Social Machines

ZusammenfassungSocial Machines sind ein Paradigma für die Gestaltung soziotechnischer Systeme, die unter Verwendung von Web- und Plattformlösungen das Potenzial digitaler Technologien mit der Eigenlogik sozialer Interaktion, Organisation und Strukturbildung auf neue Weise zusammenführen. Im Folgenden diskutieren wir das Paradigma der Social Machine aus den Perspektiven der Informatik, der Wirtschaftsinformatik, der Soziologie und des Rechts, um Orientierungspunkte für seine Gestaltung zu identifizieren. Der Begriff ist in der Literatur jedoch bisher nicht abschließend definiert sondern nur durch Beispiele illustriert.In diesem Artikel stellen wir zunächst die folgende Definition zur Diskussion: Social Machines sind soziotechnische Systeme, in denen die Prozesse sozialer Interaktion hybrid zwischen menschlichen und maschinellen Akteuren ablaufen und teilweise algorithmisiert sind. Im Anschluss beleuchten wir drei aktuelle, sich gegenseitig bedingende Entwicklungen von Social Machines: die immer stärkere Verschmelzung von Sozialität und Maschine, die Vermessung von Nutzeraktivitäten als Grundstoff gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalts und die zunehmende Algorithmisierung gesellschaftlicher Prozesse. Abschließend diskutieren wir, dass eine teilhabeorientierte, demokratischen Werten folgende Gestaltung von Social Machines die Perspektiven der Nutzungsakzeptanz, der gesellschaftlichen Akzeptabilität und der nachhaltigen Wirtschaftlichkeit adressieren und umsetzen muss.

Applying mechanical philosophy to web science: The case of social machines

Social machines are a prominent focus of attention for those who work in the field of Web and Internet science. Although a number of online systems have been described as social machines (examples include the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Reddit, and Galaxy Zoo), there is, as yet, little consensus as to the precise meaning of the term “social machine.” This presents a problem for the scientific study of social machines, especially when it comes to the provision of a theoretical framework that directs, informs, and explicates the scientific and engineering activities of the social machine community. The present paper outlines an approach to understanding social machines that draws on recent work in the philosophy of science, especially work in so-called mechanical philosophy. This is what might be called a mechanistic view of social machines. According to this view, social machines are systems whose phenomena (i.e., events, states, and processes) are explained via an appeal to (online) socio-technical mechanisms. We show how this account is able to accommodate a number of existing attempts to define the social machine concept, thereby yielding an important opportunity for theoretical integration.

Becoming Giuliana: Antonioni's Red Desert and the Capitalist Social Machine

This essay employs Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the capitalist social machine to explore Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964). More specifically, it addresses the psychological struggles of the film's female protagonist, Giuliana, with respect to duelling forces of capitalist deterritorialisation and Oedipal reterritorialisation. The essay also brings together Deleuze's cinema works with his and Guattari's schizoanalysis to show how Antonioni's use of the time-image itself functions as a deterritorialising force, particularly with respect to the film's pivotal island fantasy scene, where, if only momentarily, Giuliana engages in the Deleuzean act of becoming.

Autonomous Social Robot Navigation using a Behavioral Finite State Social Machine

SUMMARYWe present a robot navigation system based on Behavioral Finite State Social Machine. The paper makes a robot operate as a social tour guide that adapts its navigation based on the behavior of the visitors. The problem of a robot leading a human group with a limited field-of-view vision is relatively untouched in the literature. Uncertainties arise when the visitors are not visible, wherein the behavior of the robot is adapted as a social response. Artificial potential field is used for local planning, and a velocity manager sets the speed disproportional to time duration of missing visitors.

The search for (artificial) intelligence, in capitalism

Artificial intelligence is being touted as a new wave of machinic processing and productive potential. Building on concepts starting with the invention of the term artificial intelligence in the 1950s, now, machines can supposedly not only see, hear, and think, but also solve problems and learn, and in this way, it seems that actually there is a new form of humiliation for humans. This article starts with a historical overview of the forerunners of artificial intelligence, where ideas of how intelligence can be formulated according to philosophers and social theorists begin to enter the work sphere and are inextricably linked to capitalist production. However, there always already has been an artificial intelligence in power in, on the one hand, technical machines and the social machine money, and on the other, humans, making both sides (machines and humans), an interface of their mutual capitalist socialisation. The question this piece addresses is, then, what kind of capitalist socialisation will the actual forms of artificial intelligence bring?

Measure, machine, money

The aim of the text is to clarify why machines are economically productive only in capitalism and therefore in our society are capitalistic machines. They are capitalist not only because they increase the productive power of the capitalist valorisation, but this valorisation first of all is producing these machines, or at least it produces their productivity and hence ‘the machinic’ of machines. To understand this production of the machinic, we must understand them, as, for example, Heidegger, Simondon or Deleuze and Guattari have shown, from their context: from their non-technical essence, from their connection with other machines and from the social essence of the machinic. But in this context, first of all and in the last instance, we have to understand with Marx their entanglement with the capitalist valorisation. This can be shown for three different types of machines: the physical machine, the calculation machine and the social machine: money. What all three have in common and almost defines them as machines is that all three naturalise relations by quantifying them. The classical physical machine quantifies the relation of nature, the calculation machine quantifies information and meaning, and the money machine quantifies the relations of our society. I will concentrate on the physical and the money machine only. The technique to quantify is for both the same: measurement. This quantification and naturalisation by measurement is why both are – although or especially because they are opposed types of machines – interfaces to the capitalist valorisation process, and in this functioning as interfaces, we have to search their non-technical essence.

Machines and measure

This Special Issue, entitled ‘Machines & Measure’, is largely the dissemination from a workshop held at University of Leicester School of Business, organised by editor Phoebe V Moore, for the Conference for Socialist Economists South Group in February 2018, which was hosted by the University of Leicester School of Business, Philosophy and Political Economy Centre. Not all the authors in the Special Issue were speakers at the event, but this collection provides a carefully selected, representative collection of articles and essays which address the questions and disturbances that drove the event’s concept, those being, as articulated in the event description: How are machines being used in contemporary capitalism to perpetuate control and to intensify power relations at work? Theorising how this occurs through discussions about the physical machine, the calculation machine and the social machine, the workshop was designed to re-visit questions about how quantification and measure both human and machinic become entangled in the social and how the incorporation and absorption of workers as appendages within the machine as Marx identified, where artificial intelligence and the platform economy dominate today’s discussions in digitalised work research.Stemming from Marxist critical theory, questions of money, time, space are also revisited in the Special Issues articles, as well as less debated concepts in rhythmanalysis and a revival of historically frequently discussed issues such as activities on the shop floor, where a whole range of semi-automated and fully automated methods to manage work through numeration without, necessarily, remuneration continue. Articles ask the most important questions today and begin to identify possible solutions from a self-consciously Marxist perspective.