A Roadmap for Addressing Critical Challenges in Human-Machine Social Systems

Table of Links

Abstract and Introduction

Human-machine interactions

Collective outcomes

Box 1: Competition in high-frequency trading markets

Box 2: Contagion on Twitter

Box 3: Cooperation and coordination on Wikipedia

Box 4: Cooperation and contagion on Reddit

Discussion

Implications for research

Implications for design

Implications for policy

Conclusion, Acknowledgments, References, and Competing interests

Conclusion

This survey synthesizes relatively disparate literature based on agent-based models, controlled experiments, online field interventions, and observational analyses from human-computer interaction, robotics, web science, financial economics, and computational social science under a common theoretical framework: human-machine social systems. We identify common dynamics and patterns that emerge from the interactions of humans and autonomous machines regardless of the specific context, as well as peculiarities and unique problems that concrete techno-organizational and sociocultural environments generate.

Our utmost ambition is to stimulate cumulative empirically driven and mechanism-focused sociological research in the emerging, fast-evolving field of human-AI science. At stake are new and urgent social challenges such as online misinformation, market flash crashes, cybersecurity, labor market resilience, and road safety. With increasing social connectivity and accelerating developments in AI, understanding the complex interactions between humans and autonomous machines is a challenging undertaking, but one that is crucially important for a better human future.

Acknowledgments

MT acknowledges the generous support of the Santa Fe Institute during the period when the research was conducted. TY was partially funded by the Irish Research Council under grant number IRCLA/2022/3217, ANNETTE (Artificial Intelligence Enhanced Collective Intelligence). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.