SOCIAM all-hands meeting, September, University of Oxford

1. Social Machines:
Theoretical Perspectives
September 2017
Oxford, UK
Paul Smart

3. Book Structure
Sections
• Understanding Social
Machines
• Varieties of Social
Machines
• Interdisciplinary Linkages
Chapters
• Views of Social Machines
• The Mechanistic View of
Social Machines
• Views, Revisited
• The Conceptual
Landscape of the Social
Web

4. Book Structure
Sections
• Understanding Social
Machines
• Varieties of Social
Machines
• Interdisciplinary Linkages
Chapters
• Socio-Technical
Mechanisms
• Classifying Social
Machines
• The Social Machine
Morphospace

5. Book Structure
Sections
• Understanding Social
Machines
• Varieties of Social
Machines
• Implications and
Interdisciplinary
Linkages
Chapters
• Social Machines and
Social Mechanisms
• Social Physics
• Knowledge Machines
• Problem-Solving Engines
• The Social Computer

6. Views of Social Machines
Content Creation View Sociable Machines
View
Socially-Situated
Machines View
Extended Systems
View
Cognitive Systems
View
Socio-Computational
View
Narratological View
Process View

7. Views of Social Machines
Content Creation View Sociable Machines
View
Socially-Situated
Machines View
Extended Systems
View
Cognitive Systems
View
Socio-Computational
View
Narratological View
Process View

8. The Mechanistic View
• Focus on socio-technical mechanisms.
• Socio-technical mechanisms?
• Mechanisms:
• “A mechanism for a phenomenon consists of
entities (or parts) whose activities and
interactions are organized so as to be
responsible for the phenomenon.”
• Socio-technical mechanisms:
• Mechanisms made of people and technology.

9. Social Machine (Ψ-ing)
X3Φ3-ing
X2Φ2-ing
X1Φ1-ing X5Φ5-ing
Socio-Technical
Mechanism
Phenomenon
MECHANISTIC
REALIZATION/CONSTITUTION

10. Views of Social Machines
Content Creation View Sociable Machines
View
Socially-Situated
Machines View
Extended Systems
View
Cognitive Systems
View
Socio-Computational
View
Narratological View
Process View

11. Views of Social Machines
Content Creation View Sociable Machines
View
Socially-Situated
Machines View
Extended Systems
View
Cognitive Systems
View
Socio-Computational
View
Narratological View
Process View

12. Room for the Views?
• Content Creation View:
• human and machine components assigned specific
functional roles.
• Extended Systems View:
• human-extended machine cognition.
• Process View:
• processes realized by socio-technical mechanisms.
• Cognitive Systems View:
• phenomena of the cognitive kind.
• Socio-Computational View:
• phenomena of the computational kind.
• Narratological View:
• descriptions of mechanisms (Little, 2018).

13. Socially-Situated Machines
• Smart and Madaan (in press):
• The human mind is a socially-created artefact
(phylogeny / ontogeny).
• Two Red Queens:
• Socio-cognitive complexity.
• Socio-ecological variability.
• Internet provides contact with humanity.
• Social scaffolding of machine intelligence.
• AI as the product of social machines?

14. The Gift of Language

15. Conclusion
• Mechanistic View:
• Social machines as systems whose states,
events and processes are realized by socio-
technical mechanisms.
• Relaxed (but not lazy) pluralism:
• Multispectral conceptual analysis.
• Socially-Situated Machines Views:
• Social machines as socially-situated machines.

16. Publications
• Smart, P. R. (2017) Machine Intelligence and the
Social Web: How to Get a Cognitive Upgrade.
COGNITIVE’17, Athens, Greece.
• Smart, P. R. and Madaan (in press) The Social
Scaffolding of Machine Intelligence. Int. Journal of
Adv. Cognitive Systems.
• Smart, P. R. (in press) Predicting Me: A Route to
Digital Immortality? In The Mind–Technology
Problem. Springer, Berlin, Germany.
• Smart et al. (submitted) Towards an Understanding
of Social Machines. AI & Society.
• Smart et al (in prep) Social Machines: A
Mechanistic Perspective.