Human Computation: Is this the route to Terra Sapiens?

 "We cannot solve problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein (attributed)

Pietro Michelucci is the editor of Handbook of Human Computation (2013). What is that? As he wrote in the introduction, "A more descriptive title for this book would have been “The application, design, infrastructure, and analysis of heterogeneous multi-agent distributed information processing systems and their political, societal, and ethical implications”, but as brevity is the soul of wit, I decided to go with simply Handbook of Human Computation." Michelucci's paper "Human Computation and Convergence" (2016) further describes these systems, that have "the capacity to address society's most wicked problems and achieve planetary homeostasis." Those are his words, and a lofty vision indeed! As he writes in his paper:

"Thus far, biological evolution has endowed humans with the intelligence needed for survival, including the invention of powerful technologies. However, some of these inventions have led to intractable societal problems (e.g., climate change, pandemic disease, geopolitical conflict, etc.), the solutions of which exceed the reach of individual human cognitive abilities. These “wicked problems” have no specific formulation, as each problem characterization depends upon a specific solution approach, which exists among an unknown set of possible approaches. To further complicate matters, there is no definitive endpoint; candidate solutions must be dynamic, adaptive, and ongoing.

"While collective intelligence, distributed sensing, and coordinated action, when implemented successfully, are each potentially transformative in their own right, the prospect of combining those capabilities within a unified system suggests a tantalizing opportunity to build a distributed organism that manifests collective agency in the world. Such a “superorganism” would exhibit pervasive awareness through its distributed sensory faculties, reason with an unprecedented degree of predictive accuracy, and implement complex, multi-actor behaviors. This model has evolutionary precedents among the eusocial insect species, which derive survival advantages through locally cooperative, globally emergent collective behaviors. Indeed, a recent comparative analysis of these insect behaviors to open source software development has provided inspiration for new human computation methods.

"In other words, when life forms collaborate and coalesce, as enabled by technology, to produce a more advanced predictive model of the universe, they are better able to self-adjust and engineer effective interventions that further perpetuate life and more advanced information processing systems, leading to yet better predictions. Dynamic systems theory would suggest that such a cascading process could lead to a phase shift, that is, a sudden qualitatively different pattern of organization in the life-universe system."

Pietro Michelucci recently tweeted “The one thing we can always count on humans to do is to be human (not sure that's changed much over the centuries). Considering invariant aspects of human behavior helps us engineer more effective human/machine partnerships for societal betterment.” It's notable that this perspective is shared among many researchers, in a separate paper, "Cyber-Physical Human Systems: Putting People in the Loop" (2016), I read "While most of us think about people using systems, many complex systems (such as the smart grid, or smart cities) are actually a combination of computers, machines and people all working together to achieve the goals of the systems. ...The different ways in which people and computers observe, process, and act present challenges (and opportunities) for people to work together with computers to best achieve a goal." The authors go on to develop a unique way of framing this challenge in terms of elements, components, and systems.

It seems to me that at our current stage of sociocultural evolution, we have a pretty good understanding of the elements, and we are beginning to acquire detailed data models of the components, but we have not fully realized the ability to rapidly reconfigure the system, in response to changing conditions, to optimize its functioning and thereby preserve the integrity of the components. This last requirement makes all the difference in effectively addressing existential threats.

Let's define the relationship among these terms, according to the paper's authors. Elements combine to form components (and critically, some of these are capable of delivering services) which in turn combine to form systems. Now suppose that we would like to optimize our system. The difficulty here is that optimal system conditions are continuously changing in response to dynamic conditions external to the system - in the changing global environment - and to conditions internal to the system - as service components evolve by recombining elements into new configurations. Therefore in order to optimize a system, we must do at least three things simultaneously: sense environmental conditions, maintain accurate data on system service components, and configure service components into functioning social ecosystems. (Think of three rough categories: context, capability, and configuration.)

On Monitoring Cyber-Physical-Social Systems

Here's how the paper's authors describe their solution. A Human Service Capability Description (HSCD) data model shows your general capabilities and needs, grouped into elements. Think of it as the most accurate and up-to-date resume (or personal profile, digital identity, etc.) that you could ever make. This allows you to integrate into a broader Cyber Physical Social System (CPSS), which has pervasive awareness through its distributed sensory faculties. Utilizing the HSCD of multiple people, a CPSS can coordinate complex, multi-actor behaviors, resulting in a coherent system-level outcome. In other words, a CPSS leverages the capability of multiple individuals to find creative solutions to complex problems, such as the economic optimization problem, and non-economic social problems. This is a formal presentation of how a CPSS might work. For a big picture view of CPSS, Hai Zhuge, a Chinese computer scientist, can help put it all into perspective. Here's a few paraphrased selections from an article he coauthored:

The natural ecological environment is a vast and complex system that has evolved over billions of years. The health of any ecosystem depends on effective energy flow, material flow, and information flow cycles to maintain the dynamic balance of populations of species in the flow cycles by assimilating waste and being able to self-recover from damage. The harmonious characteristics of the natural ecological environment represent a new way for IT professionals to establish a future interconnection environment.

In his book "The Knowledge Grid: Toward Cyber-Physical Society" (2012) Zhuge describes how he aspires to connect everything. As Christian Jensen explains in the foreword, the book "advances the vision of human-machine-nature symbiosis." As Zhuge says, "cyber-physical-social systems will need to be based on a kind of semantics capable of establishing an “understanding” between inanimate resources and humans." As he describes on his personal website:

The future interconnection environment will be a large-scale human-machine environment that unites the physical, virtual, and mental worlds. Ideally, this environment will be an autonomous, living, sustainable, and intelligent system within which society and nature evolve cooperatively. It will gather and organize resources into semantically rich forms that both machines and people can easily use. Geographically dispersed users will be able to cooperatively accomplish tasks and solve problems by using the network to actively promote the flow of material, energy, techniques, information, knowledge, and services in this environment.

In his 2013 paper "Cyber-Physical Society: The science and engineering for future society," Zhuge describes one of the benefits he sees to this approach. "A cyber-physical society can be efficient and low carbon, as it will be able to optimize coordination between the flow of knowledge, information, materials, and energy, and minimize energy use and waste production." A useful analogy to Zhuge's idea is that of the "smart electric grid" or a "circular economy." To paraphrase "Smart Cities as Cyber-Physical Social Systems:"

It is worth emphasizing that the ultimate value of CPSS infrastructure lies in “closing the loop” that consists of sensing, communicating, decision making, and actuating—rather than simply collecting and sharing data. This aspect is not yet widely recognized... Technology alone cannot transform a city without the participation and cooperation of its citizens. A CPSS is in fact a sociotechnical ecosystem of people, technology, organizations, and information. As such, the proper design and management of this ecosystem needs to bring together engineers, ecologists, economists, and social scientists, providing a wealth of interdisciplinary research opportunities.

Generation and evolution of various spaces

The philosopher Walter Benesch noted that, for the ancients, "space" is where things and events happen. For Zeno, if something did not occupy space, it was nothing. Likewise, an idea occupies a position in a train or sequence of ideas, has origins and ends. Benesch made use of this metaphor, "the analogies that can be made between our thinking of space and and the space of our thinking provide the basis for what I am calling philosophical space... It is within a world of mental constructs that we relate thoughts, objects, and symbols and turn them into literature, music, architecture, religion, science. ...I believe that mastering travel in philosophical space is as important as learning to walk in physical space for it is in the contexts of philosophical space that we give significance to our life-long voyages in the physical world."

To achieve the goals of a "smart world" capable of increased sensory feedback and information processing, we need to bring together a multitude of things operating within a variety of spaces. Discovering how those things interact will be eye opening; charting the dimensions of cyber, physical, social, and (yes) philosophical spaces, and where and how they interpenetrate with each other, will be illuminating; and relating the contents of all these spaces to one another will be revolutionary.

We can combine the agent interaction model (Fig.1) and spatial qualities (Fig.2) of CPSS to develop a model of the evolution of a "smart world." If the cyber-physical-social space is characterized by three dimensions, the majority of our evolutionary history proceeded along the physical dimension, as relatively simple organisms with rudimentary forms of social interaction. With the evolution of sophisticated neuroanatomy and cultures, our exploration of social space became more varied and complex, and with the development of complex artifacts in the last century (or rather the last few decades) we've increasingly explored cyber space, the third axis on the graph.

In order to realize that "smart world" with improved flows in energy, materials, and information, we'll need a better understanding of how the various actors, and their respective fields of action, all work together. It is much easier to solve a two dimensional maze when you can gain a "bird's eye" view and see it from the third dimension. In the same way, social space makes solving problems in physical space easier (embodiment problem, economic optimization problem), cyber space makes solving problems in social space easier (interpersonal utility comparison problem, coordination paradox), and physical space informs problems in cyber space (correlate dissociated contents and knowledge). Similar to the way that metacognition sheds light upon cognition, each additional dimension provides new tools, and improves the flows, responsiveness, and coordination among the actors in the other fields.

Case study 1: The interpersonal utility comparison problem

There's a very powerful thesis to be argued for using emerging technology in the service of social justice movements. We're seeing bits and pieces of this argument being constructed, but there's much more waiting to be said. Political spending, both public and private, could be better tracked. And we can get a fine grained understanding of the flow of money across the globe, regardless of the source or destination, or to what ends it is put. Do we really want to know? Of course. Better still, we don't even have to use standard metrics - there are many proxy variables that would probably suffice, and perhaps yield a clearer picture.

Alex Pentland once said theorists like Adam Smith and Karl Marx only had half the answers. His study of social physics, which he calls "Promethean fire," marks a qualitative change in our understanding of human interaction. We have the potential to move past Marxism and capitalism. Wealth is still power, but we can now know exactly how it is created or extracted, where it is going, what it is doing, and (counterfactually) what it might've done instead. According to Noam Cohen: "As the Silicon Valley mantra goes, what you can’t measure you can’t improve. Imagine a world where data are used to make institutions more fair, rather than just more efficient, where books are published with fantastic titles like Algorithms of Justice, and Automating Equality. These tools are now available to journalists, advocacy organizations, and reformers within government."

Case study 2: Dematerialization (resource efficiency)

Andrew McAfee describes this process, which involves the intersection of the physical and cyber spaces: "Today, we have decoupled economic growth from resource consumption. Dematerialization is simply the ability to consume the things we want (in this case media communications, computing) while using fewer resources, fewer molecules from the world. In some cases none at all. Now dematerialization does not happen because we spontaneously give up the desire to consume and embrace the philosophy of degrowth. It doesn't happen because we're noble. It happens because we're cheap. It's very simple. Resources cost money that we would rather not spend, and technological progress offers us an alternative to that spending. So instead of buying a computer and a hard drive and a landline, and an answering machine, and the camcorder, and the camera, and a Walkman, and a tape. We just buy one tiny phone. Once you're aware of dematerialization you start to see it all over the place."

Metaphysical pluralism, the simulation hypothesis, and CPSS

Philosophers have long distinguished between the "real" and the "apparent." Science itself is a grand project to determine what is "real." Ancient philosophy embarked on this journey, and the Socratic paradox can be paraphrased as "I know that I know nothing," That's why it has been said Socrates was the wisest man - he knew that any knowledge he claimed to have was only "apparent," not real in any sense of the word. That's our starting point. This physical reality full of physical things can at best be considered our apparent world, a qualification we conveniently ignore as we go about our daily lives. It may be that reality is very different, and existence an undefinable term. This ties into the anthropic principle, which is to say "of course we'd consider our apparent reality to be real, by what other standard are we to judge?" Regardless, The terms "reality" and "simulation" reveal so many ambiguities that, given the Socratic paradox, from an operational perspective they seem arbitrarily equivalent.

“It might be that, in some sense, all of the world that we think of as ‘the real world’ is itself information. And that’s what computers are running as well. It might turn out that metaphysically speaking, deep down, a simulation and reality are the same sorts of things.” - Robert Rupert, philosophy of mind professor at the University of Colorado

Living Governance

What is real? The metaphysical question is very old, and it’s clearly at the root of the “simulation hypothesis” advanced by Nick Bostrom and popularized by Elon Musk. We could also ask “What is a simulation?” For both questions, the real and the simulated define each other, as the one is not the other and vice versa. But more to the point, they both agree that there is just one reality, whereas there can be limitless simulations. This is the perspective of metaphysical monism, and it's not a requirement for the CPSS framework. Instead of a monistic or dualistic perspective on reality, the third option of metaphysical pluralism appears a natural fit for the philosphical basis of CPSS. Think of it as an application of anekāntavāda (Sanskrit: अनेकान्तवाद, "many-sidedness"). Why diversity and pluralism? We live in a reality composed of multiple interconnected spaces that share some qualities, but not others, and these spaces reflect and influence each other to a greater or lesser degree. Each of them has it's own particular geography, contents, limits, and operational processes. One emergent phenomenon cannot be reduced to another, but they can form a synergistic relationship.

Within the context of CPSS, we can call physical space S(n), social space S(n+1), and cyber space S(n+2). Maybe we could add mind space to the mix somewhere, but that’s beside the point. In a sense, each of these spaces is a recursive model, an abstraction or simulation that facilitates interactive engagement with the underlying agents and processes in the other spaces, all of which are different substrates of reality. And just as it is possible to distinguish between fact and fiction in physical space, so too do such limits exist in social and cyber spaces, though they follow different sets of rules in accordance with their particular substrates. If some version of metaphysical pluralism best describes the fabric of reality, then our task within each space/substrate is to map its geography, correlate its contents, and understand its limits and flows. The operational qualities of physical spaces (such as mass, energy, and time), social spaces (intangibles like fairness, security, and caring), and cyber spaces (interpersonal cognition, digital communication, and complex control) are very different, and should be judged according to their own merits.

The current economy is biased toward physical space, while a disproportionate amount of growth seems to be occurring in social and cyber spaces today. That raises the question of how one places value on intangible qualities, and there is likely insufficient understanding of how that can be ascribed, and whether it is quantifiable. While I would not be able to exist without physical things, I would very likely not exist without social things either. And I can confidently predict that if cyber things ceased to exist, there would be a non-trivial amount of disruption to many lives as well. This wasn't always the case, but today many critical aspects of our infrastructure have become dependent upon cybernetic systems, which are much more than just your smart phone and social media accounts. 

Additional resources:

"Solving today’s most challenging and complex problems requires an ability to build consensus around common goals and gather, process, and act on information at massive scales with increasing efficiency. We do not know how to create machines with the critical cognitive abilities required for solving important human-centered problems. But what if we could engineer systems that combine the respective strengths of machines and humans toward new capabilities?" - A US Research Roadmap for Human Computation

Collective Awareness and Action in Urban Superorganisms
Cyber–Physical–Social Frameworks for Urban Big Data Systems: A Survey 
Cyber-Human Systems (CHS), National Science Foundation
Ensuring Leadership in Federally Funded Research and Development in Information Technology (Report from President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology)
Human-Machine-Nature Symbiosis on Cyber-Physical-Social Intelligence, Hai Zhuge (2019)
From Internet to Smart World, HuanSheng Ning (See David Grinspoon's concept of "Terra Sapiens," which means "wise Earth." How much of a difference is there between a wise Earth and a smart world?) Accessed from Cybermatics
A Data-Centric Framework for Cyber-Physical-Social Systems, Bin Guo (Data-driven CPSS leverages the aggregated power of cyber, physical, and social spaces to improve the efficiencies of organizations and the quality of people’s lives.)
Transitions in distributed intelligence, Olaf Witkowski (Connection between evolutionary transitions, intelligent problem solving, and efficient solutions.)
The Myth of a Superhuman AI, Kevin Kelly ("Our intelligence is one of a million types of possible intelligences. So while each dimension of cognition and computation has a limit, if there are hundreds of dimensions, then there are uncountable varieties of mind — none of them infinite in any dimension.")
Technology Has Already Taken Over 90% Of The Jobs Humans Used To Do, If technology has taken over 90% of the jobs humans used to do, then do 90% of jobs we are doing today really need to be done? "Real-life markets are failures all the way down - irrational behaviors, asymmetrical information, barriers to entry, monopoly control, and more. Then layer on top of that complicated regulatory systems, legacy policies and infrastructure, and the distorting influence of status quo interests, and you've got quite a mess."
In 20 Years, the Internet Will Have Swallowed You (The Internet of Things meets the Quantified Self. Our physical embodiment, our being in and of the world, is as important as our activities and relationships.)
Rethinking Who Gets What and Why, Tim O'Reilly (This series of slides is excellent, based on his 2017 book "What's the Future and Why it's up to Us." See earlier version as well.)
Open Data and Algorithmic Regulation, Tim O'Reilly

The Attention Economy

"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." - Proverbs 6:6
"Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." - Matthew 5:5

It's late September, and for some reason articles about termites are popping up in my newsfeed. Three days ago, in "What termites can teach us" Amia Srinivasan explored the concept of the "extended organism" and what Radhika Nagpal calls "extended stigmergy." Just two days ago, in "A giant crawling brain: the jaw-dropping world of termites" (an extract from "Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology") Lisa Margonelli writes "one scientific metaphor for the inscrutable termite is a neuron in a giant crawling brain." [3] Okay, so termites are interesting, but if you want to see what eusocial insects are really capable of, consider ants, specifically the Argentine ant, Linepithema humile, whose name literally means “humble” or “weak.” About this species a paper was written titled "The global expansion of a single ant supercolony."

Feng Gao at the 2014 Umbrella Movement

It's the ability to indirectly coordinate large groups of individuals, via the mechanism of stigmergy, that makes these insects so successful. They benefit from the synergistic effects of working together. The central insight of stigmergy is that global coordination can be achieved by individual agents interacting locally. Two fundamental principles govern this: 
1. No matter how large the environment grows, because agents interact only locally, their limited processing capabilities are not overwhelmed. (This is useful, since today no single person understands every aspect of society which affects them.) [4]
2. Through the dynamics of self-organization, local interactions can yield a coherent system-level outcome that provides the required control. (This is useful, since we have a need to coordinate goals with people we will never speak to.) [1,7]

Originally, the concept of stigmergy was used to build up a coherent explanation of the so-called "coordination paradox" between the individual and the societal level. The explanation to the coordination paradox provided by stigmergy is that individuals interact indirectly: each affects the behavior of others by indirect communication. [2] Andy Clark and David Chalmers' paper "The Extended Mind" explores a related concept to stigmergy and other forms of indirect communication/coordination, they write: "Does the extended mind imply an extended self? It seems so. ...This view will have significant consequences. It may be, for example, that in some cases interfering with someone's environment will have the same moral significance as interfering with their person. In any case, once the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped, we may be able to see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world." [5]

If this is as far as we go, then we understand the basic idea of stigmergy and may even suspect that it could be capable of greater utility. Radhika Nagpal, in her TED talk, said "We can actually take these rules that we've learned from nature and combine them and create entirely new collective behaviors of our very own." [6] Leave it to Daniel Estrada and Jonathan Lawhead to give what I consider to be one of the best descriptions of how stigmergy can be leveraged in human society. In doing so, they bring in several additional ideas. The first of these is the concept of "natural human computing," (aka human-based computation). [18] This is analogous to stigmergy. Just as we can think of ants or termites as neurons within a brain, individual human behavior patterns, via their interaction, can be thought of as cooperating to compute the solution to a problem. The second of these ideas is that of the "attention economy." The short explanation is that an attention economy treats our attention as a finite resource constantly produced by conscious attenders. Today we live in a money-based economy, so the movement toward an attention-based economy would parallel the movement from the “object dimension” to the “subject dimension" of philosophical space. [8] Per Estrada, "what makes this flow of attention different from every financial economy we are familiar with: you can't store attention. You can't stockpile attention or reserve a bank of attention units. There is no debt in an attention economy and there can be no surplus of attention. There is just the total amount of attention being produced, and the many ways we allocate that attention among all the things we spend our time doing.” [9]

Now we are ready for Estrada and Lawhead's paper "Gaming the Attention Economy," which establishes two very important ideas: (1) how to leverage the normal behavior of individuals to solve complex problems, and (2) how to uncover the real value of things that our current economic system fails to recognize. By utilizing the new tools enabled by augmented reality and digital communities for exchanging goods and services (like Craigslist), we can efficiently address energy, environment, and resource related problems. To me, the potential for addressing climate change holds significant promise. [15, 17] Today we have just glimpses of how utilizing the computational dynamics of natural human activity, acting upon high quality information about local patterns of attention, use, and interaction, can solve the economic optimization problem (and even non-economic social problems). In fact, as Daniel Estrada and Jonathan Lawhead write, that’s a reason why it may eventually replace our current money-based system.

According to Estrada, “Attention models are fundamentally a measure of consensus and therefore may function as the legitimate grounds for a self-organized system of governance, while at the same time working as a model for collectively planning the production, distribution, consumption, and recycling of our natural resources. In this sense, an Attention Economy is a complete system for social organization, and therefore may function in the ideal case without significant contributions from either money or centralized political institutions. ...The attention economy unifies what have traditionally been considered the “separate magisteria” of human social organization: the domains of economics, of governance, and of culture, each of which are traditionally assumed to operate by their own internal dynamics. In fact, these domains are deeply interconnected, and an attention economy will allow us to visualize these relations directly. ...As we collectively confront problems that require social, coordinated action, human societies will increasingly appeal to attention-based models rather than other kinds of models for solving coordination problems.” [9] "[These] provide the essential feedback loops for allowing human communities to self-organize at a global scale," [10] end various forms of exploitative hierarchical systems, and restore the traditional reverse dominance hierarchy to humankind.

Paraphrasing Estrada, we have a lot of work to do: the social networking tools for generating spontaneous direct actions and broad democratic consensus are important. They must operate openly, transparently, and independent of any centralized state or corporate control. [13, 14] State and corporate interests often diverge from the collective interests of the people, so instead of state power generating conformity to social norms, self-organizing social networks will need to ensure that control stays on the side of the people, and include a method for social credit monitoring to manage the distribution of labor and resources such that they are effectively abundant and accessible to all participants in a fair and democratic way. [11, 12, 16] We have some good models for how to do this, but we are a long way from realizing their potential. 

Tags: attention economy, human-based computation, social computing, superorganism, (extended) stigmergy, extended mind, distributed cognition, agent-environment feedback loop, crowdsourcing, augmented reality, gamification (in government), game theory, social credit system (China), Aadhaar (India), persuasive technology, coordination paradox, multi-agent systems, interpersonal utility comparison problem, distributed autonomous organization (DAO), personal autonomous organization (PAO), social physics, sousveillance (reciprocal accountability), algorithmic social contract, Scalable Cooperation Group, 共識主動性社會 (stigmergy society)

Footnotes:
[1] A Survey of Environments and Mechanisms for Human-Human Stigmergy, 2006
[2] Cognitive Stigmergy: A Framework Based on Agents and Artifacts, 2006
[3] Heylighten, Accelerating socio-technological evolution, 2007: "Quantitative stigmergy is nearly identical to the process of reinforcement learning that differentially strengthens connections between neurons in the brain. Qualitative stigmergy is the true motor of innovation."
[4] Heylighen, Stigmergy as a Universal Coordination Mechanism: components, varieties and applications, 2016: "Compared to traditional methods of organization, stigmergy makes absolutely minimal demands on the agents... by coordinating initially independent actions into a harmonious whole."
[5] The Extended Mind
[6] What intelligent machines can learn from a school of fish
[7] Heather Marsh, A societal singularity: We have reached a "societal singularity" characterized as a state where "no one can understand every aspect of society which affects them" yet we have a need to "coordinate goals with people we will never speak to."
[8] Walter Benesch, “An Introduction to Comparative Philosophy.”
[9] The Attention Economy 
[10] The Attention Economy Primer
[11] Sesame Credit will (eventually) make fully automated luxury queer space anarcho-communism possible
[12] David Brin: "The combined weight of all the new surveillance technologies heading our way is a recipe for disaster, beyond Orwell’s wildest nightmares. The only way we can stop them from becoming instruments of repression is by giving everyone access to these tools so that the powerful will be stymied and held accountable, and ordinary citizens will be empowered. By answering surveillance with sousveillance. By demanding that Aadhaar report to the people more effectively than to the mighty."
[13] Alex Pentland, Reinventing Society in the Wake of Big Data: “The most efficient and robust architectures tend to be ones that have no central points. It means that there's no single place for a dictator to grab control."
[14] LeRon Shults, Artificial Intelligence Shows Why Atheism Is Unpopular: “It’s going to be done. So not doing it is not the answer.” Instead, he believes the answer is to do the work with transparency and simultaneously speak out about the ethical danger inherent in it.
[15] Inducing Peer Pressure to Promote Cooperation, 2013
[16] Morality in the Machines, "Jonathan Zittrain’s ambition for the AI initiative is immense: to democratize social media’s secret algorithms, artificial intelligence and similar technologies."
[17] Gamification and Climate Change Activism - Beneficial or Detrimental?
[18] Human computation is an approach to solving complex problems that leverages the personal informatics of normal individual behaviors to increase the effect of coordinated action. It does this by using the tools of social computation (social networks, marketplaces, fine-grained details, augmented reality, etc.) to make information about normal human behaviors available to their users. This increased information availability creates robust progress feedback loops that allow humans to select individual behaviors or characteristics for either reinforcement, interruption, alteration, (etc.)
[0] Peter Corning and Eörs Szathmáry, "Synergistic Selection": A Darwinian frame for the evolution of complexity, 2015: "...new forms of information have played a key role in the emergence of complexity at every level, from DNA coding sequences in the genome to pheromone “signals” in social insects, the evolution of language in humankind, and (now) the binary/digital code of the internet age."

Additional Sources:
Big Idea: Attention Economy
Daniel Estrada on Bruce Sterling’s “The Caryatids” As a Model for the Attention Economy
Vivek Singh, Ankur Mani, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Social Persuasion in Online and Physical Networks
Daniel Estrada, Rethinking Machines: Artificial Intelligence beyond the Philosophy of Mind (The central issue in human computation concerns the integration of human brains into a general computing architecture that allows for efficient and useful results when applied to challenging computational tasks. How do we attract and sustain the attention of multiple agents, and under what conditions do they perform well?)
Social Norms: Social Identity, (how social identities and relationships motivate choices and actions)
Daniel Estrada's Polytopolis: A distributed framework for organizing communities and values (inspired by the psychology of social identity and collective behavior).
Patchwork theory
Heather Marsh, Inteligencia Colectiva para la Democracia (video presentation)
Heather Marsh, The evolution of democracy (transcript of above presentation)
Stigmergic epistemology, stigmergic cognition, 2007
A Brief History of Stigmergy
Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration, 2007
Kosorukoff, A., Goldberg D. E. “Evolutionary computation as a form of social organization”
Introduction to Human Computation
Jane McGonigal “Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World”
Climate Change? There’s a Game For That
Gamification for health and wellbeing: A systematic review of the literature (persuasive technology, serious games, and personal informatics; game design elements can be mapped to established behavior change techniques; like personal informatics, gamification tracks of individual behaviors, displayed to the user, enrolled in some form of goal-setting and progress feedback)
Gamification: An Introduction to Its Potential (human based computation game) Game mechanics and dynamics tap into fundamental human needs and desires, such as the desire for reward, status, achievement, self-expression, self-efficacy, competition, and altruism, among others. Intrinsically rewarding activities can be enhanced with gamified elements (and access to greater information and new forms of social interaction), potentially accelerating real-world change on an individual, social, and global scale.
Hive-mind solves tasks using Google Glass ant game
New game creates a hive mind out of Google Glass users

Gedanken Experiment

Democritus (430-380 BC) said "I would rather discover one causal relation than be King of Persia." Was he just being an eccentric philosopher, devoted to knowledge for its own sake? Or did he realize that an understanding of causal relations has myriad possible applications, and such a discovery could make him even more powerful than the most powerful person on Earth at the time? ...I think it was a little of both.

David Hume (1711-1776) distinguished between analytic claims (the product of thoughts) and empirical claims (matters of fact), classifying causal claims as empirical rather than analytic. He identified the source of all empirical claims with human experience, namely, sensory input.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) said "Development of Western science is based on two great achievements: The invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systemic experiment (during the Renaissance)."

Judea Pearl (1936- ) said "I am convinced that the entire story of causality unfolds from just three basic principles: (1) causation encodes behavior under interventions, (2) interventions are surgeries on mechanisms, and (3) mechanisms are stable functional relationships." In assessing our current position in relation to Einstein's quote, Pearl states that while the observational component of science has benefited from the power of formal methods, the design of new experiments is still managed by the unaided human intellect. But, when experimental science enjoys the benefit of formal mathematics along with its observational component, another scientific revolution will occur that will be equal in impact to the one that took place during the Renaissance. And AI will be the major player in this revolution.

When considering counterfactuals and digital models (essentially two sides of the same coin), the greatest agency to effect change (according to one's goals and abilities) will lay with whomever has a better understanding of mechanisms, causal relationships, and possible interventions. This is the takeaway message from Judea Pearl, and ties in considerably with Pedro Domingos and David Brin as well.

What I really believe, and what I am confident Democritus did as well, is that aside from the erudite novelty and numerous applications of a causal understanding, the greatest benefit of all is that it can bring the beauty and wonder of the world around us into clearer focus. And that is likely what motivated him most of all.

Source: Reasoning with Cause and Effect, by Judea Pearl