the interactions between those components. As a result of those interactions, self-organization is going on in these systems. New emergent properties come up. They can be very surprising, actually, and that means we cannot understand those systems anymore, based on what we see, which is the components. (…) We need to have new instruments and tools to understand these kinds of systems. (…)" - Amira

“We have interconnected everything. In some sense, we have created unstable systems. (…) Just take financial trading today, it’s done by the most powerful computers. These computers are creating a view of the environment; in this case the financial world. They’re making projections into the future. They’re communicating with each other. They have really many features of humans. And that basically establishes an artificial society, which means also we may have all the problems that we are facing in society if we don’t design these systems well. (…) Their interaction is creating a completely new world, and it is very important to recognize that it’s not just a gradual change of our world; there is a sudden transition in the behavior of those systems, as the coupling strength exceeds a certain threshold. (…)" - Amira

"What will be very important in order to make sense of the complexity of our information society is to overcome the disciplinary silos of science. (…) Big Data is not a solution per se. Even the most powerful machine learning algorithm will not be sufficient to make sense of our world, to understand the principles according to which our world is working. This is important to recognize. The great challenge is to marry data with theories, with models. (…) Information society will transform our society fundamentally and we shouldn’t just let it happen. We want to understand how that will change our society, and what are the different pathes that our society may take, and decide for the one that we want it to take. (…) In the future, [this sea of data] will probably be a cheap resource, or even a free resource to a certain extent, if we learn how to deal with openness of data. The expensive thing will be what we do with the data. That means the algorithms, the models, and theories that allow us to make sense of the data.” - Amira