Christman Roos
Title: APPLICATIONS OF REAL-TIME ECONOMY: CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR SYMPATHETIC FEEDBACK SYSTEM TO REDUCE CARBON EMISSIONS
Supervisor: Dr. Veiko Lember
Opponent: Dr. Christos Giotitsas
Defense: 2-3 June 2022
Abstract: The world is facing plethora of challenges. Several of them have been mapped by the UN, resulting in a number of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but remain unresolved. This thesis addresses two of them with its results: #12 “Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns” and #13 “Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts” by synthesising real-time economy phenomenon and cybernetic viable system model. For thematic inception, thick description is provided for both real-time economy as a concept as well as for ‘Project Cybersyn’ that houses cybernetic viable system model. Allegedly, the term ‘real-time economy’ first appeared in an article in 2002, describing how a company used real-time data to react instantaneously to changes in their business, however, one of the first attempts to harness real-time economy principles date back as far as 1970s, when Chile experimented with cybernetics to steer its socialist economics using timely information made available bottom-up for the decision-makers. This was done with a help of British theorist and cybernetician, Stafford Beer. The author studies commonalities and differences between the real-time economy concept and the viable system model, coming up with a proposition how to tackle climate change by infusing the two and harnessing blockchain technology to create sympathetic feedback system for effective carbon emissions reduction. A conceptual model framework is provided.
Keywords: Real-time economy, viable system model, climate change, carbon reduction, SDGs
