Cultural Science

Applications of Artificial Social Intelligence

William Sims Bainbridge

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781951527594
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Sector de servicios

This innovative book explores the new relationships connecting computer science, social science, and the humanities.

In our time of great and uncertain change, business, government, and education must partner in many forms of technical and cultural convergence–for the benefit of both human welfare and economic recovery.

This innovative book explores the new relationships connecting computer science, social science, and the humanities. One popular form of artificial social intelligence, recommender systems, can become a far more valuable tool for research on the arts, beginning with movies and computer games, then extending to all the other art forms.

While artificial intelligence can be a powerful tool for description of physical reality, it must become both social and cultural if it is to be a valued tool of human expression. Many new developments offer opportunities and challenges for both industry and government policy. This book shows how artificial intelligence and related information technologies can converge successfully with the social sciences and humanities, so together they can achieve maximum benefits for people.

CHAPTER 1

Convergence of Humanities, Social Science, and Information Science

The world is undergoing a vast cultural transformation, involving globalization and communication via the World Wide Web, but also marked by the emergence of a vast number and diversity of online subcultures. The economic consequences are quite significant, not merely in the entertainment industries but in commerce more generally.
In universities, the recent decline of enrollments in the humanities and the growth of enrollments in computer science suggest that traditional definitions of academic fields may be obsolete, and innovation may revive the humanities by rendering them more computational. Since well over a century ago when Hollerith developed information technology to analyze the 1900 U.S. census, the social sciences have been relatively computational, but they also connect to the humanities and thus can serve as agents of convergence.1 Much public debate currently rages about possible unintended negative consequences of information technologies, such as artificial intelligence, and the efforts of computer science organizations and corporations to emphasize ethics would be greatly facilitated by partnership with the humanities and social sciences.

The Convergence of Cultural Science

When cognitive science emerged some years ago, chiefly through convergence of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and linguistics, two of the most cognitive sciences were not involved, sociology and political science, and the involvement of cultural anthropology was relatively minor. A logical explanation is that these fields involve social cognition, rather than the functioning of an individual mind, and they study real-world situations in which disagreement rather than consensus may reign. Of course, some forms of artificial intelligence are really social, notably multiagent systems, as are some related methodologies such as genetic algorithms. It is time for a new cultural science to develop, the younger sibling of cognitive science, through convergence of humanities, social sciences, and computer and information sciences. A key methodology to accomplish this will be artificial social intelligence.2 When considering how to evaluate progress in artificial intelligence, Kenneth Forbus suggested, “the best approach is to evaluate AI systems by their ability to participate in our culture.”3 For this technology to strengthen rather than weaken human culture, the appropriate forms of convergence must be discovered.

Emerging out of the multidisciplinary National Nanotechnology Initiative, a series of conferences organized by the National ­Science Foundation explored in great depth “NBIC”—the convergence of ­Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information technology, and new technologies based on Cognitive science. A series of massive reports was published, starting in 2003 with Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance and most recently in 2016 with Handbook of Science and Technology Convergence, chiefly edited by Bainbridge in collaboration with Mihail Roco, the leader of the National Nanotechnology Initiative.4 A chapter introducing culture science proclaimed:

Unification of the social sciences, and their greater integration into society, might be advanced significantly through the concept of cultural science. This is an emerging science of the shared concepts and practices of large social groups, based on convergence across sociology, political science, cultural anthropology, linguistics, and related fields. Cultural science takes its inspiration from cognitive science, but with the ambition to become a coequal partner in understanding and improving human behavior. As a metaphor, it considers any complex social system to be a “mind” or a “computer” that processes information and takes action, based on shared memory that is called culture. As a tool for achieving convergence of the social sciences, it is quite compatible with other unifying concepts, and only vigorous future research can determine its full potential.5

In his contribution to the first NBIC conference in 2002, Jim Spohrer from IBM surveyed how many fields could advance in collaboration with each other, including this prediction concerning his own field:

Information science advances will find many applications in the ongoing ebusiness transformation already underway, as well as pervasive communication and knowledge management tools to empower individuals. More importantly, information science will provide both the interlingua to knit the other technologies together and the raw computational power needed to store and manipulate mountains of new knowledge.6

He also saw key roles for social science:

Social science advances (obtained from studies of real systems as well as simulations of complex adaptive systems composed of many interacting individuals) will provide fresh insights into the collective IQ of humans, as well as interspecies collective IQ and the spread of memes.

In the context of computer simulations of social behavior, the expression collective IQ is nearly equivalent to artificial social intelligence. His terms interlingua and meme both belong to cultural science.

Of course, Interlingua is a specific artificial language, which Wikipedia reports is actually used in some practical contexts as an auxiliary language and its “vocabulary, grammar and other characteristics are derived from natural languages, rather than being centrally planned.”7 Metaphorically, an interlingua, uncapitalized, is a set of concepts and terms drawn from two or more cultures or technical fields, adapted to some degree to serve as an effective tool for communicating convergently. An example of an interlingua term is indeed meme, which Wikipedia defines as “a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.”8 The word meme is itself a convergence of biological and cultural terminology, based on biological gene and social imitation.9

I had long been interested in the parallels and differences between genetic and cultural evolution, and at a 1982 conference I gave a paper that noted the limitations as well as the advantages of the memetic approach:

In order for a cultural genetics to be possible, three things are necessary: First, there must be some process of reproduction and inheritance, in which cultural structures and elements are transmitted from one “generation” to the next. Second, there must be a significant measure of stability in the transmission process, in which the replicators show sufficient copying-fidelity to transmit recognizable patterns. Third, there must be some process such as sexuality or mutation which introduces change and variety into the process of inheritance yet is sufficiently coherent itself to permit scientific analysis. In fact these conditions are met by religious cults and by at least some other phenomena such as stylistic schools in the various arts. If other parts of the wider culture fail to exhibit these features, still there will be an “inorganic chemistry” of cu...