Title:
Artificial Democratic Life: the emergence of new forms of social life and how artificial life can help shape and foster it.

Speaker: Dr. Xabier Barandiaran

Abstract:
New constraints and opportunities often give rise to theemergence of new forms of life or their radical transformation. Suchis the case of administrative institutions, the emergence and autonomization of economic life with capitalism or the emergence of spread of academic life through journals and, ultimately, the internet. This last infrastructure, the internet, has made possible a profound transformation of many human and societal forms of life. And Democracy is waiting its turn. In the era of Artificial Intelligence and Algorithmic Governance, the combination of corporate controlled social networks, big data analytics and political cyberwar, the issue of how to build public infrastructures for peaceful, deliberative and privacy-aware democratic life becomes essential. Barcelona City Council is leading the project Decidim: an online platform for participatory democracy, with thousands of users. The platform is rapidly extending to other cities in Europe (Spain, Italy, Sweden, France, etc.). Its success depends partly on the capacity of the development team to include algorithms that maximize democratic rights, minimize lobby-influence and favors self-organization and social autonomy. Instead of applying AI techniques (deep learning, machine learning) to user profiling and other standard (ab)uses of corporate dominated social networks, the challenge ahead lies on defining Artificial Life models that boost Democratic Life. The goal of this talk is to review such possibilities and explore the way in which Artificial Life can help improve our democracies in an era of maximal inequality on digital power. With the lessons learned during the rise of networked multitudinous identities during the 15M we currently face the challenge of designing the interaction dynamics within Decidim.Barcelona (the participatory democracy platform of Barcelona City Council) so as to make possible the emergence of both city-scale and social autonomous identities. Regarding city-scale identity, and inspired on the way in which cells become autonomous (it is, after all, in Greek cities where autonomy was born as a concept), Decidim makes possible the interaction between bottom-up and top-down dynamics on the constitution of global constraints (such as Municipal Action Plan). We see institutions as channeling collective energy and matter (human, urban and economic) to produce meso and macroscopic constraints for the production and reproduction of city life. Citizen interactions on the other hand are equivalente to molecular interactions. When it comes to political decision making, planing and policy making, Decidim is designed to generate a dialectic between bottom-up (proposal production and voting) and top-down (selection and result construction) dynamics. The PAM (Pla d'Actuació Municipal, Municipal Action Plan, 4 yearly strategic planning for the city) is a good example of city-scale "identity" production through bottom-up and top-down interaction dynamics. The second aspect of autonomous identity generation mechanism we want to foster will soon be available through citizen initiatives and enhanced horizontal communication channels within Decidim.Barcelona. The new participatory regulation (which is currently under discussion) makes possible for citizen to organize and create different king of large scale interventions that can finally end up on a public consultation. We consider that the perceived opportunity for citizen initiatives to be institutionally channeled will create a kind of energy gradient (like those found at the roots of physical self-organized processes, such as Benard cells). Decidim.Barcelona is currently been designed to facilitate social interaction on the creation of citizen proposal for initiatives, their interaction through social media, and the self-organization of public discussion and coordination of communicative action to boost the emergence of political collective identities. How can we foster a better democratic life making use of the tools and principles of Artificial Life?