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Social Machines:The Coming Collision of Artificial Intelligence, Social Networking

and HumanityJim Hendler

Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive SciencesDirector, Institute for Data Exploration and Applications

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institutehttp://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler

@jahendler (twitter)

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(Shameless Plug)

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What is a social machine?

• 3 definitions of “Social Machine”– Cooler name than social media analytics

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What is a social machine?

• 3 definitions of “Social Machine”– Cooler name than social media analytics– Machines increasingly entering our

social sphere

1968 2010 Today

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What is a social machine?

• 3 definitions of “Social Machine”– Cooler name than social media analytics– Machines increasingly entering our

social sphere– Networks of machines supporting

networks of people working together in ways that impact the real world

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What is a social machine?

Real life is and must be full of all kinds of social constraint – the very processes from which society arises. Computers can help if we use them to create abstract social machines on the Web: processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration… The stage is set for an evolutionary growth of new social engines.. Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999

Combination of all three

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Social networking consumes huge amountsof human (humanity’s!) time

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Time spent online

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Time spent online

Economist, 2014

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Using this time

Imagine• Hundreds of millions of people• Effectively able to network together• Working with the data archives of science, govts,

NGOs, etc.Working together on the Web

to cure disease, to feed the hungry,and to empower the powerless…

How could we do this?

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Idea 1, do this by “accident”

Being explored, but how do we make this purposeful?

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Harnessing the power for “fun”

Von Ahn, 06

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GWAP (ESP ca. 2006)

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Harnessing this power “unknowlingly”

You have likely helped to make Optical Character Recognition better!

Von Ahn et al, 08

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Duolingo (2012)

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Harnessing human knowledge for problem solving

Raddick et al, 07

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Millions of galaxies classified

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16: Hanny’s Voorwerp(A digression or maybe the whole point)

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The Zooniverse

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Social machines for Social Good

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Social machines for Social Good

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AI and Social Machines

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Today: We gain benefit from AI

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But, the machines still need us…

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But, the machines still need us…

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The “AI revolution” needs Social Machines!

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Embracing the blur

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Embracing the blur

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Embracing the blur

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Wikipedia Needs humans (enabled by technology)

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Wikipedia needs technology (enabled by humans)

How do you prevent people from ruining articles? (Defacement or vandalism)

Software robots automatically reverse obvious defacement immediately. Moreover, there are hundreds of people who spend a little time each day watching the list of recent changes on Wikipedia (see Wikipedia:Recent changes patrol)... (Wikipedia FAQ, 2010)

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Studying Social Machines is Inherently Multidisciplinary

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Distribution Statement

Wikipedia as Social Mechanism

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Distribution Statement

Slashdot (viz. Reddit) mechanism

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Galaxy Zoo communities

Bipana Bantawa, OII

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“Self Organizing” social machines

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Different network dynamics in different SMs

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22: Social Challenges include

• Keys to understanding on-line communities include– dynamics of online communities

• Incentives unclear• Information flows between online and offline are largely

unstudied• We can no longer assume an expert -> novice

continuum, but what replaces it?– Trust (and distrust) on Web-based communities

• Goal is to share information, not hide it – but how do we prevent abuses?

• Who do you trust (really)?– Governance is a critical factor

• HFS is “self organizing,” which limits its scale

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Example: Governance

• Wikipedia includes a lot of rules and privileged people to adjudicate/enforce them– Study in 2008

(Butler etal, CHI, 08)• 44 policies (now 51)• 248 guidelines (now over 400)

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23: Technical Challenges include

• Heavy programming burden– Costs a lot to build/support a scalable, governed

platform• Compare Wikipedia to HFS

– Designing a successful GWAP still a black art• And a large programming challenge

– How can we create tools that a community can use by itself?

• 80% solution for everyone >> 99% for some• Underlying models

– How do we define Social Machines more rigorously?

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Engineering challenges

• Creating tools that allow groups of users to create, share and evolve a new generation of open and interacting social machines– Declarative mechanism for sharing– Read/write mechanism for both information and “governance”

• Creating the underlying architectural principles to guide the design and efficient engineering of new Web infrastructure components for this new generation of social software – Distributed, open and dynamic (aka Web-like)

• Creating mechanisms to guarantee that use protocols are explicit and conform to the relevant social policy expectations of the users.– Transparency, accountability, policy awareness

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Social Machines

• We are on developingnew technologies to create Web-based systems that will transform society by:– Creating new systems that allow large numbers of

users to interact  over the Web to collectively solve problems.

– Creating and disseminating new Web application development technologies aimed at letting communities build and run their own social machines

• AI may be an important part of this• There are some important examples out there

– But there’s a lot of important science to be done• This is a truly interdisciplinary challenge in which

computing, social science, informatics and communications work is all required

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Questions