How could that happen?
How could rhetoric- a word, a look- effortlessly turn a bystander into a collaborator?
Dramatic phenomena in the world today, such as racism, war, hunger, global warming, homelessness and malaria are social phenomena- the result of collective human behaviour, whether directly in action or indirectly through neglect and indifference. These are problems of collections, of social groups learning how to evolve and get along. After some 50,000 years we are still attempting to get beyond the tribe, to survive unintended consequences of what is so often referred to as progress.
We need more time.
Social phenomena happen in social reality, reality that exists but only through the behaviour of individuals adhering to commonly held beliefs. Stock markets crash because investors believe they will. Despite the considerable literature on how social reality is constructed, surprisingly little of an applied nature is known of the fundamental dynamics. The purpose of this project is to contribute to the understanding and modelling of the dynamics of the construction of social reality, with specific attention paid to a particularly insidious pathway of social construction called deception.
The trickster has for thousands of years instinctively known how to deceive. The problem today is algorithms can also be trained to deceive; instead of the small audience of a con artist, the algorithm has an audience of millions of attention-deficient brains trying to make sense of message torrents. This is a big problem getting bigger. There is no way to stop this so-call progress; paraphrasing Paul Virilio, to invent social construction is to invent deception.
We are running out of time.
If we are to understand how to sustainably resolve social problems, we need a better understanding of the fundamentals. And moving forward has been complicated with the dramatic debut of a novel social species- the software algorithm as a new entrant and charismatic competitor in society. I argue algorithms are, with the representational faculty and materiality gifted them, able to fully participate in social reality without the genetic tethering by which we are constrained. We believe we can control the effect of innovation, but history will argue this a fool’s errand. Quoting David Armano on ChatGPT, conversational computing is just the beginning?.
Time's up.
The work described in this website is towards a deeper understanding of the risk of deception: a practical theory of how deception happens and the outline of a computational model to explore deception and its detection in natural language.