June 10, 2019
The presentation is available below.
—————————————
Title: Basic Democracy, Knowledge Management and Democracy-by-Design
Abstract
Basic democracy has been proposed as a means of collective self-governance distinct from liberal democracy, i.e. it is a conventional rule-based system of empowerment, decision-making and public action that is both prior to and separate from concerns such as justice, morality and rights.
This talk will discuss firstly, founding an open system on the principles of basic democracy
can mitigate the risks of oligarchy, autocracy and majoritarian tyranny; and secondly, how such a system provides a stable platform for implementing value-driven requirements such as distributive justice, through knowledge management processes which make information available for socially-productive purposes. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the implications for engineering socio-technical systems, ownership of the means of social coordination, historical political science, and the public understanding of democracy; and briefly, how a complete breakdown of basic democracy and knowledge management processes led to “the 6-letter ‘B’ word”.
Speaker Biography
Jeremy Pitt is Professor of Intelligent and Self-Organising Systems in the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London, where until recently he was Deputy Head of the Intelligent Systems & Networks Group. His research interests focus on developing formal models of social processes using computational logic, and their application in self-organising multi-agent systems, for example fair and sustainable
common-pool resource management, computational justice and democracy. He also has strong interests in human-computer interaction, socio-technical systems, and the social impact of technology; with regard to the latter he has edited two books, This Pervasive Day (IC Press, 2012) and The Computer After Me (IC Press, 2014).
He has been an investigator on more than 30 national and European research projects and has published more than 150 articles in journals and conferences. He is a Fellow of the BCS, and a Fellow of the IET, and is Editor in Chief of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.
