Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has led the founding of a research institution gathering top scholars around the world from various fields including sociology, economics and psychology, with the aim of finding out how to help society adapt to rapid technological advancement, Sina Finance reported.
The newly set up Luohan Tang, which literally means Arhat Hall, has brought together 15 top scholars, including many Nobel laureates and the management of Alibaba and Ant Financial.
They have carried out a two-day closed-door discussion since Monday and published a declaration. It said the society is not prepared to deal with a whole new world created by big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robots and other digital technologies.
Social scientists have the responsibility to collaborate better and help the human society adapt to this digital revolution, they added.
Ant Financial, the fin-tech arm of Alibaba, will support the research of these scholars.
Earlier in October last year, Alibaba set up the Damo Academy and announced plans to invest 100 billion yuan in the exploration of frontier technology over the next three years.
This is what I’m afraid of the most topping everything else- even above major power military compeitition – our technological development and speed of applying them en-mass have vastly outpaced our social construct development. Even now our societies are full of cracks in so many aspects with no guarantee of long term stability, now insert tech revolutions that threatens to fundamentally change our social structures and functions …new stability factors will have to be invented on the fly and they will have to work, as the tech we invented have made messy revolutions that happened in the past to have the possiblity of ending mankind next time they occur. Its especially worrying with this hyper techno-industrial-consumer social bedrock we’ve constructed over the last 2 ceuntries…. Whelp back to more studying..