On social machines for algorithmic regulation
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On social machines for algorithmic regulation Nello Cristianini1 · Teresa Scantamburlo1 Received: 23 April 2019 / Accepted: 23 September 2019 © The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Autonomous mechanisms have been proposed to regulate certain aspects of society and are already being used to regulate business organisations. We take seriously recent proposals for algorithmic regulation of society, and we identify the existing technologies that can be used to implement them, most of them originally introduced in business contexts. We build on the notion of ‘social machine’ and we connect it to various ongoing trends and ideas, including crowdsourced task-work, social compiler, mechanism design, reputation management systems, and social scoring. After showing how all the building blocks of algorithmic regulation are already well in place, we discuss the possible implications for human autonomy and social order. The main contribution of this paper is to identify convergent social and technical trends that are leading towards social regulation by algorithms, and to discuss the possible social, political, and ethical consequences of taking this path. Keywords Algorithmic regulation · Social machines · Autonomous agents · Artificial intelligence · Social scoring · Autonomy · Democracy
1 Introduction A recent article by historian Yuval Harari argues that “the conflict between democracy and dictatorship” is not one “between different ethical systems, but actually between data-processing systems.” (Harari 2018). While in the twentieth century liberal democracies benefited from their decentralised approach to decision-making—distributing information and power among many people proved to be more effective than concentrating them in one place—in the twenty-first century recent progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has turned this around by enabling intelligent systems to process large volumes of information centrally (Harari 2018). According to Harari, this shift would suggest that democratic ideals, such as equality and liberty, are “more fragile than we believe” (Harari 2018). Thus, rather than being “self-evident” or “irreversible” (Harari 2018), these ideals may change subtly, in a way that we do not expect, and we do not want. This article is concerned with the notion of “social regulation”, by which we mean the activity of governing a society, encouraging certain outcomes over others, steering the * Nello Cristianini [email protected] 1
University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
behaviour of a community. While this activity has traditionally been performed by a complex of explicit and implicit rules, enacted by an authority, or elicited by social interactions, we are interested in how modern AI technology interacts with it. The problem of effectively governing a country of hundreds of millions of citizens has been debated in policy circles for a long time (Heaven 2017), and there are proposals to turn to digital technology (Larson 2018). In this article, we will use the expression “algorithmic regulation
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