Institutions as Designers of Better Social Games

Introduction

The digital transformation processes under the paradigm of Industry 4.0 are expected to have a tremendous impact on the economic and social development. All stakeholders: businesses, private organizations, NGOs and public authorities have a role to play for shaping the next “robotic era”. Even more, many new rules have to be defined and many new models for economic and social long-term development have to be discussed, taking into account the increased number of new machines on the job. Technologies cannot decide how our societies and how our personal life will change. Technologies provide us with tools and instruments, extending our abilities to cope more efficiently with the new coming challenges and future problems. Current digitalization trends focus to further improve human capacity to understand more complicated dynamic processes, switching the gap between virtual and real with sophisticated cyber-physical systems. The promise for better manufacturing processes can improve resource efficiency, customization, supply chain reorganization and product life-cycle management patterns. More advanced robots on the work can lead to increased service and production functions, confirming that digitalization processes come for more rational and data-based decision-making in order to better forecast, plan and implement the next models of development.

However, technologies cannot resolve our social and human problems and cannot make our societies more sustainable and future-oriented. The data all over the world continue to show accumulating waste, based on overproduction, neglected environmental and ecological balances, impermissible abuse of social and human rights and political oppression, short-focused and unsustainable global development movements. People increasingly feel excluded and unrepresented in main political and governance processes. Power distribution polarizes and inequalities intensify both internally in the countries and in the regions and internationally. New impactful Internet phenomena raise including fake news, social-network propaganda and intensified misinformation, using artificial intelligence applications to modify behavior patterns and social preferences. All this come to show that new technologies do not offer a “magic key” for the better future. Thus in the next robotic era there is a clear need for new social contract renegotiation. This means designing new institutions and defining new rules for making the “game” again more efficient and fair for all. Social exclusion, inequality, future of work and sustainable development are among the number of challenges that the new rules have to address.

Today is the moment to open the debate about the future of institutions. In order to “unlock” the potential of the next growth people should reach new common understanding for the next types of social arrangements and power distribution. Discussing the future of work and the new roles of humans in the labor force raise two main questions. On one side there should be redefined the new skillsets and new competences needed in the years to come. On the other side, much more attention should be paid on the issues of inclusive models of growth, encouraging and supporting people for cultivating and expressing talents and gifts in a socially enriching and responsible-for-the future way.

However, we have to admit that in the framework of the current institutionalized market-dominated, consumer-oriented and growth-based economic models, little attention is paid to many of the inherent human capacities. Due to the lack of monetization mechanisms and social support, many of the human gifts and dispositions remain undervalued and underestimated on the labor market, as for example the ability to take care, to protect, to persist, to share knowledge and competences, to artistically express, to encourage and motivate, to cooperate altruistically for a common cause. Thus, technically, human have the capacity and the potential to cope with the pressing problems of the future. However, in the current settings, many of the activities, ensuring sustainable development, environmental and social protection, crisis relief and poverty alleviation are just downsized to short-term campaigns, leaded by NGOs and volunteers. Thus in order to have much larger impact in the future, more efforts will be necessary to put all this hidden human capital to work. Meanwhile the existing institutional arrangements still widen the gap, measuring skills, personal success and organizational future perspectives only in economic terms.