Conference Distinguished Lecturer
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
12:45pm, Monarchy BallroomHilton Waikoloa Village
"Pervasive experimentation and learning requires greater autonomy
to act, innovate, try, fail, learn, and teach..."
Abstract:
Cooperation and Human Systems Design (pdf)
Dr.
Yochai Benkler is the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for
Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School.. He
writes about the Internet and the emergence of networked economy and society, as
well as the organization of infrastructure, such as wireless communications.
Professor Benkler received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award in
2007, and the Public Knowledge IP3 Award in 2006.
In the 1990s Dr. Benkler played a role in characterizing the role of
information commons as a central factor of innovation, information production,
and freedom in both its autonomy and democracy senses. In the 2000s, he worked
more on the sources, as well as the economic and political significance of
radically decentralized individual action and collaboration in the production of
information, knowledge and culture. His work traverses a wide range of
disciplines and sectors, and is taught in sundry professional schools and
academic departments. In real world applications, his work has been widely
discussed in both the business sector and civil society. His books include
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
(2006), which received the Don K. Price award from the American Political
Science Association for best book on science, technology, and politics, the
Donald McGannon Award for best book on social and ethical relevance in
communications policy research, and was named best business book about the
future by Strategy & Business. His articles include
"Overcoming Agoraphobia" (1997, initiating the debate over spectrum commons);
"Commons as Neglected Factor of Information Production" (1998) and "Free as the
Air to Common Use" (1998, characterizing the role of the commons in information
production and its relation to freedom); "From Consumers to Users" (2000,
characterizing the need to preserve commons as a core policy goal, across all
layers of the information environment); "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the
Nature of the Firm" (characterizing peer production as a basic phenomenon of the
networked economy) and "Sharing Nicely" (2002, characterizing shareable goods
and explaining sharing of material resources online).
Jochai Benkler's work can be freely accessed at benkler.org.
Cooperation and Human Systems Design
Three points suggest a need for a research agenda on cooperation and human systems design.
First, human beings exist and act within multiple overlapping systems that provide them the affordances and constraints that make their actions and interactions possible. These systems take many forms; technical platforms, business processes, law, social organizations and more loosely norms, are familiar classes. Sometimes we see fields develop at the intersection of two classes of systems: the social norms literature in law did this for law and social dynamics in stable communities; as did the “technology is politics”
work, well known for the “code is law” moniker, in Internet policy. But the phenomenon is pervasive: from broad questions like environmental policy, operating in different ways in each class of system, to specific design problems like wireless communications networks, human action always occurs simultaneously in multiple systems, but we do not generally approach problems of human action through the prism of integrated human systems.
Second, globalization and ever-more rapid innovation cycles make the social and economic environment more complex and harder to characterize fully for perfect rationalization: through planning or through supposedly “perfect” markets. What we see in multiple areas, instead, are efforts to introduce human agency enabled to engage in sensing, diagnosis, experimentation, learning, and adaptation. Pervasive experimentation and learning requires greater autonomy to act, innovate, try, fail, learn, and teach, than was
desired or required in systems that typified the 20th century. Toyota Production System is as different from Fordism as Internet design is different from AT&T's old telephone network: both enable faster and better learning through greater freedom of action by human agents throughout the system. To enable the decentralization of practical capacity and authority to act, these systems introduce loosely-bound elements that leave more to human agency, and take on less completely the role of specifying all inputs, processes, and outputs over the expected lifetime of the system.
Freedom to act, in turn, triggers the need to consider the problems of how to achieve cooperation among human beings who exist in systems that give them the freedom to both help and harm others. This forms the third point driving this agenda. The past fifteen years have seen a trend in social and biological sciences, as well as in political science and business management, away from
single-minded interpretation of human action as selfishly motivated, and toward developing a more cooperative view of human nature, human interaction, or both. Diverging from the dominant simplifying assumption of selfish maximization as the uniform practical model of human agency, work in multiple disciplines has shown that the majority of people do not start out behaving as selfish rational actor models predict, but can deteriorate to that behavior when placed in contexts that generate negative dynamics. Studies in these
different disciplines suggest heterogeneity of motivational profiles and many possibilities of creating systems that sustain cooperation, not purely by mechanism design oriented toward aligning individual selfish incentives, but primarily by designing the dynamics to improve self-reinforcing social processes of cooperation.
The broad problem to attack is how to combine these three points in an approach to integrated design of loosely-bound human systems, oriented to enable autonomous individual human action while fostering cooperation.
