FuturICT is a response to the European Flagship call. It intends to unify hundreds of the best scientists in Europe to explore social life on earth, and provide powerful new ways to manage challenges that make the modern world so difficult to predict, including the financial crisis.

Today, society and technology are changing at a pace that often outstrips our capacity to understand and manage them. It seems that we know more about the universe than about our society. Therefore it is time to use the power of information to explore social and economic life on Earth and discover options for a sustainable future. As the recent financial crisis demonstrates, the systems that we have built to organise our affairs now possess an unprecedented degree of complexity and interdependence among their technological, social and economic components. This complexity often results in counter‐intuitive effects driven by positive feedbacks that lead to domino‐like cascades of failures. Neither the precepts of traditional science, nor our collective experience from a simpler past, adequately prepare us for the future. It is simply impossible to understand and manage complex networks using conventional tools.

We need to put systems in place that highlight, or prevent, conceivable failures and allow us to quickly recover from those that we cannot predict. We need this insight to help manage our financial markets but also to tackle other risks, such as flu pandemics, social instabilities, or criminal networks. At the same time, policymakers are currently faced with major decisions of how to plan the general infrastructure of services to cope with the demands of the future, and what is more, to do so in a sustainable manner. The same decisions are also posed to individuals who wish to improve their own lives.

Thus now is the time to create a paradigm shift moving from a focus on the system components and their properties towards evaluating their interactions. These interactions are often hard to measure but create collective, emergent dynamics which are characteristic of strongly coupled systems.