Self-Organising Multi-Agent Systems

The wicked societal problems that arise from the transition to the 'Digital Age' present the challenge to engineer increasingly complex socio-technical systems to combat them. These systems must unite human and computational intelligence, and rely on accurate, analogue-world information about its users for establishing the accessibility and ownership of information. Many existing systems are custom owned, yet non-customisable, meaning that users must wait for system updates from the developers, instead of being able to actively make the changes themselves. Furthermore, the information that users supply is stored by the system owner, which prevents users from having autonomy over their own data. It is therefore important that a generative system is engineered, allowing for users to personalise and customise their experience at will, with an architecture that allows for the local storage of data.

We envision a system with an architecture based around local server instantiation (with a local database) for data autonomy, and the ability to download various plug-ins for customisability. A meta-platform provides a repository for the server code and set of plug-ins which can be downloaded onto a variety of media, such as a Raspberry Pi, mobile phone, or home tablet. This allows for users to choose where to host the server, by purchasing a relevant piece of technology, and download the appropriate plug-ins for their experience. Users may also invite others to their network to create an environment, where multiple users share a platform with an owner to interact with their plug-ins.

This variety of plug-ins affords generativity, as it empowers the userbase to use the software to create innovative platforms which were not imagined by the original platform's designers. The meta-platform repository is both open source and non-restrictive as any users may upload any plug-in for use on any platform. We offer three examples of plug-ins that can be useful for a sound socio-technical system: firstly, a plug-in that is able to codify deep social knowledge for example by creating digital governance. Secondly, we consider a plug-in for a lightweight blockchain alternative - one where an 'economy' of favours/tokens can be tracked between users. Thirdly, we envision a locally hosted machine learning (ML) plug-in, where the output is for the benefit of the user, not the owner, as any data embedding is obscured from everyone but the user themselves.