Research

Questions of power and empowerment are an inevitable consequence of the convergence of technological advances in machine intelligence with the commodification of social relationships, the monetisation of social interaction, and the entrenchment (even enhancement) of existing asymmetries in hierarchical and hegemonic structures; irrespective of whether governance and politics is conceived of as an unrelenting power struggle between antagonistic sides in the context of existential threats, or idealised as the civilised search for consensus and compromise over priorities and preferences concerning competing values. The architecture of re-empowerment, exemplified by the public ownership of the means of social coordination, the codification of deep social knowledge, and polycentric governance and co-production, asserts that Artificial Intelligence can be used to re-empower individuals and communities with the tools to support successful collective action, to promote grassroots entrepreneurialism in solving local problems of social coordination and matters of public interest, and to resolve disputes that will inevitably arise in public places when natural (human) and computational (artificial) intelligences with differing priorities and preferences have to live and work together.

Get in touch with Jeremy to further discuss this research.

Future organisations will combine human (natural) and computational (artificial) intelligence, but this raises unique challenges for interaction, deliberation, and collective decision-making concerning an organisation’s structures, procedures, and direction. My PhD research has synthesised theories of human psychology and political science with novel algorithms for machine learning and machine innovation. During my PhD, I have designed, implemented, and experimented on socially-inspired systems, hybrid systems comprising a machine learning and a machine reasoning component, as well as a human-computer system which integrates visual representation of the trajectory of an organisation with verbal interaction to recommend actions to control its trajectory. The significance of this research is to empower people and communities to make effective decisions and innovate through co-production with artificial intelligence.

Get in touch with Asimina to discuss this research.

In recent years, we have seen an increased penetration of privatised services used to unify users of, and bring traffic to companies. These services often host multiple pieces of software, for example Facebook’s marketplace and social networking, or Amazon’s shopping and cloud services. Such services are called platforms, and this effect of increasing popularity and prevalence is known as the platform revolution, or the platform economy.

The platform revolution introduces multiple concerns, such as the lack of reuse and opportunities for domain-specific customisation, whilst offering a soft-target single point of failure for security exploits. Moreover, they are mostly privately-owned by trans-national corporations, whose motives and values are sometimes distinctly different from their user communities, wherein Artificial Intelligence (AI) is often used to abstract or reinforce pre-existing asymmetric power relationships and inequalities.

This research concerns what we’re calling ethical platformisation, in which we are proposing and building a distributed, full-stack system architecture for combatting the ethical concerns raised by the platform revolution. This architecture leverages a federated, plugin-based system with decentralised hosting options to re-empower communities and fight against exploitation.

Get in touch with Matt to discuss this research. 

Michael Polanyi and Vincent Ostrom’s pioneering work on polycentricity analysed structural and self-organising features of social systems comprising multiple decision-making centres. Their work also emphasised the importance of networks to effective governance in such systems, as well as the different scales and diversity of organisations that need to be coordinated, and the over-arching set of checks, balances, and guardrails required for the “right to self-organise” to be entrenched in a “system of systems”.

However, much of their work was done at the advent of the computer, prior to the global Internet, the “Information Revolution” and the “Knowledge Economy”, and before the idea of the Digital Society was even envisioned. In this sense, Polanyi’s “Great Transformation” is becoming a “Greater Transformation” as digitalisation leads inexorably and inevitably to the Digital Society, seemingly to a concentration rather than a distribution of power and empowerment.

Therefore, our research on Digital Polycentricity further elaborates the concept of polycentricity by exploring the social, technological, ethical and political implications produced by the convergence of polycentric governance with information and communication technologies—particularly social networking platforms, Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence. It will also focus on developing methodologies for the design, operationalisation and innovation of and in the next generation of socio-technical systems, that this convergence will inevitably produce.

Get in touch with Ciske to discuss this research.