#social-technology — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #social-technology, aggregated by home.social.
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“Rather than expecting #AGI to resolve perennial problems of human social organization, we should treat #AI as a new #socialtechnology which will alleviate some problems, exacerbate others & create new ones, just as other social technologies have done in the past” knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-a...
AI as Social Technology -
“Individuals may form communities, but only institutions can create a nation”*…
Traffic police in Rome, 1981.Good institutions are social technologies that scale trust from personal relations to entire nations. Game theorist and social scientist Julien Lie-Panis unpacks the extraordinary phenomenon of human cooperation to explain how– and why– institutions work…
Every human society, from the smallest village to the largest nation, faces the same fundamental challenge: how to get people to act in the interests of the collective rather than their own. Fishermen must limit their catch so fish stocks don’t collapse. People must respect others’ property and safety. Citizens must pay taxes to fund roads, schools and hospitals. Left to pure self-interest, no community could endure; the bonds of collective life would quickly unravel.
The solutions we’ve devised are remarkably similar across cultures and centuries. We create rules. Then we appoint guardians to enforce them. Those who break the rules are punished. But there’s a problem with this approach, one that the Roman poet Juvenal identified nearly 2,000 years ago: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards themselves?
Fisheries appoint monitors to prevent overfishing – but what if the monitors accept bribes to look the other way? Police officers exist to protect everyone’s property and safety – but who ensures that they don’t abuse their power? Governments collect taxes for public services – but how do we stop officials from diverting the funds to their own accounts?
Every institution faces the same fundamental paradox. Institutions foster cooperation by rewarding good behaviour and punishing rule-breakers. Yet they themselves depend on cooperative members to function. We haven’t solved the cooperation problem – we’ve simply moved it back one step. So why do institutions work at all? To understand this puzzle, we need to first ask what makes human cooperation so extraordinary in the natural world…
[Lie-Panis explores human cooperation, and examines the ways in which, while it follows the same evolutionary rules as cooperation among other species, humans have expanded the ambit of their coordination. He explains the ways in which institutions depend on “a present-future trade-off,” on its constituents’ patience as it works through problems. And he illustrates the ways in which constituents’ concerns with material security and social capital can generate that patience. He concludes…]
… Institutions can thus be understood as social technologies. We engineer them constantly, often without realising it. When neighbours organise to maintain a shared garden or playground, they appoint a small committee to manage funds and decisions. The arrangement works because it transforms the hard problem of coordinating dozens of contributors into the easier problem of trusting a few visible people who can be praised for diligence or blamed for misuse.
Like any tool, institutions cannot create what isn’t already there; they can only amplify existing cooperative capacity. Institutions rest on the conditions that make cooperation rational: material security and social capital. Where those conditions hold, reputation can work at scale. One layer of accountability supports the next, until cooperation extends far beyond the limits of familiarity. From the same force that binds vampire bats and coral reef fish, we have built cities, markets, and nations. Institutions are how trust is scaled to millions of strangers.
Eminently worth reading in full: “Guarding the Guardians,” from @jliep.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
Apposite (albeit a bit orthogonal): “Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings,” from @marco-giancotti.bsky.social.
* Benjamin Disraeli
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As we get along, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that a film poking fun at a plethora of institutions, Howard Hawks’ comedy Bringing Up Baby, premiered at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. Featuring Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and a leopard, the film earned good reviews but suffered at the box office. Indeed, Hepburn’s career fell into a slump– she was one of a group of actors labeled as “box office poison” by the Independent Theatre Owners of America– that she broke with The Philadelphia Story (again with Grant) in 1940.
As for Bringing Up Baby, the film did well when re-released in the 1940s, and grew further in popularity when it began to be shown on television in the 1950s. Today it is recognized as the authentic screwball classic that it is; it sits at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, and ranks among “Top 100” on lists from the American Film Institute and the National Society of Film Critics.
#BringingUpBaby #CaryGrant #cooperation #culture #film #history #HowardHawks #institutions #KatherineHepburn #movies #politics #reputation #socialCapital #socialInfrastructure #socialTechnology #society -
Social media platforms have become central infrastructure for #CivicLife, #PublicDebate, and elections, yet they were never designed to support trust or democratic deliberation.
In a new blog, Liv Marte Nordhaug, CEO of the #DPGA Secretariat, outlines how #SocialTechnology and #DigitalPublicGoods can help countries reclaim healthier digital public spaces.
Read more:
https://www.digitalpublicgoods.net/blog/cutting-the-gordian-knot-of-social-media -
Conversations lost track. Odd topics, contrasting needs. Torn again between the desire to have lightweight technology and being supportive when it comes to accessible tools. Ones own requirements and privileges, and the loneliness of seeing other demands first and foremost. Too many decisions and most of them aren't pleasant.
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Audio for the morning:
From the outside, Bluesky may seem like a Twitter clone. But anyone who’s close to the technology — and the team — knows that they’re building something much deeper: they’re rethinking the internet’s architecture to create a more flexible, user-centric web.
I really enjoy listening to these, and come up with a bunch of conclusions. For one, it's incredible and quickly unnerving to see the widespread use of the word "awesome" for virtually everything. Then, Bluesky folks are undisputably great at doing marketing for their brainchild. Which has good and bad sides to it. They don't have solutions to a lot of interesting problems yet, but in a way they seem better at making them transparent and obvious: With all the ActivityPub based Fediverse focused on the individual server, no one (not even conceptually) "owns" things such as bandwidth consumption for communication between these nodes, for data storage costs all across the infrastructure, for resource consumptions on the individual node to handle loads of in- and outbound traffic. The AT protocol model of the world at least has these on the list, plus it seems to strive more for that vote-with-your-feet - idea of you just taking your data (yes /all/ your data) and just switch your provider if the one you're left with isn't feasible for you anymore (a feature I could have direly needed earlier this year in my pixelfed mess). Bluesky is still quite a bit from that and has its own slew of issues to tackle, but I still ... wonder whether it's further from that than ActivityPub is from actually making account data portable in a reliable manner. Or from adding something like distributed moderation with moderators of communities spread all across different instances aren't necessarily the folks to run instances. It will be interesting and somehow I am also waiting for AT to be submitted to a standardization body like the IETF which might be a smarter choice and place than the W3C as a much more "web-centric" entity. And I learnt on the sidenote that Paul Frazee, the guy who did this show on the Bluesky end, apparently worked with the Beaker Browser and SSB community before which also was new to me and seems quite good a reference point to start with. Worth listening, after all, despite way too much commenting on my end having gone on here. -
Rebooting the #openweb in a good way
The #Fediverse exists, and more than that, it’s alive and kicking. Sure, it might be a messy, chaotic, a bit fragmented, and yes, still niche. But let’s not underplay it, this is the healthiest corners of the internet we’ve got. Tens of million accounts, hundreds of thousands active people, sometimes talking about how we build our digital spaces from the bottom up. Yep, there are the cat videos, the #fluffys and the #spikys. But also an in-group debate is bubbling away about who […]https://hamishcampbell.com/rebooting-the-openweb-in-a-good-way/
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(Also: Shrugging at the idea of people suggesting models to be used as vehicle of creating technological equality because allowing everyone to easily write code at home without depending on others or years of studies all too much and there's so much odd about that claim it's hard to know where to even start and maybe these hours in between the first mugs of coffee aren't a good thing for reading through certain inboxes.)
#outerworld #concrete city #social technology #the hype cycle
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🌍 The Agroecological TRANSITIONS program will present their experience integrating digital resources and agroecology. TRANSITIONS’ projects are aiming to improve food security, minimize negative ecological impacts, and foster climate-informed agroecological transitions.
🗓️ Sep 10 (2024)
⏰ 2-3:30pm CET
📽️ Meeting Link
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83422304958#agroecology #agroecología #agroécologie #ict4d #socialtechnology
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“#SocialTechnology, rather than the discovery of farming, is the key bottleneck of civilization.”
https://www.palladiummag.com/2021/05/17/why-civilization-is-older-than-we-thought/
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A great article about the difference between social #techniques and social #technologies, by Ralph Kilmann.
https://kilmanndiagnostics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Kilmann-Integrating-Knowledge-MAPS.pdf#kilmann #science #sociology #systemsthinking #socialtechnology #orgdev #management
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SERTA seeks to expand the work of transformative education networks, agroecological movements and the construction and dissemination of social technologies in the territories. #Agroecology #Agroecologia #Caatinga #SocialTechnology #Agroforestry
https://agroecologymap.org/locais/servico-de-tecnologia-alternativa-serta-unidade-ibimirim-pe