Infrastructure for autonomy: Designing networked service systems with intelligent interfaces

Human autonomy will increasingly depend upon well-designed networks of artifacts and infrastructures. As the world becomes ever more complex and uncertain, our ability to shape it in virtuous ways will rely upon the extent to which diverse resources — people, natural resources, biological systems, software, and hardware — can be organized to serve our needs directly and concurrently. The most promising technological developments affecting current solutions for these foundational requirements of human existence are in networked information systems (Gubbi et al., 2013; Chen et al., 2018; Dautov et al., 2020). The emergence, development, and eventual proliferation of the Internet and its offspring will increasingly enable solutions for the urgent challenges facing modern societies. However, this incredible diversity of intelligent, networked devices, operated by sophisticated communication protocols, is complicated to comprehend and use. Modern societies demand solutions that transcend the traditional solutions of organizational theory; by optimizing a mix of human beings, information machines, and artificial interfaces, it is now feasible to offer real-time support and continuous augmentation of human decision-making and deliberation. Information technologies can finally minimize the burden of coordination among people who have a relevant problem to solve, or a service to provide, and who have to interact to achieve a common goal. Blueprinting models of autonomy for societies cannot yet account for the massive changes in individuals' decision-making patterns induced by novel technological solutions for communications, transport, and assistance. New processes of commoditization — and new modes of orchestration — of human talents are emerging and will profoundly reshape the organization of work and life across the world. We are focusing our inquiry on these themes. Our research deals with an impulse coming from mathematics, artificial intelligence, and complexity theories. However, while we start from a technology push, we constrain ourselves along the projects with explicit technological avenues, and we link back to explicit market pull demands as we move along. These chapters, hence, provide an overview of the topics we are addressing throughout the dissertation.