A social machine is an environment comprising humans and technology interacting and producing outputs or action which would not be possible without both parties present. The growth of social machines has been greatly enabled by technologies such as the Internet, the smartphone, social media and the World Wide Web, by connecting people in new ways.

Concept

The idea of social machines has been around for a long time, discussed as early as 1846 by Captain William Allen, and also by authors such as

Norman Mailer Nachem Malech Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007), known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, activist, filmmaker and actor. In a career spanning over six decades, Mailer ...

Gilles Deleuze Gilles Louis René Deleuze ( , ; 18 January 1925 – 4 November 1995) was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volu ...

and

Félix Guattari Pierre-Félix Guattari ( , ; 30 April 1930 – 29 August 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næss, ...

. Social machines blur the lines between computational processes and input from humans. They often take the form of collaborative online projects which produce web content, such as

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

citizen science Citizen science (CS) (similar to community science, crowd science, crowd-sourced science, civic science, participatory monitoring, or volunteer monitoring) is scientific research conducted with participation from the public (who are sometimes re ...

projects like

Galaxy Zoo Galaxy Zoo is a crowdsourced astronomy project which invites people to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. It is an example of citizen science as it enlists the help of members of the public to help in scien ...

, and even

social networking A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...

site such as

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

have also been defined as social machines. However, a social machine does not necessarily produce outcomes which directly affect the individuals or machines involved and an alternative viewpoint states that Social Machines are "rather than being an intentionally engineered piece of software - the substrate of accumulated human cross-system information sharing activities".

Nigel Shadbolt Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt (born 9 April 1956) is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. He is Chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded ...

et al. say that the

telos Telos (; ) is a term used by philosopher Aristotle to refer to the final cause of a natural organ or entity, or of a work of human art. Intentional actualization of potential or inherent purpose,"Telos.''Philosophy Terms'' Retrieved 3 May 2020. ...

of the social machine is specific to its participants, whereas the telos of a platform is independent of its participants’ purposes; the platform is there to facilitate communication. A social machine may also spread across more than one platform, depending on how its participants interact, while a platform like Twitter could host many thousands of social machines. An academic field investigating the idea has been active since

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profess ...

's book ''

Weaving the web ''Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by its inventor'' (1999) is a book written by Tim Berners-Lee describing how the World Wide Web was created and his role in it. References *Port, Otis. "How the N ...

''. Social machines are characterised as 'social systems on the Web ... computational entities governed by both computational and social processes'.

and

James Hendler James Alexander Hendler (born April 2, 1957) is an artificial intelligence researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States, and one of the originators of the Semantic Web. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administr ...

expressed some of the underlying scientific challenges with respect to AI research using semantic web technology as a point of departure. Recent work focuses on the idea that certain social machines can be regarded as autonomous and goal-driven agents, and should be analysed and regulated as such.

Nello Cristianini Nello Cristianini (born 1968) is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol. Education Cristianini holds a degree in physics from the University of Trieste, a Master in computation ...

and Teresa Scantamburlo argued that the combination of a human society and an algorithmic regulation forms a social machine.

References

External links

SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines
— slide show
Observing Social Machines Part 1: What to Observe
— pre-print Government by algorithm

Concept

See also

References

Further reading

External links