148
7 Digitally Assisted Self-Organization
should elicit a timely and suitable response. Third, the incoming information must
determine how the interaction should be modified.
18
Considering this, would a self-organizing society be possible? For hundreds of
years people have been fascinated by the self-organization of social insects such as
ants, bees and termites. A bee hive, for example, is an astonishingly differentiated,
complex and well-coordinated social system, even though there is no hierarchical
chain of command. No bee orchestrates the actions of the other bees. The queen bee
simply lays eggs and all other bees perform their respective roles without being told
so.
Inspired by this, Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of Bees (1714) argues that
actions driven by selfish motivations can create collective benefits. Adam Smith’s
concept of the “invisible hand” conveys a similar idea. According to this, the actions
of people would be invisibly coordinated in a way that automatically improves the
state of the economy and of society. Behind this worldview there seems to be a belief
in some sort of divine order.
19
However, in the wake of the recent financial and economic crisis, the assumption
that complex systems will always automatically produce the best possible outcomes
has been seriously questioned. Phenomena such as traffic jams and crowd disasters also demonstrate the dangers of having too much faith in the “invisible hand”.
The same applies to “tragedies of the commons” such as the overuse of resources,
discussed in the next chapter.
Yet, I believe that, three hundred years after the principle of the invisible hand
was postulated, we can finally make it work. Whether self-organization in a complex
dynamical system ends in success or failure largely depends on the interaction rules
between a system’s components. So, we need to make sure that the system components suitably respond to real-time information in such a way that they produce
a favorable pattern, property, or functionality by means of self-organization. The
Internet of Things is the enabling technology that can now provide us with the
necessary real-time data, and complexity science can teach us how to use this data.
7.14 Information Technologies to Assist Social Systems
I have shown above that self-organizing traffic lights can outperform the top-down
control of traffic flows, if suitable real-time feedbacks are applied. On freeways,
traffic congestion can be reduced by adaptive cruise control systems, which locally
modify the interactions between cars. In other words, skillful “mechanism design”
can support favorable self-organization.
18 In later chapters, I will discuss in detail how to gather such information and how to find suitable
interaction rules.
19 This idea is still present in today’s neo-liberalism. In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan,
for example, said: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government
is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex
to be managed…”.
7 Digitally Assisted Self-Organization
should elicit a timely and suitable response. Third, the incoming information must
determine how the interaction should be modified.
18
Considering this, would a self-organizing society be possible? For hundreds of
years people have been fascinated by the self-organization of social insects such as
ants, bees and termites. A bee hive, for example, is an astonishingly differentiated,
complex and well-coordinated social system, even though there is no hierarchical
chain of command. No bee orchestrates the actions of the other bees. The queen bee
simply lays eggs and all other bees perform their respective roles without being told
so.
Inspired by this, Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of Bees (1714) argues that
actions driven by selfish motivations can create collective benefits. Adam Smith’s
concept of the “invisible hand” conveys a similar idea. According to this, the actions
of people would be invisibly coordinated in a way that automatically improves the
state of the economy and of society. Behind this worldview there seems to be a belief
in some sort of divine order.
19
However, in the wake of the recent financial and economic crisis, the assumption
that complex systems will always automatically produce the best possible outcomes
has been seriously questioned. Phenomena such as traffic jams and crowd disasters also demonstrate the dangers of having too much faith in the “invisible hand”.
The same applies to “tragedies of the commons” such as the overuse of resources,
discussed in the next chapter.
Yet, I believe that, three hundred years after the principle of the invisible hand
was postulated, we can finally make it work. Whether self-organization in a complex
dynamical system ends in success or failure largely depends on the interaction rules
between a system’s components. So, we need to make sure that the system components suitably respond to real-time information in such a way that they produce
a favorable pattern, property, or functionality by means of self-organization. The
Internet of Things is the enabling technology that can now provide us with the
necessary real-time data, and complexity science can teach us how to use this data.
7.14 Information Technologies to Assist Social Systems
I have shown above that self-organizing traffic lights can outperform the top-down
control of traffic flows, if suitable real-time feedbacks are applied. On freeways,
traffic congestion can be reduced by adaptive cruise control systems, which locally
modify the interactions between cars. In other words, skillful “mechanism design”
can support favorable self-organization.
18 In later chapters, I will discuss in detail how to gather such information and how to find suitable
interaction rules.
19 This idea is still present in today’s neo-liberalism. In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan,
for example, said: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government
is the problem. From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex
to be managed…”.