Autonomous decentralization of society structures and information systems

Abstract

Although economical and technological progress has made societies more prosperous, it has also created drawbacks such as poverty and unemployment, and not every member of these societies is happy. The dissatisfaction has led to questions and the re-examination of the top-down approach of central government for planning and management. Recently a new type of society has been postulated, in which the happiness of the individual has importance as well as the prosperity of the group. This new trend will come about through a structural change in society itself. Such a restructuring will be accelerated by information technologies, including the Internet/Intranet, which have been rapidly advancing. Global communication networks enable global communication among individuals and eliminate traditional borderlines around organizations and countries; that is, information sent by each individual flows all over the world and an individual can choose the information he/she needs. The name for the above new trend in the structural change of society is "Autonomous Decentralization" and the author believes that the Autonomous Decentralized System (ADS) (K. Mori et al., 1986) will become quite a common technology in every section or every level of society, such as companies, industries, and public organizations. The paper describes the effectiveness of applying ADS technologies to the structure of our new society and indicates the future trend of ADS technologies.