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. In this talk, we investigate the automation of basic democracy as a framework for the self-organisation of collective governance in open systems. We present a series of simulation experiments in civic participation, legislation, and entrenchment, which demonstrate how an open system founded on the principles of basic democracy can mitigate the risks of oligarchy, autocracy and majoritarian tyranny. This implies that basic democracy can provide a stable platform for implementing value-driven requirements such as the supply of sustainable institutions and ‘liberal’ values like distributive justice. We conclude by considering the implications for the development and management of socio-technical systems, specifically that these systems should be ‘supplied’ based on the theory of basic democracy, codified as principles of democracy by design. This is joint work with Professor Josiah Ober (University of Stanford)
Bio:
Jeremy Pitt is Professor of Intelligent and Self-Organising Systems in the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London, where he is also 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
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