 | This article possibly contains original research .(March 2024) |
Mick Ashby's ethical regulator theorem [1] builds upon the Conant-Ashby good regulator theorem, [2] which is ambiguous because being good at regulating does not imply being good ethically.
The ethical regulator theorem claims that the following nine requisites are necessary and sufficient for a cybernetic regulator to be both effective and ethical: [3]
Of these requisites, only the first six are necessary for a regulator to be effective. The three requisites of ethics, integrity, and transparency are optional if a system only needs to be effective. This gives rise to the Law of Inevitable Ethical Inadequacy, which states "If you do not specify that you require a secure ethical system, what you get is an insecure unethical system." [1] The reason is that unless ethical adequacy is a requirement, a system design will tend to optimize for effectiveness, and therefore maximally ignore the optional ethical, integrity, and transparency dimensions, which inevitably results in a design and subsequent implementation that is ethically inadequate and vulnerable to manipulation.
The ethical regulator theorem shows that the effectiveness of a cybernetic regulator depends on seven requisites. The effectiveness of a regulator, R, can be expressed as the function:
EffectivenessR = PurposeR x TruthR x (VarietyR - EthicsR) x PredictabilityR x IntelligenceR x InfluenceR
If two systems, A and B, are competing for control of a third system, C, and EffectivenessA "is greater than EffectivenessB, then A is more likely than B to win control of C".
The effectiveness function reflects how the variety of actions that are available to an ethical regulator is reduced by all actions that are considered unethical, which puts an ethical regulator at a disadvantage when competing against an unethical competitor.
According to the model-centric cybernetics paradigm, [4] an ethical regulator is the product of third-order regulation. The Conant-Ashby good regulator theorem, which established that "every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system," is a key tenet of the model-centric cybernetics paradigm. The paradigm defines that a cybernetic regulator consists of a purpose, a model, a well-defined observer that only observes what the model requires as input parameters, some kind of decision-making intelligence, and a control channel that transmits selected actions or communications to the regulated system.
Thus, in order to be effective, a first-order (simple) cybernetic regulator requires a model of the system that is being regulated and a second-order (reflexive) regulator can only achieve reflexivity by also having a model of itself, which encodes a real-time representation of the possible variety that is available to the regulator. Finally, an ethical regulator is realized by using a third regulator to regulate a reflexive regulator to constrain it to only exhibit behavior that does not violate the ethical schema that is encoded in a third model. If the third model encodes what is illegal or socially unacceptable, then the concept of a third-order regulator has utility for making law-abiding robots and ethical AI.
In mathematics, an isomorphism is a structure-preserving mapping between two structures of the same type that can be reversed by an inverse mapping. Two mathematical structures are isomorphic if an isomorphism exists between them. The word isomorphism is derived from the Ancient Greek: ἴσοςisos "equal", and μορφήmorphe "form" or "shape".
Systems theory is the transdisciplinary study of systems, i.e. cohesive groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or artificial. Every system has causal boundaries, is influenced by its context, defined by its structure, function and role, and expressed through its relations with other systems. A system is "more than the sum of its parts" by expressing synergy or emergent behavior.
Anthony Stafford Beer was a British theorist, consultant and professor at the Manchester Business School. He is best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics.
Negative feedback occurs when some function of the output of a system, process, or mechanism is fed back in a manner that tends to reduce the fluctuations in the output, whether caused by changes in the input or by other disturbances. A classic example of negative feedback is a heating system thermostat — when the temperature gets high enough, the heater is turned OFF. When the temperature gets too cold, the heat is turned back ON. In each case the "feedback" generated by the thermostat "negates" the trend.
Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when sufficient energy is available, not needing control by any external agent. It is often triggered by seemingly random fluctuations, amplified by positive feedback. The resulting organization is wholly decentralized, distributed over all the components of the system. As such, the organization is typically robust and able to survive or self-repair substantial perturbation. Chaos theory discusses self-organization in terms of islands of predictability in a sea of chaotic unpredictability.
William Ross Ashby was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of the science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby.
Second-order cybernetics, also known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, is the recursive application of cybernetics to itself and the reflexive practice of cybernetics according to such a critique. It is cybernetics where "the role of the observer is appreciated and acknowledged rather than disguised, as had become traditional in western science". Second-order cybernetics was developed between the late 1960s and mid 1970s by Heinz von Foerster and others, with key inspiration coming from Margaret Mead. Foerster referred to it as "the control of control and the communication of communication" and differentiated first order cybernetics as "the cybernetics of observed systems" and second-order cybernetics as "the cybernetics of observing systems".
The viable system model (VSM) is a model of the organizational structure of any autonomous system capable of producing itself. It is an implementation of viable system theory. At the biological level, this model is correspondent to autopoiesis.
Industry self-regulation is the process whereby members of an industry, trade or sector of the economy monitor their own adherence to legal, ethical, or safety standards, rather than have an outside, independent agency such as a third party entity or governmental regulator monitor and enforce those standards. Self-regulation may ease compliance and ownership of standards, but it can also give rise to conflicts of interest. If any organization, such as a corporation or government bureaucracy, is asked to eliminate unethical behavior within their own group, it may be in their interest in the short run to eliminate the appearance of unethical behavior, rather than the behavior itself, by keeping any ethical breaches hidden, instead of exposing and correcting them. An exception occurs when the ethical breach is already known by the public. In that case, it could be in the group's interest to end the ethical problem to which the public has knowledge, but keep remaining breaches hidden. Another exception would occur in industry sectors with varied membership, such as international brands together with small and medium size companies where the brand owners would have an interest to protect the joint sector reputation by issuing together self-regulation so as to avoid smaller companies with less resources causing damage out of ignorance. Similarly, the reliability of a professional group such as lawyers and journalists could make ethical rules work satisfactorily as a self-regulation if they were a pre-condition for adherence of new members.
Andrew Gordon Speedie Pask was a British cybernetician, inventor and polymath who made during his lifetime multiple contributions to cybernetics, educational psychology, educational technology, epistemology, chemical computing, architecture, and the performing arts. During his life he gained three doctorate degrees. He was an avid writer, with more than two hundred and fifty publications which included a variety of journal articles, books, periodicals, patents, and technical reports. He also worked as an academic and researcher for a variety of educational settings, research institutes, and private stakeholders including but not limited to the University of Illinois, Concordia University, the Open University, Brunel University and the Architectural Association School of Architecture. He is known for the development of conversation theory.
The Office of Police Integrity (OPI) was the Australian state of Victoria independent police oversight and anti-corruption agency established by the Victorian Government in November 2004. OPI ceased operation on 9 February 2013 and was replaced by the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC). OPI's official role was to detect, investigate and prevent police corruption and serious misconduct and to ensure that police members had regard to the human rights set out in the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities.
In cybernetics, the term variety denotes the total number of distinguishable elements of a set, most often the set of states, inputs, or outputs of a finite-state machine or transformation, or the binary logarithm of the same quantity. Variety is used in cybernetics as an information theory that is easily related to deterministic finite automata, and less formally as a conceptual tool for thinking about organization, regulation, and stability. It is an early theory of complexity in automata, complex systems, and operations research.
The good regulator is a theorem conceived by Roger C. Conant and W. Ross Ashby that is central to cybernetics. Originally stated that "every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system", but more accurately, every good regulator must contain a model of the system. That is, any regulator that is maximally simple among optimal regulators must behave as an image of that system under a homomorphism; while the authors sometimes say 'isomorphism', the mapping they construct is only a homomorphism.
Stuart Anspach Umpleby is an American cybernetician and professor in the Department of Management and Director of the Research Program in Social and Organizational Learning in the School of Business at the George Washington University.
Cybernetics is a field of systems theory that studies circular causal systems whose outputs are also inputs, such as feedback systems. It is concerned with the general principles of circular causal processes, including in ecological, technological, biological, cognitive and social systems and also in the context of practical activities such as designing, learning, and managing.
Autonomous agency theory (AAT) is a viable system theory (VST) which models autonomous social complex adaptive systems. It can be used to model the relationship between an agency and its environment(s), and these may include other interactive agencies. The nature of that interaction is determined by both the agency's external and internal attributes and constraints. Internal attributes may include immanent dynamic "self" processes that drive agency change.
Self-organization, a process where some form of overall order arises out of the local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system, was discovered in cybernetics by William Ross Ashby in 1947. It states that any deterministic dynamic system automatically evolves towards a state of equilibrium that can be described in terms of an attractor in a basin of surrounding states. Once there, the further evolution of the system is constrained to remain in the attractor. This constraint implies a form of mutual dependency or coordination between its constituent components or subsystems. In Ashby's terms, each subsystem has adapted to the environment formed by all other subsystems.
Jason Jixuan Hu, is a Chinese American cyberneticist, independent scholar and managing director of WINTOP Organizational Learning Laboratory, and organizer/facilitator of the Club of Remy(Youtube Channel). He is noted for his work on "cognitive capacity in human communication, conflict resolution and cooperation solicitation," and on view on distance education in America.
Walter Murray Wonham was a Canadian control theorist and professor at the University of Toronto. He focused on multi-variable geometric control theory, stochastic control and stochastic filters, and the control of discrete event systems from the standpoint of mathematical logic and formal languages.
An Introduction to Cybernetics is a book by W. Ross Ashby, first published in 1956 in London by Chapman and Hall. An Introduction is considered the first textbook on cybernetics, where the basic principles of the new field were first rigorously laid out. It was intended to serve as an elementary introduction to cybernetic principles of homeostasis, primarily for an audience of physiologists, psychologists, and sociologists. Ashby addressed adjacent topics in addition to cybernetics such as information theory, communications theory, control theory, game theory and systems theory.