September 2024
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5 Reads
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Publications (58)
September 2024
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6 Reads
September 2024
September 2024
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1 Read
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1 Citation
February 2024
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53 Reads
People’s decisions and actions are informed, influenced, and constrained by socially constructed social arrangements. Usually, these social arrangements are pre-determined, and people joining institutions or organizations may have, at least initially, little control or influence over them. Occasionally, however, but increasingly commonly in the transition to the “Digital Society,” people have an opportunity to self-determine their social arrangements “from scratch.” The issues then are: how do people gain experience in such founding processes, experiment safely with alternative social arrangements, and gain expertise so that they can participate meaningfully, for example in consultation events. In this research paper, we address these issues by presenting a framework for “computer-supported social arrangements” tools which would enable people to specify, learn, apply, evaluate, and innovate social arrangements. This would contribute to empowering people and communities with the necessary experience, experimentation, and expertise for effective and sustainable self-determination of their own social arrangements.
January 2024
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4 Reads
December 2023
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8 Reads
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Achieving social order in societies of self-interested autonomous agents is a difficult problem due to lack of trust in the actions of others and the temptation to seek rewards at the expense of others. In human society, social norms play a strong role in fostering cooperative behaviour—as long as the value of cooperation and the cost of defection are understood by a large proportion of society. Prior work has shown the importance of both norms and metanorms (requiring punishment of defection) to produce and maintain norm-compliant behaviour in a society, e.g. as in Axelrod’s approach of learning of individual behavioural characteristics of boldness and vengefulness. However, much of this work (including Axelrod’s) uses simplified simulation scenarios in which norms are implicit in the code or are represented as simple bit strings, which limits the practical application of these methods for agents that interact across a range of real-world scenarios with complex norms. This work presents a generalisation of Axelrod’s approach in which norms are explicitly represented and agents can choose their actions after performing what-if reasoning using a version of the event calculus that tracks the creation, fulfilment and violation of expectations. This approach allows agents to continually learn and apply their boldness and vengefulness parameters across multiple scenarios with differing norms. The approach is illustrated using Axelrod’s scenario as well as a social dilemma from the behavioural game theory literature.
December 2023
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11 Reads
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Some cooperative survival situations require all members of a group to participate equally in collective action; however, if the only sanction for non-participatory free-riding is exclusion, then it can be ineffective, as exclusion is indistinguishable from non-participation. The question then is: how does a group, that can define a set of mutually agreed conventional rules, incentivise participation that supports collective survival when the only sanctioning instrument is exclusion. This problem is investigated in this paper through the design and implementation of a self-organising multi-agent simulator for an iterated cooperative survival game. A series of experiments, or ‘survival trials’, is run for three different sanctioning schemes: fixed-length, dynamic-length and graduated-length exclusion. Results show that graduated sanctions outperform the alternatives, which can be either too weak or too strong. We conclude by arguing that these results provide evidence for why graduated sanctions are the basis for one of the principles of self-governing institutions.
December 2023
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4 Reads
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2 Citations
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
The increasing digitalization of our social systems has led to the development of agentic computational artifacts. If socio-technical systems (STSs) fit for purpose in the digital society are to be designed and operationalized, the theory of polycentric governance (which traditionally considers the interdependency of interactions between the autonomous centers of decision-making within a social system) must be enriched to reflect this digitalization. In this article, we consider the extension of polycentricity to include “the digital” by viewing the concept through four “lenses” (interactional, governmental, architectural, and axiological), which are then synthesized to conclude with a research program for value-sensitive operationalization (VSO). This opens the potential to develop technologies and foster human relationships with these technologies that aim to optimize the human quality of experience.
September 2023
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8 Reads
Citations (25)
... The foundational principle of complex networks is self-organizing behavior: each node optimizes its connection decisions to maximize individual benefit and effectiveness; nodes consistently compete for new connections and exhibit a preference for linking to highly connected nodes. This self-organizing behavior among cities precipitates a Matthew effect, culminating in the formation of an orderly network 21,22 . ...
- Citing Article
March 2023
Artificial Life
... When the government has complete discretionary power, it is in the government's best interests to compensate citizens whose homes have been flooded by taxing citizens who live on the plateau, creating a prisoner's dilemma situation. In previous work [12], we experimented with the use of social norm-based expectations to achieve coordination where citizen agents are hard-coded to prefer actions that will result in no violation. ...
- Citing Chapter
- Full-text available
October 2022
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
... Regarding the metrics for evaluating implementations of reflective AI systems, one could follow a Distributed Processing Units approach, as described by Mertzani and Pitt (2022). Such an approach accounts for multiple metrics to be used in tandem as a cybernetic multi-agent system. ...
Reference:
Reflective Artificial Intelligence
- Citing Conference Paper
- Full-text available
July 2022
... However, the regulatory theory of social influence (RTSI: [3]) posits that, in distributed information processing over social networks, not only are sources seeking potential targets to influence, but potential targets are also (for reasons of cognitive efficiency and coherence) actively seeking sources by whom to be influenced, putting their trust in those sources. The role of expertise in such situations is significant [4]-or in this case, apparent expertise. By leveraging an existing form of social relationship, some systems, such as LLM chatbots integrated into web search engines, seem to encourage (unintentionally or otherwise) this misidentification and misappropriation to increase their user base. ...
- Citing Article
October 2022
Artificial Life
... Population-based alternatives to GES have been explored in other fields, e.g., to find a subset of base models for an ensemble (Partridge and Yates, 1996;Zhou et al., 2002;Zhou and Tang, 2003;Cavalcanti et al., 2016;Onan et al., 2017). QDO has been used previously to build ensembles (Boisvert and Sheppard, 2021;Nickerson and Hu, 2021;Cardoso et al., 2021bCardoso et al., ,a, 2022Ferigo et al., 2023), but always with a focus on maintaining a behaviourally diverse population of base models, from which to build an ensemble after optimisation. In contrast, we focus on the behavioural diversity of a population of ensembles. ...
- Citing Conference Paper
July 2022
... An important factor in Deceptive AI Ecosystems, that enhances the deceptiveness of AI technologies, is the creation of context around it and the reinforcement of biases by using AI as a speech act with the ulterior goal of monetisation of individuals and society (Lewis et al., 2021). The trend of democratic backsliding is enhanced not only by the use of technologies, but also by the way in which we communicate and 'normalise' our perceptions and beliefs about these technologies, which in today's techno ecosystem is done through social influence by actors/agents, such as BigTech, who have both the power and incentive to do so (Mertzani and Pitt, 2022). It is at this level where intentional deception happens, rather than at the technological 'stochastic parroting' level. ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
June 2022
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
... As a result, users feel more empowered and like they own something. Personalization tailors information to specific sustainability interests whether it's climate action, biodiversity conservation, or social justice (Pitt et al., 2021). Personalization promotes continued participation in sustainable development issues by responding to individual passions. ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
March 2021
International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence
... Managers, organizers, communicators, and other functional responsibilities are seen as critical in determining a team's performance [10]. The hierarchical structure of roles not only describes the specific functions and relationships of members but also provides the necessary basis for optimizing the organization [11]. Therefore, understanding the hybrid structures of participants and their diverse design performances is critical to the advancement of the community. ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
September 2021
... Population-based alternatives to GES have been explored in other fields, e.g., to find a subset of base models for an ensemble (Partridge and Yates, 1996;Zhou et al., 2002;Zhou and Tang, 2003;Cavalcanti et al., 2016;Onan et al., 2017). QDO has been used previously to build ensembles (Boisvert and Sheppard, 2021;Nickerson and Hu, 2021;Cardoso et al., 2021bCardoso et al., ,a, 2022Ferigo et al., 2023), but always with a focus on maintaining a behaviourally diverse population of base models, from which to build an ensemble after optimisation. In contrast, we focus on the behavioural diversity of a population of ensembles. ...
- Citing Conference Paper
June 2021
... Meta-platforms provide standardized infrastructure architecture, setting a consistent framework adopted by participating platforms [26,60]. An example is the plug-in architecture [57,58]. This architecture has a core system for general tasks, while plug-ins handle specific tasks. ...
- Citing Article
June 2021
IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society