Please edit at will and/or comment
Brad DeGraf, Bleu Knight, Ronen Tamari, Sharar Oriel, Charles Blass, Daniel Friedman,
others please add
What is the nature of the situation or problem the team is being formed to address?
As prosocial creatures, human existence is both defined and enriched by the connections that are built with others. However, the proliferating number of people we meet each day (in person or virtually) obfuscates the connections that would be most beneficial to foster or strengthen. It is unlikely that we search for more information about every new acquaintance, as most people are already facing an overload of internet information. Moreover, there are probably many people who would be highly beneficial to our social network and our lives that we have never heard of.
Internet algorithms and applications have been developed to help us deal with the information burden in digital environments. For example, we can distill our news feed to contain only articles that we want to read, thus amplifying the signal to noise ratio of salient information. There are algorithms that constantly notice our behavior in the digital landscape- what we shop for, where we eat, who we know- which either covertly or overtly customize the information that we are presented with. Furthermore, there are also algorithms that are also designed to influence our behavior in the digital space- such as those that are used for shopping (You may also like…) and also building human connections (You may also know…). However, these algorithms typically provide no information to the end user about why they are making recommendations other than generic similarities, such as “People who follow person x also follow person y.”
Digital content is loaded with stigmergic markers that are either left intentionally by other humans (such as tags in a blog post) or obtained by web crawling and natural language processing. While some digital information can usually be found referring to people, it is unlikely to reflect the depth and breadth of their interests, knowledge, and personality. Meeting someone new can often spark a desire to connect them to other people that we know for reasons that cannot be easily identified through a google search.
Could building new fruitful connections between others be augmented with digital technology? Can humans-in-the-loop provide stigmergic markers above and beyond those used by algorithms?
Are there known causes?
Humans know a lot about each other that is not readily available in the digital landscape. While many things can be obtained through searching social media profiles and company websites, humans are nuanced creatures. Google searches usually won’t reveal that someone loves opera, Italian food, salsa dancing, and has a dark, twisted sense of humor. Capturing some of that knowledge in digitally manipulable forms affords significant opportunities for innovation and value creation in social networks.
Is the situation novel?
While artificial intelligence has been collecting, curating, and manipulating information about humans for decades, there have been few (if any) attempts to reverse this script. Human curation of information obtained from the digital landscape has the potential to greatly enhance the depth and breadth of relevant connections that we make with other humans. When intentional stigmergic marks are left by other humans, who can identify passions and personality, this could enhance the signal to noise ratio with respect to other relevant humans. The increase in salient connections- such as Lennon meeting McCartney- could produce many more fruitful endeavors for humanity. There are arguably few opportunities more ‘novel’ than the evolution of human consciousness, especially at the collective level.
If so, if there are traditional methods which would normally be used to address similar situations or problems, what are their limitations and why are they inadequate?
As mentioned previously, there are algorithms used by social media applications that leverage human stigmergy, **such as those used by Facebook (e.g. these ten people are connected to other people you know) , LinkedIn (e.g. these people also worked at a company you worked at and are connected to your coworkers), and Twitter (e.g. A retweets B, C likes comment by D, etc.).
The primary limitations of these artificially curated stigmergic marks are (1) potential marking actions are not open or extensible (2) user-interaction affordances for marking are not open (3) there is low-fidelity data on links (friend, connection, etc. are 1-bit) (3) algorithms that drive resulting collective behavior are not open or fully understood (4) exploration of emergent potential is limited.
What will happen if this situation is not addressed?
Dating in the digital era is a revolution. Before online dating, humans wasted tons of time getting to know each other in meat space, only to find out some simple thing that would have instantly turned them off- your potential mate holds different religious or political views than you, smokes or drinks, wants/does not want kids, is a cat/dog lover, etc. Many hours and dollars were wasted in this unguided mating exploration. Human stigmergy (dating profile creation) has facilitated the process of mate selection. Now people can simply leave a few chosen words and a picture in the digital landscape which, when encountered by others, persuade swiping left or right depending on potential mate compatibility.
Time is our most precious resource. It is the one thing that, once spent, can never be recovered. Intentional (explicit) or artificial (implicit) stigmergic marks left on people in our digital landscape can save time by facilitating connections and coordination based on common interests. Forming salient relationships through human stigmergy could foster a love affair, at scale. Without leveraging explicit (driven by human intention) and implicit (digital) stigmergic marks, these potential lifelong connections and coordinated actions will go unexplored.