My friend Wendy Hall co-authored a 2019 book The Theory and Practice of Social Machines, which I read only recently. The central idea of a social machine is very interesting – a social network connected by digital devices, a human-machine social entity at scale. These can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in terms of societal outcomes, and most of the book is concerned with this question: “If we take the metaphor of the ‘social machine’ seriously, then we can think of it as doing some computing, and hence processing information, which can be done more or less accurately.” Well, it’s only too obvious how that is going at the moment.

So the book asks how should one analyse social machines and, importantly, try to construct or shape them? When do you get filter bubbles or groupthink, and when robustly diverse engagement towards a common aim? The middle chunk of chapters looks at many examples of social machines in operation, in areas ranging from music to social media to healthcare to open data. It ends, in a somewhat unsatisfactory way, with a list of questions or areas for future research, and with the conclusion: “Social machines should prompt neither optimism nor pessimism; they will enable new types of problem solving and new types of mischief alike.”

I do think the metaphor can be fruitful, but I suppose with the mischief aspect so much more evident 6 years after the book‘s publication I hungered for something a bit more action-oriented.