CALL FOR WORKSHOP PARTICIPATION(Deadline for papers and participants: 01.12.2006) CYBERNETHICS, COPYRIGHT & VIRTUAL COMPANY to be held in International Conference on Business, Law and Technology (IBLT) Workshop Organiser: Emre Bayamlioglu *** The planned workshop shall flow on two observations and related arguments.
*** At one extreme all these questions may lead to some ludditism or criticism of the idea of progress, which is the most significant pillar of western civilisation. Nevertheless it is doubtless that, the global economy depends on automation to increase productivity and this trend has undeniable social effects. This is where, the position of law may be questioned in the broader picture of social science. It is apparent that above line of reasoning and construction are highly interdisciplinary and aim of this workshop is to seek contribution of other fields both in and outside the law, as well as entrepreneurial approaches in particular those relate to content management. Some questions and line of arguments regarding different fields may be listed as follows: Commercial law - cybernetics and company law 1, 2 Information/computer science - What are the challenges in creating the ultimate law executing software? 3, 4, 5 Business ethics - What is responsible software ? What may be the mode of regulation in terms of software design to avoid "ENRON" like behavior? Philosophy of computation - Can machines think? What is information made of? 6, 7 Administrative law - e-government - What are the characteristics of modern state as a cybernetic system? Civil Law - ingredients of legal personality 8, 9 IP/IT Law - What is the legal status of machine generated content? Sociology - Is there an end to materialism? 10, 11 Workshop Participants are invited to present research and application papers , or to indicate which topic they could contribute. Please send an email to: emreb@bilgi.edu.tr P.S. The references given herein cannot reflect even a very small portion of the extensive literature on such diverse topics. Therefore contributions to the reading list are very welcome and will be posted on the workshop site accordingly. ----------------------------------------------------- 1. THE CYBERNETIC FACTORY: Beer and his followers have attempted to put this Viable System Model, as it is known, into operation in many organisations over the years (Espejo and Harnden 1989), but the showpiece was Beer's attempt to cybernetise Chile in the period 1971-73, under the socialist regime of Salvador Allende (Beer 1972, 2nd ed. 1981). This project sought to convert the entire Chilean economy into the kind of cyborg assemblage I just described, with real-time information flows running from individual factories and so on to a central control-room- the brain- and back again. The project went a long way in a short time, before it was cut off by the Pinochet coup. Many of the principals (though not Beer) found themselves in jail; others fled to the US. Nobody, alas, has offered Beer an entire nation-state to work on since. 2. Turnbull, Shann, "Corporate Governance: Theories, Challenges and Paradigms". Gouvernance: Revue Internationale, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp.11-43, 2000 http://ssrn.com/abstract=221350 3. William J. Rapaport, Philosophy of Computer Science: An Introductory Course, 4. Luciano Floridi, What Is The Philosophy Of Information?. www.philosophyofinformation.net/pdf/wipi.pdf 5. Legal systems are often modelled using regulative norms, like obligations and permissions However, a large part of the legal code does not contain prohibitions and permissions, but definitions for classifying the commonsense world under legal categories,like contract, money, property, marriage. Regulative norms can refer to thislegal classification of reality...... For modelling constitutive norms, specialized formalisms for counts-as conditionals have been introduced but itremains unclear how to relate them to regulative norms. 6. Christian Fuchs, Science as a Self-Organizing Meta-Information System,. http://ssrn.com/abstract=504244 7. Knowledge is the social manifestation of information. We live in a knowledge society insofar as all social systems are knowledge-generating systems. Modern society today has become knowledge-based because our social systems are increasingly based on technological and scientific knowledge and on mental labour., 8. Linda MacDonald Glenn, Biotechnology at the Margins of Personhood:An Evolving Legal Paradigm, Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 13 - October 2003 - http://jetpress.org/volume13/glenn.htm 9. My findings indicate that computers also interact as (non-human) consumers. Consequently,we could consider them as artificial consumers. Richard Gatarski, Artificial Consumers: A Role For Computers As Subjects In Consumer-Related Marketing, www.fek.su.se/home/rgi/nff2003ac/gatarski_ACatNFF_2003-06-11.pdf 10. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (1999) provides an analysis of information-age capitalism and the movements currently dissolving it. See Chp.3 Marx's Machines http://www.fims.uwo.ca/people/faculty/dyerwitheford/ 11. ...technological development has a logic of its own, that as a system is goes beyond the intention of any participating individual, and in fact becomes their master. In such a reading, technological evolution is inevitable and has unforeseen consequences. In the pessimistic vision, it's in fact the ultimate form of alienation. This is so because technology is an expression of just a part of our humanity, instrumental reason, but when embedded in the technological systems and its machines, it then forces us to ressemble it, and we indeed follow the logic of machines loose many parts of our full humanity. Think of the positions of Heidegger, Baudrillard, and Virilio as exemplars of such a type of analysis. |