IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 47

that the debate over the driverless
car is just a preliminary skirmish in
the long-term battle for the future of
humanity, i.e., what does complete
automation of manual tasks imply for
full-time employment and the welfare
state, and the values that come with
it: sense of belonging, identification
with an organization, pride in a "job
well done," social interaction and opinion dissemination, self-actualization,
and so on.
The result is that the next generation of socio-technical system presents
both un-paralleled opportunities for
participatory self-organization, ci tizen empower ment, and grassroots activism, and corresponding
risks in disenfranchisement, exclusivity, and disempowerment. There
is the threat of becoming "slaves to
the algorithm," leaving no opportunity for "wriggle room" or the application of common sense, being left
with no space for the principled violation of policy (e.g., forgiveness).
We could be outsmarted by the machines to the point of becoming
"gombies" (i.e., Google zombies).
There could be misinterpretation
of predictive analytics whereby predictions become self-fulfilling prophesies, or we could face the misuse of
psychometric data to influence the
outcome of elections.
The articles in this special section are concerned with addressing
this tradeoff between opportunities
and threats. Critically, all the papers
offer a diagnosis and a constructive
recommendation. They are diagnostic in the sense that they study and
analyze the threats. Once we know
what the threats are, we examine
how to constructively design, deploy,
and "leave to their own devices" (as it
were) these valuable, but potentially
vulnerable, socio-technical systems,
in order to neutralize the threats, and
realize the benefits. The effort here is
to identify essential requirements for
responsible and responsive design of
SEPTEMBER 2017

the next generation of value-oriented
socio-technical systems.
In "Value-Sensitive Design for
Peer Production Systems," Agnieszka Rychwalska and Magdalena
Roszczyn´ska-Kurasin´ska focus on
peer-production systems and, using
Wikipedia as an exemplar, demonstrate the importance of values,
and how commons-based collective
agency is a primary quality of peerproduction systems that can elevate
them above "standard" production
lines. In "Change is Afoot: Applying Change Management Theories
to Self-Organizing Socio-Technical
Systems," Jan-Philipp Steghöfer
ar gues that adaptation, managing adaptation, and human involvement in deciding adaptation are key
attributes for successful long-lived
socio-technical systems, and that
key insights from change management (as developed in the psychological study of organizational
behavior) need to be encapsulated
in the design and operation of sociotechnical systems. In "Technological
Impact on Values and Pathologies in
Socio-Technical Communities," Ada
Diaconescu and Jeremy Pitt address
the issue of governance, particularly
how technological advances can disguise the actual distribution of power
and control, and distort the critical
knowledge management processes
that enable governance of a sociotechnical system to be responsive,
inclusive, and "fair." Like the preceding two papers, they advocate that
certain properties (transparency,
responsible engagement, and perceptible impact) should all be primary system design requirements,
not afterthoughts grafted to system
functionality. This advocacy is generalized by the final paper in the
Special Section, "Socially-Sensitive
Systems Design," by Kirstie Bellman,
Jean Botev, Hanno Hildmann, Peter
Lewis, Stephen Marsh, Jeremy Pitt,
Ingo Scholtes, and Sven Tomforde,
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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

who use the sociological theories
o f P iotr Sz tompa to propose a
new design methodology to support this approach.
The papers in this Special Section have been produced as a
consequence of Dagstuhl Seminar
15482 "Social Concepts in SelfOrganising Systems" [4], and deep
thanks are due to all the participants of the conference, and the
Dagstuhl administrators who made
it possible.

Author Information
Jan-Philipp Steghofer is with the
Department of Computer Science
and Engineering, Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Email:
jan-philipp.steghofer@cse.gu.se.
Ada Diaconescu is Assistant Professor (tenured) in the Department
of Computer Science and Networks at Telecom ParisTech, which
is part of the Mines-Telecom Institute and of Paris-Saclay University, France.
Steve Marsh is Assistant Professor
of Information Systems, University
of Ontario Institute of Technology,
Canada; email: stephen.marsh@
uoit.ca.
Jeremy Pitt is Professor of Intelligent and Self-Organizing Systems in
the Department of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering at Imperial
College, London, U.K.

References
[1] P. Mason, "The battle over Uber and driverless cars is really a debate about the future
of humanity," The Guardian, Oct. 31, 2016;
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/31/paul-mason-driverless-carsuber-artificial-intelligence-unemployment.
[2] M. Ulieru, "Blockchain and the real sharing economy: 'Uberisation' demystified,"
LinkedIn, Sept. 16, 2016; https://www
.linkedin.com/pulse/blockchain-real-sharingeconomy-uberisation-dr-mihaela-ulieru.
[3] A. Diaconescu, S. Marsh, J. Pitt, W. Reif,
and J.-P. Steghöfer, Eds., "Report of Dagstuhl
Seminar 15482 Social Concepts in SelfOrganizing Systems," Dagstuhl Reports,
vol. 5, no. 11, pp. 127-150, 2015.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentis https://www http://www.linkedin.com/pulse/blockchain-real-sharing

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017