The Social Computer: Combining Machine and Human Computation

The social computer is a future computational system that harnesses the innate problem solving, action and information gathering powers of humans and the environments in which they live in order to tackle large scale social problems that are beyond our current capabilities. The hardware of a social computer is supplied by people’s brains and bodies, the environment where they live, including artifacts, e.g., buildings and roads, sensors into the environment, networks and computers; while the software is the people’s minds, laws, organizational and social rules, social conventions, and computer software. Similarly to what happens within a conventional computer and more interestingly within naturally occurring reasoning and control systems like the human body, a social computer exhibits an algorithmic behavior and problem solving capabilities which are the result of very large numbers of local computations, decisions, interactions, data and control information transfers.