Abstract
Online Social Systems such as community forums, social media, e-commerce and gaming are having an increasingly significant impact on our lives. They affect the way we accomplish all sorts of collective activities, the way we relate to others, and the way we construct are own self-image. These systems often have both human and artificial agency creating what we call online hybrid social systems. However, when systems are designed and constructed, the psychological and sociological impact of such systems on individuals and communities is not always worked out in advance. We see this as a significant challenge for which coordination, organisations, institutions and norms are core resources and we would like to make a call to arms researchers in these topics to subscribe a conscientious approach to that challenge.
In this paper we identify a class of design issues that need attention when designing hybrid online social systems and propose to address those problems using conscientious design which is underpinned by ethical and social values. We present an austere framework to articulate those notions and illustrate these ideas with an example. We outline five lines of research that we see worth pursuing.
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- 1.
- 2.
Stuart Russell: “... The right response [to AI’s threat] seems to be to change the goals of the field itself; instead of pure intelligence, we need to build intelligence that is provably aligned with human values...”. https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/edge-article/.
- 3.
Take for example “correspondence chess” where players use some form of long distance asynchronous communication —post, email, pigeons—to exchange properly written messages that indicate which piece is moved where. In this case, the rules of the game state that no other action, no other way of expressing a move may have an effect on the board. The fact that one of the players is advised by the best experts before each move will help this player make better moves—and probably make this player win—but the state of the board changes only when the instruction is properly sent and received. As H. Simon would say about the market [19], a HOSS is an “interface” between the opaque (A.2.2) decision-making models of individual agents and their collective goal, in this case, of playing a game of chess. This point is clarified in Sec 4 when we propose that the tripartite view of a socio-cognitive technical systems demands that if any action in \(\mathcal {W}\) is to be recognised as a valid institutional action in \(\mathcal {I}\), it has to be an input that is duly processed in \(\mathcal {T}\).
- 4.
See [14] for a more leisurely discussion of the WIT proposal.
- 5.
See [4] for some elaboration of 2 and 3.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to acknowledge the support of SINTELNET (FET Open Coordinated Action FP7-ICT-2009-C Project No. 286370). This research was partially supported by project MILESS (MINECO TIN2013-45039-P).
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Noriega, P., Verhagen, H., d’Inverno, M., Padget, J. (2017). A Manifesto for Conscientious Design of Hybrid Online Social Systems. In: Cranefield, S., Mahmoud, S., Padget, J., Rocha, A. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems XII. COIN COIN 2016 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10315. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66595-5_4
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