Wed. Dec. 12, 2007- Yochai Benkler: Cooperation and Human Systems Design
The Center for Research on Computation and Society continues its weekly lunch seminar:
CRCS Privacy and Security Lunch Seminar
Date: Wednesday, 12 December 2007
Time: 12:00pm-1:30 pm
Place: MD 221
Topic: Cooperation and Human Systems Design
Speaker: Yochai Benkler, Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law
Abstract:
Globalization and rapid innovation cycles make the social and economic environment more complex and harder to characterize for planning or pricing. In response, we see adoption of loosely-bound, permeable human systems— technical platforms, business processes, and institutional devices—that enable pervasive experimentation and learning through decentralization of practical capacity and authority to act. Providing such practical freedom for human agency creates new challenges in design for cooperation. Doing so requires attention to work in social and biological sciences, political science and business management, that diverges from dominant interpretations of human action as selfishly motivated, and developes a more cooperative view of human nature, human interaction, or both. Observed heterogeneity of motivational profiles and practices of sustained cooperation suggests the potential for design aimed not at aligning individual selfish incentives, but at enabling the dynamics of self-reinforcing, cooperative social-psycological processes.