In the short story “On the Exactitude in Science”, the Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges tells the story of a nation of cartographers who set themselves the goal to create the most exact maps of their kingdom. After years of work, these maps took on such a detailed scale that they depicted the actual dimensions of the kingdom. They covered the entire empire and thus brought about its downfall. The people finally failed themselves.
This analogy illustrates a fundamental dilemma of modeling. For a model to remain useful and practicable in application, it must abstract the complex reality. Due to this abstraction, parts of reality are inevitably omitted. What remains is a model tailored to the wishes of the creators with a specific purpose – the Model Land. This is how Erica Thompson (2022) describes the world of mathematical models in her book of the same name “Escape from Model Land”.
What-if scenarios in digital city twins are based on these mathematical models and simulations and allow us to experiment with different alternatives in order to make a robust basis for real decisions in urban development. To get to this starting point, we embark on a journey from a real-world problem, through the development of Model Land, gathering helpful insights, to a real-world solution. However, the design of Model Land and the way back to the real world can quickly become a challenge. How should we design Model Land and what is the goal? Who has access and who doesn’t? How are the findings from Model Land transferred to the real world? Furthermore: What opportunities and risks are hidden behind the inscrutable construct called “artificial intelligence” that we encounter in Model Land?
The development, integration and application of models and simulations in digital city twins thus give rise to various ethical issues that must be negotiated in each individual modeling process. Within three overarching sections – “Entering Model Land”, “Navigating Model Land” and “Leaving Model Land” – the reader of the ethics guide embarks on the journey of a hypothetical modeling process along eleven advisory guidelines. Based on an in-depth literature review in the fields of modeling and simulation, scientific ethics and artificial intelligence, both hints and room for thought are provided, focusing on the relevance of the ethical dimension with regard to the construction and use of mathematical models and simulations. These guidelines provide an overview of the topics discussed in the scientific literature and are therefore neither exhaustive nor universally valid. They serve as an initial orientation within a modeling process, in which every decision to be made requires a concrete case-by-case consideration.
Editorial team: Rico Herzog and Viktoria Probst
