Digital Transformation, Digital Humanism: What Needs to Be Done

Abstract

Information technology (IT) changes our society and world, from the individual level up to the ongoing geopolitical powerplay. From an ontological point of view, it influences how we perceive the world and how we think about it. This transformation only happened in the short time span of about 80 years, and it is continuing. We highlight some of the major features of this process. Besides its enormous achievements, this development has serious shortcomings. We will discuss some of them and describe our positive answer: Digital Humanism, an approach that describes, analyzes, and, most importantly, influences the complex interplay of technology and humankind, for a better society and life, fully respecting universal human rights. It is a proactive approach, focusing on the integration of technical and social innovation. Then we will present our Digital Humanism initiative, discuss its research and innovation roadmap, and finish with a general framework integrating the different dimensions of this initiative. [Some arguments have already been partly expressed in other publications such as Werthner (Electronic Markets, 32:145–151, 2022a) and Werthner et al. (IEEE Computer, 56(1):138–142, 2023).]

1 Introduction

Today, we experience, also astonished by its transformative power, the complex technical socioeconomic process called Digital Transformation. This happened in a short time span, from the invention of the first electronic computer about 80 years ago to today, where IT acts as the operating system of our society. This metamorphosis from a stand-alone computer to a worldwide mega-machine touches on every aspect of our lives, and as stated by Lee (2020), we experience the co-evolution of man–machine.

But this progress, as the progress of our society, is full of contradictions, sometimes even pointing backward. As historical processes do not always move forward in a positive direction, this technological development also has its downsides, with negative impact in the economic, societal, and political arenas. It is a complex process, not easy to understand and to manage. Many forces play a role, technical, societal, political, and economic. One should add that economic interests should not play the decisive role. The historic claim of the invisible hand of Adam Smith, where following their self-interest consumers and firms create an efficient allocation of resources for the entire society, did not work, looking at the many distortions of this process. We only mention the ecological crisis and the increasing economic inequalities, major problems of today besides the accelerating worldwide power play on a political and even military level. Also in these global crises, IT plays an important role. In addition, in the Web itself, we observe an ongoing monopolization with few worldwide acting tech giants, which, besides exploiting (all) loopholes to avoid paying taxes, exercise economic as well as political power.

But technology is neither God given nor should it follow a technical or economic determinism. An approach to give society a voice, to demand for a democratic participation on equal terms, is Digital Humanism. As a concept and as an initiative with growing support, it looks critically at this development and tries to influence it.

In this contribution, we start by looking shortly at informatics¹ and one of its major successes, the Web, its development, as well as its broad and massive impact. We will then discuss some of the shortcomings of this technology-induced changes and present Digital Humanism and its Vienna Manifesto as a multidisciplinary and democratic answer. It is a proactive approach, focusing on the integration of technical and social innovation. One of its major contributions in this respect is the Digital Humanism research and innovation roadmap, serving as a guideline for future work, both practical and theoretical.

2 Some Notes on Informatics

Some notes on the nature of informatics will help explain its transformative power, the pervasiveness, the broad impact, and the speed of this development (for an excellent introduction to computer science, see the chapter by Larus). The computer as the machine of today is a general-purpose automaton. It can, as the sole automaton, control itself by software and also be instantiated by software to a particular specific problem-solving machine. This general-purpose machine has the unique property of being able to independently change and control its behavior based on external inputs and internal states. It is able to act on its own without human intervention, except the initial programming and setup. It demonstrates independent behavior. Stated differently, and which can be seen by the power of some AI tools, it automates and simulates human thinking.²

I agree with Kristen Nygaard’s comprehensive definition of informatics (interestingly, it dates back to the 1980s): “Informatics is the science that has as its domain information processes and related phenomena in artifacts, society and nature” (Nygaard, 1986). Informatics, it is asserted, does not only deal with a specific machine, the computer. Rooted in engineering and technical and social sciences, informatics has, in an interdisciplinary manner, incorporated methods from these different disciplines, besides developing its own ones. Today, it is a powerful tool for other disciplines and for science in general. It is versatile in scientific calculations and simulations, having changed the theory and practice in other disciplines. Conceptually, informatics has created a new view of natural and human-made phenomena, providing an “info-computational” theory with its ontology, epistemology, and methods. It shows two inseparable faces: (1) informatics as subject, e.g., with research and development in areas such as algorithms, design, information presentation, programming languages, or software engineering, etc., and (2) informatics in subject, as a tool and methodical approach to other sciences and application fields.

Informatics is able to create new things, both virtual and real; look, for example, at the rich world of soft- and hardware, nearly not limited by physical constraints. This is similar to art. Its artifacts are both pervasive and disappearing, with developments like the Internet of things. Software seems to be everywhere, nearly all physical modern machines are controlled by software. One may state that every machine that is touched by software becomes a computer.

This discipline can also be regarded as the science of abstraction, where, in contrast to other sciences, this abstraction is materialized in virtual artifacts, i.e., software. However, system developers, software engineers, or designers are distant from the user. In a kind of technological intermediation, the creators of software influence and control users from a great distance, both in time and space. Peterson et al. (2023) call this abstracted power as “a human actor’s influence or control over a system, process, or dataset which … .. obscures or distances the human actor from consequences of that influence or control.” Abstraction understood in this way is thus also an exercise of power.

3 The Web, Its Impact, and Transformation

The Internet and the Web (see Chapter of Larus) can be regarded as the most important and influential technological artifact of today. This happened very fast, far faster than any other technology in the past.³ Alone, the quantitative numbers are impressive: in 2023, nearly 68% of the world population has Internet access.⁴ This leads to:

• An economic transformation, with new companies, changed markets structures (e.g., online tourism where online agents outperform by far classical travel companies), or new and disappearing industry sectors (e.g., Wikipedia dried up the market of encyclopedias)

• Social expansion, where, for example, tools like Skype or Zoom enable new ways of human communication, especially in times of crisis or over long distances

• Psychological changes on a personal level with signs of dependence on online communication

• Massive changes on the political and legal level, as it can also be followed in the mass media

• Even changing physical spaces, for example, with e-commerce and logistics, and the probable massive decline in numbers of physical shopping centers

This list could easily be extended. Likewise, the structural changes are interesting that occurred in the Web itself. It is a good example of the ongoing dialectic process of order and disorder or, in other words, centralized versus a decentralized: continuously new companies (disorder) while at the same time an intensified concentration (order).

The Web and the Internet are rooted in the US anti-establishment movement and its utopian cultural vision, e.g., the declaration of the independence of the cyberspace. It had a decentralized and basic democratic vision of information sharing with, for example, its news groups or bulletin boards. Key persons like Doug Engelbart envisioned a future where technology should augment humans and enhance human capabilities, not to substitute them. There still exist strong elements of such collaborative and participatory approaches, like Wikipedia, or the open-source movement, both with huge societal and also economic impact.

However, on a structural level, the Web transformed from a means for free information sharing and participation to a highly centralized infrastructure with few companies being in control. In fields such as ecology, this phenomenon has already been described as the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968), a situation in which individual users with unrestricted access to an unregulated resource cause it to be destroyed, contrary to the common good for all (for a critical discussion see also Ostrom, 1990). The Web of today follows an advertising-based business model, with huge search engines and online stores. The model is similar to newspapers but extended by personalization and recommendations (Vardi, 2018). Both led to changing user behavior, and users adapt and follow recommendations.⁵ The basic units of return are clicks, and one needs to optimize clicks for higher economic income. The Web became also emotionalized, as negative emotions generate more clicks. Advertisers pay for user data, leading to the well-described surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019). We, the users, became consumers instead of citizens (Stanger, 2020). At the end, we are users, products, and producers at the same time; it is nearly an economic perpetuum mobile.

In the Web, we seem to have absolute individual freedom. But what I see, what I get, what I do is defined by the distance measure of a recommender’s similarity matrix. In addition, there is an algorithmic interdependence between the individual (reinforced by our almost narcissistic and exuberant self-referentiality; see selfies) and the common. But this common is also a delusion as it is a “summary” of previously individualized views. In essence, instead of the conscious decision of the human for what to do, this is done by mostly unknown algorithms. At the end, we have the delusion of both, the individual freedom and the seemingly common. We got the transformation from a system supporting individual freedom and democratic participation to one under a rather centralized algorithmic control.

The focus of this development was and is on automation and efficiency (see the chapter of Vardi), squeezing out of the system any kind of unproductivity; the objective is an optimal nearly autonomous functioning of systems. As such, they can also scale up easily. This efficiency process has two further properties: (1) outsourcing to clients, where we do a lot of unpaid work (see ATMs and nearly all e-commerce online services), and (2) privatization; our public data are now owned by IT companies, and used for their economic interest (ChatGPT can also be seen as a privatization where with our data, the language models are trained). An interesting example in this respect is the open knowledge platform Wikipedia, where it is estimated that it accounts for nearly half of the value created by all Google searches (Vincent & Hecht, 2021, in Siddarth et al., 2021).

Let us take a short look at the evolution of the related business landscape, which moved from something like IT supports the business to the concept of IT is the business. This is a story of only the last 25 years:

• Google launched in 1998

• YouTube 2005

• Skype 2003

• eBay 1997

• Twitter 2006

• Facebook 2004

• Uber 2009

• Airbnb 2008

• Instagram 2010

These all are so-called platform companies. Their value is in their network of users and information from/about them, not on infrastructure (see chapter of Parker). Interestingly, all of them are newcomers, showing that the fundamental innovation came from outside. The platform economy touches all economic and societal sectors with new technical and market services. Based on a common architecture and a set of operational rules, these platforms are a kind of dialectic relationship between cooperation and centralization around platform operators, which create and control these structures. Its network effects with its dynamics of the winners take it all phenomena led to a situation where a small number of players dominate the market, and they are the most valued companies worldwide.⁶ They increase market efficiency through the reduction of transaction costs (Williamson, 1985). Focusing on transactional services, the big platforms are industrial sector independent. Concrete products play an almost negligible role; they are virtualized, as are companies, entire markets, and, increasingly, our society.

The current competition race in the field of AI also shows the power of these companies as well as the high concentration in the field. Only these companies and related startups are participating. The cost of training a very large AI system like ChatGPT and the associated requirements for computing power and data sets are concentrated in their hands. Academic institutions are less and less able to keep up.

At the end, we have a situation where these platforms offer services that have become public social goods and individuals and companies have to participate as not to be excluded from public life. In addition, given the plethora of information, we again need informatics and its intelligent tools to navigate the information space (Baeza Yates & Fayyad, 2022).

We add an economic observation: in contrast to the very optimistic promises of IT, we see that since the 1980s, which happens also to be the time of invention of the personal computer, income inequality has risen in practically all major advanced economies, parallel to the period of digitalization. But not only the gap within the society has widened; also, following the rules of the networked platform economy with its winners take it all principle, there is a growing market gap between companies. Furthermore, the productivity growth has slowed down, where one would have expected substantial growth, as forecasted by several public relations companies in the IT field. This is called the productivity paradox⁷ by Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow, as though investments in IT grew, productivity did not react accordingly. Overall, the productivity growth rates halved since the 1980s, and also the labor’s share of income fell significantly, accelerating after 2000 (Acemoglu & Restrepo, 2019).

It is not easy to isolate the causes of this socioeconomic development. In our view, there is a shared responsibility of a neoliberal ideology with a massive decrease in regulations, paralleled by ongoing concentration. Technology facilitated this process. Siddarth et al. (2021) even state that, referring to a growing economic consensus, one of the most important causes is the automation and labor replacement focus of technological change.

4 “The System Is Failing”

IT systems are both useful and extremely successful. When looking at the COVID-19 pandemic as an example, without IT tools, the world would have almost stopped, no work, no school, and no personal and public communications. In research, data science methods were essential for the development of effective vaccines. IT kept and keeps the system running, and it serves for solving fundamental and vital problems (see the essential role of informatics to tackle the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the UNO).⁸ Another, more recent example, although heavily discussed, is ChatGPT as an intelligent writing assistant, freeing the humans from tedious writing and formulating tasks. The importance of IT is also demonstrated by its important role on economic, political, and even military level. At the same time, this development comes with downsides, as stated already in 2018 by Tim Berners–Lee with his “The system is failing.”⁹ The list of critical and mutually dependent issues is long, and it is not complete (Werthner et al., 2023):

• Concentration and monopolies in the Web, where multinational IT companies have power that national governments have serious problems to control. These companies offer services that governments do not provide with that quality; they decide, and not the states, on the implementations of essential services for citizens, e.g., access to the mobile Web or cloud services.

• The centralization of power in the Web raises the issues of both personal and geopolitical sovereignty (Werthner, 2022b, or contribution of Timmers). These big companies decide on the implementations of crucial services. As an example, see the case of the Corona app in European countries, where big mobile app store providers (Apple and Google) decided on the architecture and functionality of these apps and not these countries.¹⁰

• AI and automated decision-making—put simply, the representation and automation of human thought may result in autonomous decision-making systems, with substantial legal and ethical questions (Larus et al., 2018). What makes it worse, in cases where AI is based on black-box algorithms, is we do not understand the outcome, i.e., decisions proposed and taken. AI tools like ChatGPT, based on a combination of both unsupervised training and reinforcement learning, simulate human mental abilities and conversation. They do this to an extent that some already see them as an existential threat to humanity. In addition, these tools are highly concentrated in the hands of a few powerful companies.

• Further automation will have a massive impact on employment and jobs, in both qualitative and quantitative terms (chapter of Samaan). How are and will these new jobs be designed? Will machines augment and support humans, or will they replace them? In addition, the IT industry reproduces the colonial division of labor as described by Casilli (2021),¹¹ where much of the low-skilled work is done away from the rich metropolises (see also chapter of Munn). Or look at the so-called Gig economy with the mostly false self-assessment of the independence and freedom of work but actually mostly self-exploitation.

• Increasing surveillance, where we can observe violations of privacy on a massive scale, both by private companies and by state instances, was well described by Zuboff (2019) (see also chapter by Lindorfer). This is a major threat to liberal democracy. But whom do we trust: the big IT companies or governments? Here, civil society and democratic institutions will play a key role.

• In our online media, we see developments such as the intentional fabrication of fake news and the creation of opinion bubbles (chapter of Krenn & Prem). Originally intended for democratic and open communication and information exchange, these systems are increasingly becoming toxic in the political discourse and, consequently, a threat for democracy.

• Autonomous AI-based machines move to warfare, resulting in autonomous weapons. Already, UN Secretary General António Guterres states that “Autonomous machines with the power to … . take lives without human involvement… . should be prohibited by international law.”¹² It is important to mention that here, the civil and academic society already reacted with the campaign to Stop Killer Robots, initiated by Topy Walsh to halt the development of autonomous weapons.¹³

• These developments in the IT domain create a substantial environmental burden. Although there are already a number of positive examples to use these tools for climate actions (e.g., increasing operational efficiency, proper data gathering and simulation, etc.), there is also quite a negative emission impacts of IT and its applications (e.g., development and training of tools on large data sets).¹⁴ Also here, it depends on us, in which direction it goes.

5 Digital Humanism and the Vienna Manifesto

This “double-sided” role of IT, its indisputable enormous achievements and potential, and at the same time its obvious critical issues, which are interlinked and connected, were the motivation for the first Vienna Workshop on Digital Humanism, in April 2019 (Werthner, 2022a). The intellectual point of departure was our responsibility as scientists (Popper, 1969), calling upon us to shape technologies according to human values and needs, instead of allowing technologies to shape humans. The workshop was also inspired by the tradition of the Vienna Circle, a multidisciplinary effort of the early twentieth century to reflect on the revolutionary implications of science for our understanding of the world (Sigmund, 2017).

Over 100 participants from academia, public institutions, civil society and business took part in the 2-day workshop. The program addressed the history and impact of IT and informatics, as well as the dynamics and future of the sector. The discussions focused on technical, political, economic, social, ethical, and legal issues. A real benefit was the presence of such a diversity of disciplines, covering political science, legal science, sociology, history, anthropology, philosophy, management science, and informatics. At the center of the discussion was the relationship between informatics and society, or, as expressed during the workshop, the co-evolution of information technology and humankind. The discussion showed that informatics alone, although important, is not enough to provide comprehensive answers; a much more broad, interdisciplinary approach is called for. The participants were also convinced that it is possible to influence these developments; indeed, that it is our responsibility to do so.

The term Digital Humanism was intentionally chosen to refer to the concepts of humanism and Enlightenment, according to which, the human is responsible for his or her actions and beliefs and is at the focus (Nida-Rümelin & Weidenfeld, 2018; see chapter of Nida-Rümelin and Staudacher). We also underline the importance of rational and critical reasoning, which is a reference to the Vienna Circle and its logical empiricism. We have the freedom, the right, and the responsibility to make use of our own thought power, and we are the authors of our own lives. Personal autonomy and freedom to make decisions are the prerequisites for an open, democratic, and environmentally sustainable society. Technological progress is not God-given nor does it follow a determinism. We, as individuals and as a society, should and must make decisions taking democratic, humanistic, and environmental considerations into account. We define Digital Humanism as an approach that describes, analyzes, and, most importantly, influences the complex interplay of technology and humankind, for a better society and life, fully respecting universal human rights.

At the workshop, a Vienna Manifesto for Digital Humanism¹⁵ was discussed and adopted by signatories from nearly 50 countries as a blueprint for shared principles. The Manifesto is also a call to act collectively to mobilize support that transcends national borders and continents in order to build a more human and sustainable future. More specifically, the principles of the Vienna Manifesto include:

Privacy, democracy, and inclusion

• Digital technologies should be designed and deployed in such a way that they promote democracy and inclusion.

• Privacy and freedom of speech are basic values which should be at the center of our activities.

Regulation and public oversight

• The regulatory authorities must intervene to break up technology monopolies.

• Decisions whose consequences could affect individual or collective human rights must still be made by humans.

Specific role of science and the academic sector

• Scientific approaches integrating various disciplines and eliminating discipline-specific silos are needed for mastering our challenges.

• Universities are the places where new knowledge is created and critical thinking is exercised. They should eliminate the boundaries among disciplines and foster their collaboration toward a holistic view of technological development.

Education and training

• New curricula are required, which combine humanities, social sciences, and technical and engineering sciences.

• Education in IT and training work on the ethical and societal impacts of IT must begin as early as possible in the education process.

As one can see, Digital Humanism not only attempts to eliminate the downsides of this IT induced changes but to encourage human-centered innovation, and its focus is on making the world a better one to live in, to contribute to a better and sustainable society.

6 The Digital Humanism Initiative

We touched an obvious up-to-date and hot topic; the response was enormous. Not only academics from the informatics fields reacted but also from other disciplines, as was the expressed interest by the civil society, funding agencies, and political decision-makers.¹⁶ In addition, there are a number of international initiatives with similar objectives with which we started to network, e.g., HAI or Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford,¹⁷ All Tech is Human,¹⁸ Dutch Digital Society,¹⁹ or the Digital Enlightenment Forum.²⁰

The growing public awareness can also be seen in several recent political international actions, e.g., in the US antitrust lawsuits against Facebook and Google and in Europe Digital Service Act, Digital Market Act, proposal for AI regulation, or the European GDPR, all focusing on a regulation of the online world. Other signs to show that things are changing are, for example, the OECD’s principles on AI, UNESCO’s activities, UN’s view on the Internet as global public good, or the global Partnership on AI. And international standardization organizations moved, e.g., IEEE with its IEEE 7000 Software Engineering Standard.

A specific reaction and another example of the growing public awareness came from Austrian governmental bodies and institutions. The Vienna government announced the foundation of an Institute on Digital Humanism, and the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF), a partner since the early beginnings, operates a Digital Humanism research program. The Austrian government signed the Poysdorf Declaration on Digital Humanism, a joint statement of the foreign ministers of Austria, Czech Republic, and Slovakia.

Due to the pandemic, our activities moved online with since then nearly 50 regular public online lectures and four workshops. This lecture series was a real success, and it contributed to the international discussion. It has a growing number of participants, internationally renowned speakers, and a wide range of topics from AI and ethics, limits of AI, or COVID-19 apps and privacy to the issue of sovereignty in the digital world.²¹ In addition, we published the volume Perspectives on Digital Humanism with 49 contributions (Werthner et al., 2022) with currently already over 350,000 downloads,²² produced a Digital Humanism Roadmap for Research, Innovation and Teaching (Prem et al., 2022), and organized a successful summer school.

The most important result is, however, that we succeeded in creating an intellectual core, consisting of the authors of the manifesto, the members of our international program committee, organizational partners (such as the bidt, def or L3S),²³ the authors of our different publications, and the speakers as well as the participants of our online Digital Humanism Lecture series. This really lively group is constantly growing and active (see also our statement on ChatGPT from March 2023).²⁴ This group represents our initiative, although it has no formal organization.

7 Research and Innovation Roadmap

Digital Humanism follows a constructive approach, its focus is on technologies that empower people, facilitate access to knowledge, enable participation and inclusion in society, and support diversity. We need to develop and deploy trustworthy systems, enabling the participation of varying stakeholders, which should augment humans. At the same time, our approach must address the discussed downsides of the digital transformation, make a system’s decision transparent, detect malicious behavior, and provide privacy.

These objectives and constraints were the starting point for our Digital Humanism roadmap workshop, March 2022 (Prem et al., 2022). The participants discussed and produced the roadmap of Table 1. On the horizontal axis, you find the mentioned critical issues and on the vertical the research questions and tasks, the answering of which will contribute to the solution of the respective problems. Crosses in the cells indicate which research questions we consider essential for which critical issues.

Table 1 Digital Humanism research and innovation roadmap (Prem et al., 2022), revised by P. Knees and H. Werthner

This roadmap may serve as a starting point, as a basis to further discuss and define research and innovation programs in Digital Humanism. As examples, we look at three research questions:

• Explainability: How do we explain the decision proposed by a computer, and why is which content or product proposed? This is a hard issue in data-driven models, which have no explicit logic implemented; they can be seen as black boxes.

• Fairness is an important issue (such as AI, how fair or biased are training data), automation (fairness is a crucial concept when looking at the division of labor and the interaction of a system and human), platforms (how would a fair participation of clients look like), online media (e.g., what is a fair distribution of interesting online content for which user group), or environment (here one has often to deal with economic trade-offs; what is in this context a fair representation of the different interests?)

• Efficiency and resilience, where the latter refers to fault-tolerant systems and the surviving in and the fast recovery from critical situations. Obviously, distributed architectures, such as the Internet, and algorithms play a key role. This issue plays a role in the issues of automation, platforms, sovereignty, and environment.

However, the roadmap is a first step, and it is not complete. It may not include all relevant research topics, and more importantly, it does not contain the different disciplines needed in each of the research topics. Let us take for example fairness, e.g., in recommendation or search. How is fairness defined? Is it with respect to the provider of information or products? Is it with respect to readers or consumers? Which subgroups? Do we need to define fairness with respect to some general societal criteria? Obviously, disciplines such as sociology, political science, and economics are needed. Consequently, Digital Humanism requires an exchange across various disciplines, throughout the entire process, i.e., when doing analysis, when developing new technologies, and when adopting them in practice. This is a challenge; it is hard, for instance, to come up with a common language, where all those involved use the same terminology with the same semantics. In addition, the way in which the research landscape is organized in separate silos still hinders interdisciplinarity. And interdisciplinary researchers, especially young ones, often have serious problems obtaining funding and support since they touch different communities but are not specialized enough in their core discipline. Interdisciplinarity has the danger to know too little about too many things.

This breadth represents also a challenge for teaching, how to integrate different disciplines, without losing scientific depth. Informatics departments worldwide have started to include topics such as ethics in their curricula, either as stand-alone courses or embedded in specific technical subjects. However, a real broad interdisciplinary curriculum covering the different aspects and disciplines is still missing.²⁵ But there are also positive developments, e.g., in systems engineering with steps to integrate ethical guidelines in the software process. Some companies already offer specific tools, and associations such as IEEE provide guidelines for ethical design of systems (Spiekermann-Hoff, 2021) (see chapter of Neppel and chapter of Zuber et al.).

In general, Digital Humanism calls for a different technology path. Instead of focusing on pure automation and optimization, we need to look at participation and to augment human capabilities. As explained earlier, such directions already existed in the early days of computing, for example, the work of Doug Engelbart with his foundational work in the field of human–computer interaction or his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International or Vannevar Bush with his Memex concept as a tool to augment, not replace, humans.²⁶ This tradition in human-centered technology is continued by researchers like Ben Shneiderman with his human-in-the-loop approach (Shneiderman, 2022, also chapter of Sharp). In this context, one has to mention the interesting work going on in Taiwan, with its g0v community. It promotes transparency of government information and is committed to developing information platforms and tools for citizens to participate in society. Audrey Tang, a core member of this community, became Taiwan’s first Digital Minister, and the country has rolled out experiments in digital democracy, decentralized governance, and collective intelligence.²⁷

We envisage a future based on a different way forward for the role of technology in a society that is inclusive and focusing on the needs of the human, the society, and nature. A promising approach is proposed by Siddarth et al. (2021), called digital plurality. It is (1) complementary, i.e., complement and cooperate and not replace; (2) participative, i.e., cooperative and co-evolving and respecting human rights; and (3) based on mutualism, i.e., heterogeneous approaches can benefit from each other. Technologies need to take into consideration social, political, economic, and ecological objectives. In the end, it is not about technology alone.

As the Internet and the Web have become a social public good, Digital Humanism as an initiative to shape technology according to human values is not about research and academia only. Assuming the concept of human technology co-evolution, this does not evolve on its own. As it is currently governed by unequal societal and economic power relationships, we also need to talk about power and politics. Thus, Digital Humanism needs a multidimensional framework, on three levels:

• Different problem areas as described in Sect. 4, from platforms to AI, privacy, or work

• Different disciplines: informatics and technical/engineering disciplines, social science and humanities; from analysis to construction, with, however, the real challenge of interdisciplinarity

• Different activities: applied and basic research, development and experiments, innovation, education, communication, and, finally, political intervention

This is complicated and it is challenging (Neidhardt et al., 2022), but it needs to be done.

8 Conclusions

We started by discussing the development of the Web and its transformation from an open information infrastructure to a centralized one. This comes along with several socioeconomic and political shortcomings, which I described; each of them is discussed in other chapters of this book. Digital Humanism as an approach that describes, analyzes, and, most importantly, influences the complex interplay of technology and humankind is a constructive answer to these developments. We ended by presenting our research and innovation roadmap as a guide for future work.

Digital Humanism takes a cross-disciplinary and ethical point of view. It also touches the political level, as at the end, the IT-induced economic and societal change is a political question. As there is no higher being that is responsible nor does these developments follow a historical determinism, we, the people, should be the driving force, via democratic participatory approaches. We should not obey but manage and guide the process, especially as IT will not stop, nor will the changes it induces.

We should not focus on better and faster; we need a long-term and sustainable perspective. This is the lesson of Digital Humanism: looking at the achievements, opportunities, and threats of technology, it should serve for the better of a society. Let us use IT to create a socially and ecologically sustainable society. One statement of the Vienna Manifesto is that we should not only analyze and discuss but also act, both in practical and scientific terms. We are at a crossroads.

Discussion Questions for Students and Their Teachers

• 1. How are the critical issues of Sect. 4 interrelated?

• 2. Discuss the principles of the Vienna Manifesto. Are there any missing?

• 3. Discuss centralized vs decentralized developments of the Web.

• 4. Discuss some rows, i.e., research questions, of the roadmap, and identify the necessary disciplines for these research issues.

Learning Resources for Students

• 1. Haigh, T, and Ceruzzi, P.E. (2021) A new History of Modern Computing. The MIT Press. 2021

  From microchips to cellphones to gigantic server farms, computers are among history’s most revolutionary and rapidly evolving technologies. Yet their own history is littered with myth, misunderstanding, and misinformation. Written by distinguished experts, this book tells the story of where computers came from, how they changed the world, and why those changes mattered to diverse communities. This book is essential to historians, curators, and interdisciplinary scholars in informatics, information, and media studies.

• 2. Aiello, M. (2018) The Web Was Done by Amateurs. Springer. 2018

  Divided into four parts, it critically reflects on the Web’s historical path. It starts with the prehistory of the Web, describes the original Web proposal as defined in 1989 by Tim Berners–Lee, and the most relevant technologies associated with it. Then it combines a historical reconstruction of the Web’s evolution with a more critical analysis of its original definition and the necessary changes made to the initial design. Finally, it reflects on its technical and societal success. It was written with a technologically engaged and knowledge-thirsty readership in mind.

• 3. Mitchell, M. (2019). Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. Picador. 2019

  The book stresses that computers lack the general intelligence that we, humans, have. The author argues that achieving superintelligence would require that machines acquire commonsense reasoning abilities that are nowhere in sight. The book also contains a worthy historical overview.

• 4. Crawford, K, (2021) Atlas of AI. Yale University Press. 2021

  Kate Crawford reveals how AI is a technology of extraction: from the minerals drawn from the earth to the labor pulled from low-wage information workers to the data taken from every action and expression. This book reveals how this planetary network is fueling a shift toward undemocratic governance and increased inequity. Rather than focusing on code and algorithms, the author offers us a material and political perspective on what it takes to make AI and how it centralizes power.

• 5. Cohen, J. (2020). Between Truth and Power. MIT Press. 2020

  Profound analysis and thinking about the two-way interplay between corporate and government in policy making, building on the ideas of governmentalism of Foucault and “law is code” of Lawrence Lessig.

• 6. Kelly, K (2016). The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. Penguin Books. 2016.

  In this book, Kelly talks about how Internet scale never would have been possible top–down. He compares TV networks against Internet content creation, positing that by recruiting the users, the latter is swamping the former. He argues that AIs will be distinctly nonhuman intelligences and will turn into multiple intelligence species. While McLuhan noted that tools are extensions of ourselves, Kelly notes that the cloud is an extension of our souls. Citing the “adhocracy” of Wikipedia, he observes that we don’t need much top–down design to get fantastic outcomes. We only need a little.

• 7. Shneiderman, B. (2022) Human-Centered AI. Oxford University Press. 2022

  The focus is on the opportunities of AI and how it presents and how to exploit them. The author also puts forward 15 recommendations about how to implement human-centered AI and how to bridge the gap between ethical considerations and practical realities to make successful, reliable systems.

• 8. Werthner, H., Prem, E., Lee, E.A., Ghezzi, C. (2022): Perspectives on Digital Humanism, Springer. 2022.

  This open-access book contains essays by selected thinkers from computer science, law, humanities, and social sciences, reflecting on Digital Humanism, what it is, and what it wants to achieve. It serves as further introduction to this emerging field, and it sets an agenda for research and action.