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1. Infrastructure and the cognitive ecosystem: an irrevocable transformation

   https://doi.org/10.1088/2634-4505/aced1f  

   Chester, Mikhail V.; Allenby, Braden (August 2023, Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability)

   Abstract Disruption of legacy infrastructure systems by novel digital and connected technologies represents not simply the rise of cyberphysical systems as hybrid physical and digital assets but, ultimately, the integration of legacy systems into a new cognitive ecosystem. This cognitive ecosystem, an ecology of massive data flows, artificial intelligence, institutional and intellectual structures, and connected technologies, is poised to alter how humans and artificial intelligence understand and control our world. Infrastructure managers need to be ready for this paradigm shift, recognizing their systems are increasingly being absorbed into an emerging suite of data, analytical tools, and decisionmaking technologies that will fundamentally restructure how legacy systems behave and are controlled, how decisions are made, and most importantly how workers interact with the systems. Infrastructure managers must restructure their organizations and engage in cross-organizational sensemaking if they are to be capable of navigating the complexity of the cognitive ecosystem. The cognitive ecosystem is fundamentally poised to change what infrastructures are, necessitating the need for managers to take a close look at the functions and actions of their own systems. The continuing evolution of the Anthropocene and the cognitive ecosystem has profound implications for infrastructure education. A sustained commitment to change is necessary that restructures and reorients infrastructure organizations within the cognitive ecosystem, where knowledge is generated, and control of services is wielded by myriad stakeholders. 

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2. Infrastructure governance for the Anthropocene

   https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2020.078  

   Chester, Mikhail V.; Miller, Thaddeus; Muñoz-Erickson, Tischa A. (January 2020, Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene)

   null (Ed.)

   Transitioning infrastructure governance for accelerating, increasingly uncertain, and increasingly complex environments is paramount for ensuring that critical and basic services are met during times of stability and instability. Yet the bureaucratic structures that dominate infrastructure organizations and their capacity to respond to increasing complexity remain poorly understood. To change infrastructure governance, it is critical to understand current conditions, the barriers to change, and the strategies needed to shift priorities and leadership strategy. The emergence of modern infrastructure bureaucratic and organizational structure is first explored. The need to rethink infrastructure as knowledge enterprises capable of making sense of changing conditions, and not simply as basic service providers, is discussed. Next, transformation of infrastructure governance is presented as both a challenge of organizational change as identity and power and leadership capacity to shift between stable and unstable conditions. Infrastructure bureaucracies should create capabilities to shift between periods of stability and instability, emphasizing flexibility where ad hoc teams are given power to make sense of changing conditions and steer the organization appropriately. Additionally, several critical factors must be addressed within organizational power structures, identities, and processes to facilitate change. Allowing infrastructure governance to persist in its current form is likely increasingly problematic for the future and may result in an increasing inability to maintain relevance. 

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3. Toward adaptive infrastructure: the Fifth Discipline

   https://doi.org/10.1080/23789689.2020.1762045  

   Chester, Mikhail V.; Allenby, Braden (January 2020, Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure)

   Modern infrastructure have been a relatively stable force for decades, ensuring that basic and critical services are met, without significantly changing their core designs or management principles. At the dawn of the Anthropocene it appears that accelerating and increasingly uncertain conditions are poised to result in a paradigm shift for infrastructure, where the environments in which they operate are changing faster than the systems themselves. New approaches are needed in the education, governance, and physical structures that constitute infrastructure systems that can respond in pace. Principles of agility and flexibility appear well suited to help guide how we transform the management and design of infrastructure. In changing how we approach infrastructure we will need to respond to increasingly wicked challenges. Infrastructure must become a Fifth Discipline, focused on learning about the rapidly changing environments and demands in which they operate, and agility and flexibility in both governance and technology reconfiguration. KEYWORDS: Infrastructure, Anthropocene, agility and flexibility, adaptive, resilience 

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4. Generative Ghosts: Anticipating Benefits and Risks of AI Afterlives

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713758  

   Morris, Meredith Ringel; Brubaker, Jed R (April 2025, ACM)

   As AI systems quickly improve in both breadth and depth of performance, they lend themselves to creating increasingly powerful and realistic agents, including the possibility of agents modeled on specific people. We anticipate that within our lifetimes it may become common practice for people to create custom AI agents to interact with loved ones and/or the broader world after death; indeed, the past year has seen a boom in startups purporting to offer such services. We call these generative ghosts since such agents will be capable of generating novel content rather than merely parroting content produced by their creator while living. In this paper, we reflect on the history of technologies for AI afterlives, including current early attempts by individual enthusiasts and startup companies to create generative ghosts. We then introduce a novel design space detailing potential implementations of generative ghosts. We use this analytic framework to ground a discussion of the practical and ethical implications of various approaches to designing generative ghosts, including potential positive and negative impacts on individuals and society. Based on these considerations, we lay out a research agenda for the AI and HCI research communities to better understand the risk/benefit landscape of this novel technology to ultimately empower people who wish to create and interact with AI afterlives to do so in a beneficial manner. 

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5. Infrastructure autopoiesis: requisite variety to engage complexity

   https://doi.org/10.1088/2634-4505/ac4b48  

   Chester, Mikhail V.; Allenby, Braden (February 2022, Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability)

   Abstract Infrastructure systems must change to match the growing complexity of the environments they operate in. Yet the models of governance and the core technologies they rely on are structured around models of relative long-term stability that appear increasingly insufficient and even problematic. As the environments in which infrastructure function become more complex, infrastructure systems must adapt to develop a repertoire of responses sufficient to respond to the increasing variety of conditions and challenges. Whereas in the past infrastructure leadership and system design has emphasized organization strategies that primarily focus on exploitation (e.g., efficiency and production, amenable to conditions of stability), in the future they must create space for exploration, the innovation of what the organization is and does. They will need to create the abilities to maintain themselves in the face of growing complexity by creating the knowledge, processes, and technologies necessary to engage environment complexity. We refer to this capacity asinfrastructure autopoiesis. In doing so infrastructure organizations should focus on four key tenets. First, a shift to sustained adaptation—perpetual change in the face of destabilizing conditions often marked by uncertainty—and away from rigid processes and technologies is necessary. Second, infrastructure organizations should pursue restructuring their bureaucracies to distribute more resources and decisionmaking capacity horizontally, across the organization’s hierarchy. Third, they should build capacity for horizon scanning, the process of systematically searching the environment for opportunities and threats. Fourth, they should emphasize loose fit design, the flexibility of assets to pivot function as the environment changes. The inability to engage with complexity can be expected to result in a decoupling between what our infrastructure systems can do and what we need them to do, and autopoietic capabilities may help close this gap by creating the conditions for a sufficient repertoire to emerge. 

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