Seminar: Collective Action in Hybrid Systems of Humans and Machines

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Hirokazu Shirado, Carnegie Mellon University

Collective Action in Hybrid Systems of Humans and Machines
Human cooperation is challenging, and various mechanisms are required to sustain it, although it nevertheless usually decays over time. In this talk, I introduce our experimental study involving networks of humans (N = 1,024 subjects in 64 networks) playing a cooperation game (public goods game) to which we sometimes added bots programmed to use only local knowledge. It shows that cooperation can even improve when the bots intervene in the partner selections made by the humans, reshaping social connections locally within a larger group. On the other hand, other strategies, e.g., tailoring bots allocation to the individual, do not support cooperation, although they work in simulations. Finally, I discuss the success and failure of bots in the experiment to seek generalizations about collective action in hybrid systems of humans and machines.

Hirokazu Shirado is an Assistant Professor of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on the role of social interactions and technology in the emergence of social order and in the collective confrontation of social dilemmas. He is particularly committed to the experimental study of cooperative behaviors as they manifest through interactions between people within social networks. He is also studying hybrid systems of humans and machines, particularly how machine intelligence can help people address the challenges of collective action. His website: http://www.shirado.net/

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