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