Economic Philosophy of the Internet of Things

<p>To properly understand the nature of the digital economy we need to investigate the phenomenon of a ubiquitous computing system (UCS). As defined by Robin Milner this notion implies the following characteristics: (i) it will continually make decisions hitherto made by us; (ii) it will be vast maybe 100 times today’s systems; (iii) it must continually adapt on-line to new requirements; and (iv) individual UCSs will interact with one another. This book argues that neoclassical approaches to modelling economic behaviour based on optimal control by representative-agents are ill-suited to a world typified by concurrency decentralized control and interaction. To this end it argues for the development of new process-based approaches to analysis modelling and simulation. </p><p></p><p>The book provides the context—both philosophical and mathematical—for the construction and application of new rigorous and meaningful analytical tools. In terms of social theory it adopts a Post-Cognitivist approach the elements of which include the nature philosophy of Schelling Marx’s critique of political economy Peircean Pragmatism Whitehead’s process philosophy and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the flesh along with cognitive scientific notions of embodied cognition and neural Darwinism as well as more questionable notions of artificial intelligence that are encompassed by the rubric of perception-and-action-without-intelligence. </p><p></p>