iDemocracy

1. iDemocracy Gheorghe M. Ştefan http://arh.pub.ro/gstefan/

2. Terminology • Functional Electronics (1): 1959, J. A. Morton (Bell Lab.) – “too many circuits & numbers, physics must be used directly, (example: quartz crystal is a circuit)” • Functional Electronics (2): ~1976, M. Drăgănescu – “circuits & information = function (example: one chip microcontroller)” • Embedded Computation • Cyber Physical Systems • Cyber Physical Societies IWoCPS-2012

3. ICT & Democracy = iDemocracy Motivations: • sustainable development means sustainable exercise of democracy • decline of how democracy works: • the “democratic technologies” are the same as the mechanisms used in the 18th century • ICT (Information & Communication Technology) are used in a lot of non-, maybe anti-democratic activities (brain washing designed and financed by the big corporations) IWoCPS-2012

4. Regress in exercising democracy leads to: • the emergence of corrupt political classes in countries that claim to be democracies • the emergence of alienated populations, resigned to live in corrupt democracies. Project goal: reconsidering the way the democracy is exercised, from the perspective of the current and emergent ICTs in order to balance the relation established between states, corporations and civil society. IWoCPS-2012

5. Current status: • ICT are very efficiently fructifiedby the corporate space to corrupt the political class and to “sell” counterfeit images into the public space • ICT are partially assimilatedby states helping them in solving only some simple administrative tasks • ICT affect very littlethe civil society obsessively dominated by too “local” issues. IWoCPS-2012

6. Project’s objectives: • Defining new mechanisms of exercising democracy in the context of the new & emergent ICTs • Defining the architecture of the information system designed to support the new mechanisms of exercising democracy. • Developing the technological environment as a hierarchically interconnected network of • personal devices called iPAL (ICT Personal Assistant Linker) • nodes equipped with intelligent data centers able to provide the preprocessed data to each iPAL IWoCPS-2012

7. Architecture of the information system: provides a two-direction flow of structured information: • from our complex world to each individual • from each individual towards the decision process using two ways: • the explicit one, emulating a sort of participative democracy, where each opinion/vote is weighted according to the attested competences of the participants • the implicit one, allowed by a controlled openness each democratic player provides using a “blog-based” activity IWoCPS-2012

8. iPAL sub-project • iPAL: is a mobile Cyber Physical System: • cellular approach: 104 – 106 processing elements • complex interfaces • solves the real-world data problem: there is too much unstructured or persuasive data. • Unstructured data: the result is that either data is ignored, or results are produced too late to be of value. • Structured data: provides interpersonal consciousness allowing for each individual the access to the whole complexity of our fast evolving world. IWoCPS-2012

9. Implementation • gradual process, with many iterative stages • We must avoid stressing too much our very reluctant world! • The components of our world – civil society, corporations, states – are highly inertial processes • any new mechanism of exercising democracy must be implemented as an alternative and experimental process working in parallel with the current mechanisms IWoCPS-2012

10. The main effect of iDemocracy project: Integral way of exercising power • the democratic power, as a rational exercise of the threefold competences of the state: legislative - administrative - judiciary • the elitist power, as the action of an imaginative body of highly competent people, able to provide solutions validated democratically under the sacred power supervision • the sacred power, as an unquestionable spiritual power, which offers the superior discernment when reason is too harsh or imagination is too heated. IWoCPS-2012

11. Comment on sacred/spiritual “It is unfortunate that we do not have at our disposal a more precise word than “religion” to denote the experience of the sacred. … But perhaps it is too late to search for another word, and “religion” may still be a useful term provided we keep in mind that it does not necessarily imply belief in God, gods, or ghosts, but refers to the experience of the sacred, and, consequently, is related to the ideas of being, meaning, and truth.” Mircea Eliade, The Quest. History and Meaning in Religion, The University of Chicago Press, 1969. IWoCPS-2012

12. Democratic & sacred forms based on CPS Artificial forms of consciousness (Mihai Drăgănescu) will act in all forms of power, supporting mainly the democratic and the sacred forms “There are two sciences: mathematics and ethics. One is the superficial, the other is the deepest. These sciences are accurate and unambiguous because all people have the same reason which receives mathematics and the same spiritual nature which receives moral.” Lev Tolstoi: About God and man. Form last years diary, Humanitas, 2009. (in Romanian) IWoCPS-2012

13. Concluding remarks Cyber Physical Systems will support the power exercise in Cyber Physical Societies allowing an integral way of exercising power Ideal limit stage of a Cyber Physical Society: • Democratic power exercised trough socially embedded computation (iPAL and the like) • Elitist power is exercised supported by ICT tools • Sacred power is exercised by an ICT construct IWoCPS-2012