Böcker av Erik W. Aslaksen

This book covers the work of Erik W. Aslaksen who continues to develop the view of society and its evolution published in earlier work ¿ The Social Bond (Springer 2018), The Stability of Society (Springer 2020), and Measures of Social Evolution (Springer 2021), bringing together core material of that work with the results of recent investigations in order to present the evolution of society as an integrated and continuous story leading right up to the present time. A story of human action driven by our beliefs, desires, and an ideology arising out of our ability to transform and exploit our environment through the development and application of technology. The distinguishing feature of the work is the treatment of society as an information-processing system and applying the system methodology for handling complexity, as it is applied, e.g., in engineering. This focus on information is particularly pertinent in the current circumstances, where the world has arrived at a critical point in its history through the conjunction of a number of issues that appear to be spiralling out of control: Global warming and the associated climate change, the destruction of our environment through such processes as land clearing and industrialisation with associated loss of biodiversity, the rapidly increasing visibility of the inequality in the quality of life with associated tensions, and above all, the determination of the US-led Western alliance to cling to its hegemonial role, apparently at all cost. With the sophistication and proliferation of nuclear weapons, the latter has the potential to bring on the end of civilisation as we know it. The resolution of any of these issues depends on the information available to all parties involved, and hence, the availability and quality of information is seen as the crucial and overarching issue of the present time. A number of aspects of this issue, including the role of education, economic inequality, and the control of the media, aretreated in some detail, and proposals for some small steps in the right direction are put forward.

This book extends a previously published model of social evolution by using macroeconomic measures to indicate both the current state of the society, and its evolutionary trajectory.

When we approach society as a genus and its evolution as a sequence of species, such as the family, clan, fiefdom, kingdom, and nation-state, the development of the next species - the world society - is now being thwarted by the desire of a minority to maintain a hegemonial position that resulted from a singularity in the process.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This authored monograph analyses the determining factors of societal evolution: the interaction between individuals and the resulting relationship, which the author calls the "Social Bond".

Considers the purpose and basic features of design and how the concept of value can provide a quantitative measure of that wider interaction of the engineered object with its environment. This work examines the domain in which functional design takes place and discusses how the system concept can be embedded in that domain.