• Alexander V. Bochkov, JSC "NIIAS" (Moscow, Russia)

The current transition to so-called "data-driven management," based on the creation of full-scale digital twins of complex socio-economic systems, faces a fundamental challenge. Managed systems are ergatic, meaning they include ultimately non-formalizable human, technological, and environmental components. This article demonstrates that optimization problems solved for such digital models are inherently ill-posed with respect to the original, as the human element introduces reflexive non-formalizability and implicit knowledge that cannot be captured by any formal structure. Risk in this paradigm ceases to be an external threat, becoming an immanent property of the management system itself, generated by the inevitable and growing discrepancy between the trajectories of the virtual model and the real ergatic process. Strategies optimal for the "Digital Leviathan" (total simulation) lead to the destabilization of the original, erosion of the human component, and the system exceeding the boundaries of controllability. The authors substantiate the need for a paradigm shift: from searching for a point optimum for an incomplete model to synthesizing robust and adaptive strategies that explicitly minimize the risk functional. A key element of the new "symbiotic management" paradigm is the formal inclusion of the human operator as a corrective loop in the iterative dialogue between the model and reality. The proposed architecture of symbiotic management, grounded in Bayesian updating and minimax principles, enables not merely risk minimization but active management of epistemic uncertainty, transforming human intuition into a structured source of model correction. This approach ensures the resilience of complex socio-technical systems under conditions of fundamental knowledge incompleteness, offering a path from the illusion of absolute control to the wisdom of collaborative navigation. The goal of management becomes not an absolute optimum in virtual space, but dynamic adaptive efficiency in the real world, achieved through constant management of the immanent risk of trajectory divergence. The article introduces and contrasts two concepts: the "Digital Leviathan" (the temptation to manage the simulation) and the "formalism of risk" (the discipline of constantly comparing the map and the territory).

digital twin, ergatic system, immanent risk, optimization problem, model incorrectness, symbiotic management, adaptive strategy, human factor, epistemic uncertainty

2026-09-03