This is an update to the talk entitled "Social Machines: the coming collision of artificial intelligence, social networks and humanity." It was presented as an ACM Distinguished Speaker lecture at the "University of Iowa Computing Conference" 2017-02-24
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Social Machines - 2017 Update (University of Iowa)
1. The Distinguished Speakers Program
is made possible by
For additional information, please visit http://dsp.acm.org/
2. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
Social Machines:
The Coming Collision of Artificial
Intelligence, Social Networking
and Humanity
Jim Hendler
Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web and Cognitive Sciences
Director, Institute for Data Exploration and Applications
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler
@jahendler (twitter)
4. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
What is a social machine?
• 3 definitions of “Social Machine”
– Cooler name than social media analytics
5. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
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
6. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
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
7. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
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
11. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
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?
15. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
Harnessing this power “unknowlingly”
You have likely
helped to make
Optical
Character
Recognition
better!
Von Ahn et al, 08
31. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
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)
37. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
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
38. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
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)
39. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
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?
40. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
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
41. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
Why this REALLY matters
• Humanity faces huges challenges
– eg. Our knowledge of cancer genomics is being
outpaced by mutations as cancer continues to
spread
– eg. Healthcare continuing to rise as %age of
GDP while cheaper preventive measures
remain unused
– eg. Our neighborhoods degrade as wealth
disparity grows
– eg. Our climate warms as we argue about the
causes without changing behaviors
42. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
Attacking these problems require the best minds we have working
together: Human and AI!
Social Machines give us an approach to attacking
the big problems facing humanity
43. Tetherless World Constellation, RPI
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
44. About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery (www.acm.org), is the
premier global community of computing professionals and students
with nearly 100,000 members in more than 170 countries interacting
with more than 2 million computing professionals worldwide.
OUR MISSION: We help computing professionals to be their best and
most creative. We connect them to their peers, to what the latest
developments, and inspire them to advance the profession and make a
positive impact on society.
OUR VISION: We see a world where computing helps solve tomorrow’s
problems – where we use our knowledge and skills to advance the
computing profession and make a positive social impact throughout the
world.
Notas del editor
We learn new things from the Web almost every day – the amount of data available on the Web is stunning – this slide from Google shows how a set of queries relating to flu track the CDC data on flu outbreaks – imagein what we could do by harnessing this information and think about the challenges it poses to use as WEB ENGINEERS?
One new thing happening in Science, emphasized by a project such as Galaxy zoo, is using many many non-scientiststs help scientists solve hard and important projects – there is a huge opportunity for new technologies that can help us manage the scientific, engineering and even social problems facing our world. It is a huge area for new tools and technologies to be deployed.
My own slide from WEF 2013, images widely used on Web, no copyright attached