Comments on: A proposal for a Social-Semantic Network infrastructure by Eric Hunting

By: john gieryn

john gieryn — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 17:40:39 +0000

Thanks for your eloquent lens into the future Eric Hunting, and especially the qualifiers you provided in response to Bob Haugen.

I wonder if you’re familiar with the Human Interface Project (hi-project.org) ? Seems to speak well towards the creation of a “social Internet”; they seem to have a fair bit of momentum, considering their lofty aspirations.

By: monika

monika — Sun, 02 Oct 2016 23:16:50 +0000

from article: ‘hence the name Netention) It’s like an Internet that knows *you as a person.’

and from comment: ‘ Because of its potential importance to the **daily routine and the general adoption of semantic information storage, this may become the basis of a general personal computing environment’

i think key to all this is it begs we first/also make sure we’re trying it out in an open enough system that people are.. really *themselves. (which isn’t the case currently)
begs we free up.. the **daily routine.. et al

ie: hosting life bits via self-talk as data.. as the day..
otherwise .. we’re just curating/connecting data driven by bureaucracy/supposed-to’s.. et al

By: Bob Haugen

Bob Haugen — Sat, 02 Jan 2016 13:32:44 +0000

Eric, thanks for responding and adding more nuance to your ideas.

By: Eric Hunting

Eric Hunting — Fri, 01 Jan 2016 19:14:54 +0000

These points are certainly valid. It would be hubris to suggest that there isn’t a possibility for abuse and exploitation in such technology. The key here is that I see this being developed in (and by extension, helping to develop) the context of a different, more humanistic/empathic, Post-Industrial culture where that pronia imperative is one of the culture itself and thus this technology employed with the intention of automating and optimizing that. While the progressive ideas that originally inspired the technology of social networking and media have been co-opted by commercial interests–perhaps in large part because their centralized rather than peer-oriented software architectures foster commons enclosure and value-capture rather than value sharing–those original aspirations still exist, thus the many attempts to create more open alternatives.

My choice of the butler analogy is based on an interpretation of the character as a communication facilitator and ‘trimtab’ of events rather than a genie-like ‘concierge’. The talent of the character Jeeves in the famous PG Wodehouse novels is a talent to facilitate connections his employer, because of his class social sheltering, could never make, let alone imagine. Another analogy could be the ‘queen bee’ common to the traditional village whose influence is not based on some authority but rather a higher social awareness/consciousness and emotional intelligence that allows her to subtly facilitate encounter, connection, conflict resolution, and ultimately harmony in the community. So my basic suggestion here is, in fact, a system assisting conscious human collaboration by facilitating the connections and exchanges that we, limited by our ‘monkeyspheres’ and increasingly filtered personal communication silos, find difficult to find on our own.

Social networking platforms were originally devised to facilitate social interaction. They sought to ameliorate the problem of the chronic abuse of online anonymity that leads to so much anti-social online discourse and a compulsive silo-building. They sought a mechanism of online trust-building crucial to the development of virtual communities into a vital force. But their commercialization led to a pandering to vanity and that silo-building compulsion instead, while coaxing-out and scraping personal data for profit. So the result has been a narrowing of consciousness instead of expansion. They foster what I like to call ‘browsers syndrome’; a kind of hypnagogic state induced by cycling through lists of posts and news bytes that tend to result in angry outbursts when interrupted by too much text or anything that can trigger an emotional response. Today, a lot of people don’t know the difference between Facebook and the Internet. They think Facebook is the Internet or that the Internet is something completely separate from it. And many do little else with their computers. It’s becoming the desktop of an Internet OS–and a really bad one…

If the Internet is indeed going to be a means to realizing a more empathic civilization then it needs to facilitate more sophisticated means of social interaction, capable of expanding rather than filtering connection, moderating the abuse of anonymity, building trust and, by extension, cultivating a medium for social capital and systems like open value networks. We may need to make the Internet, fundamentally, a social Internet, and thus a medium of a social economy. And so I’ve sought to envision a way a social-semantic network, building on the ability of semantic web technology to virtualize personal information, decentralize its use, and automate its association, can cultivate such interaction and models of individual and collective intent. It’s not about an AI nanny or shadchan. It’s about the automation of the association of social information that can form the basis of potential human connection to facilitate interaction and exchange through many individual apps. Because of its potential importance to the daily routine and the general adoption of semantic information storage, this may become the basis of a general personal computing environment. And so I suggest this may take the form of a semantic desktop platform. Web browsers are becoming an anachronism and a lot of people already see Facebook as the Internet’s desktop. They are already coming to understand the Internet as, predominantly, a social space.

By: Bob Haugen

Bob Haugen — Tue, 29 Dec 2015 15:39:03 +0000

I want to be fair to Eric Hunting here, because I suspect this is not what he has in mind. But my first thought when reading this is that Facebook is creating pretty much exactly what he proposes, to serve their advertising and other monetization (and world domination) plans. So is Google. Probably also the NSA, although for their world domination and finance capital’s monetization. None of them to help you with your personal goals, except where their goals and yours intersect.

I’m sure that Eric intends to use the same techniques to actually serve your goals. But then the question becomes, which techniques? What are their goals? (The goals of the techniques. See link about algorithms below.)

I don’t think the working Semantic Web people have anything like Cybernetic Pronoia in mind. I’ve seen a lot of their conversations. But I see several other projects talking about social-semantic networks by one name or another, with different approaches.

One main distinction in approach might be focusing on assisting conscious human collaboration rather than automated “wise butler” intelligence. (Assuming I read Hunting correctly…? I might have misunderstood. He could correct me in a counter-comment.)

I think assisting conscious humans was Netention’s original goal, too. (It was a brilliant experiment, but I think now dormant.) In the AI world, it used to be called IA: that is, intelligent assistance, rather than artificial intelligence. The differences might be gross or subtle. You could have intelligent assistance with or without artificial intelligence. Might depend on the degree of automation. Or what gets automated, and to what ends. Or is the algorithm accountable to humans, can they understand and control and change it as they want? Or are the humans conscious? Cathy O’Neil is good on these issues:
http://mathbabe.org/2015/05/26/algorithms-and-accountability-of-those-who-deploy-them/