Control and Management of Man-Made Systems

This chapter is devoted to gauge the effects of centralized vs. decentralized organization of dynamical systems. From the analysis it appears that “alignment of intelligence” between agents is key to achieve optimality as well as stability in distributed systems, and this alignment of intelligence is made possible thanks to communication. It appears that in any well-functioning and intelligent system, there shall be an equilibrium between local control and central control, and there shall be rules of interaction between the intelligent agents participating. This brings up the question of ethics, which is defined as the actual behavioral principles of the participating intelligent agents, and the discussion focusses on how desired behavior (desired ethics) can be made concordant with actual ethics. System-wide conditioning plays an important role in achieving this.