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CHAPTER 1 ■ INTRODUCTION: WHY THIS BOOK?
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formalisms, and big data, and the other is more focused on how AI and other technologies
can work together to support humans. Where Jim’s focus has been on building new
technologies, Alice’s has been on making sure those technologies can help real people
solve the problems that confront them. Where Alice is also a talented artist, as you will see
from many of her watercolors that grace the pages of this book, Jim’s hobby is catching up
on his e-mail and tinkering with the latest gadget his students have brought into the lab.
Yet despite, or maybe because of, our differences in perspective, we both felt it was
time to write this book. This is because we each see an accelerating pace of societal
change caused by the very technologies we have been working with for so long. The
term social machines has been used to describe many things, and we will discuss them
throughout the book, but most importantly, it represents the concept at the nexus of the
increasing convergence of artificial intelligence, social networking, and human cognition.
As the pace accelerates, these technologies, and their applications, come more and more
into contact with each other and with us. Looking for a term that could convey the speed
and impact of the changes we are living through, we hit upon the one that graces the title
of this book: collision .
We see this potential clash between AI, social networking, and humanity because
we have been part of the research that is forcing the collision. We hope that our different
perspectives will provide the reader with a better understanding of what social machines
in the future will look like, where they have come from, what some of the remaining
problems are, and why we can’t ignore the fact that this collision is already happening
and that it will have profound impacts on our humanity.
Why Read This Book?
This book is intended to educate the reader about how tools and products , developed
from the perspective of the science of AI, have been, are, and will continue to influence
each of us as individuals. We will explore these technologies and how, through them, we
interact with our environment (which now includes more and more of these intelligent
computing devices), and how we interact with others (both the human and the artificial)
within larger societal networks. We will describe how AI technologies are becoming
more available and more capable because of improvements in hardware, software, and
the infrastructure that these tools use for communication. This infrastructure is the
World Wide Web, which has had a major impact on personal and social interactions. It
has also enhanced communications between us and many different types of computing
technologies, in effect creating an online society or social machine.
Using a computer or smartphone application to communicate and network with
friends, family, colleagues, or the world in general is now a common practice. The current
availability of many different types of computers and smartphones, and the ease of
operation that is now provided, has resulted in our world being much more networked
and “online.” This ability to easily communicate with others in our society regardless
of time, geographical location, and social or economic status is the basis of the social
machine. Computer technology currently helps many of us to schedule meetings, share
personal experiences and pictures, learn, play, and participate in discussions with people
all over the world, and even with people that we don’t personally know. In fact, many of
us find it hard to go a day, letalone an hour, without checking our e-mail, texts, tweets,
Facebook updates, and so on. We are already a wired society, and this computerized