Georgia Institute of Technology

I would like to see Georgia Tech create an interdisciplinary Institute for Society Design (ISD). The mission of this institute would be to develop a technology, and an understanding of how to use it, that would help humanity best get through the many serious challenges we will be facing this century. The goal of the institute would be to develop the tools we will need to create a particular societal design called Democracy 2.0. Think of us as living in Democracy 1.0. It basically works but has some bugs and is missing some features. Democracy 2.0 is a qualitative step up in terms of democratic governance. It is a democratic governance system that has a society design process built into it. The purpose of Democracy 2.0 (D2) is to improve our ability to address serious challenges we are increasingly facing while at the same time improving the quality of how we govern and thus how we live. To make Democracy 2.0 feasible, the ISD must successfully accomplish four tasks, which would be programs conducted by the ISD. In order to do society design, you need to know where you are in terms of the functioning of society and what your trajectory is. To that end, D2 contains a very comprehensive measure of human well-being, the Human Well-Being Index (HWBI). The HWBI encompasses six dimensions of well-being germane to democratic governance. Four of them pertain to measures of social well-being: Security, freedom, prosperity, and social mobility. The other two dimensions pertain to the ability of the system of governance to achieve goals with respect to those measures of social well-being: the execution of good governance and the ability for the population to meaningfully participate in governance decisions. The Institute for Society Design thus has as a task the production and hopefully improvement of a broad-based measure of human well-being. Doing this task would ideally involve the contribution of political scientists, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists. In order to do society design, you need to provide venues that allow for widespread participation by those who care about how the world and its parts are going to unfold through the 21st century and want to do something positive about it. To maximize the legitimacy of an effort to do society design, you need to maximize the perceived fairness of the process by which a preferred societal design is created. The ISD thus has as a task the creation of alternative ways that people can contribute to a preference determination process. For example, they can participate in face-to-face venues such as charettes used by city planners or in a participatory budgeting process such as in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Alternatively, they could work out their preferences in virtual environments reminiscent of Second Life. Or they could exchange in blogs. More precisely, the ISD thus has as a task devising and disseminating a variety of ways that people can effectively participate in society design. Relevant skills for this task can be found in city planning, architecture, public policy, digital and computational media, psychology, interactive computing, management, and schools of law. Society design is not easy. We need to empower people so that they can most effectively participate in the preference determination process. We need to provide the participants in the society design process a tool that helps them evaluate the implications and merits of different societal design or governance choices they may devise or support or question. The ISD thus has as a task developing an Alternatives Testing Model (ATM). The ATM is a very large scale computer simulation program that enables people to try out different ideas for how to govern a society. The ATM embodies, to the best of our ability, the social processes that result in societal change and evolution. The ATM serves as an interactive tool for a user to play “what-ifs?” with respect to different choices regarding the structure and operation of governance ranging from very broad constitutional design choices down to particular policies or regulations a locality may wish to pursue. To build an ATM requires the combined efforts of social scientists, including historians and psychologists, computational science & engineering, interactive computing, industrial and systems engineering, systems biology, and earth and atmospheric sciences. The ATM must bridge to and interact with the climate change models as it provides a way to test how different governance decisions change economic and cultural tendencies resulting in different environmental trajectories in the climate change models. The ATM would be most effective if it were able to drive 3D simulations to create virtual reality projections of the change in the environment users perceive resulting from a particular governance choice decision. In order to properly do society design, we need to consider the implications of such an effort. How do you operate the Preference Determination Process? Likewise the ATM. How do you avoid bad societal designs leading to bad outcomes for the populations? The ISD thus has as a task participating in a discussion with others about how to implement D2 so that when a society attempts it, considerable thought has gone into how to do it right.