Synthetic Sociology and the Human Computer

The rapidly growing field of synthetic biology is founded on the premise that, if enough of the genetic machinery of cells is understood, then scientists and engineers may begin constructing biological machines and computers for our own purposes. From a toggle switch constructed in genes in E. coli, which represented a primitive form of memory, to more recent examples of blinking bacteria, synthetic biology as a productive area is maturing rapidly.

In the social sciences, we are now in a period similar to that that preceded the dawn of synthetic biology. From understanding patterns in communication and mobility of humans, to understanding how behaviors propagate through populations, our understanding of aggregate behavior of people is quite rich.

Well, it's time we begin creating synthetic sociology. Along with Nicholas Christakis, I recently laid out the potential for this new field:

We wanted to see if this could be done in humans. Like crabs, humans have specific kinds of behavior that can be predicted, in groups. To harness this, we created a survey on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, surveying lots of people at once.

We asked a couple hundred people to complete a string of 1’s and 0’s, and asked them to make it “as random as possible.” As it happens, people are fairly bad at generating random numbers—there is a broad human tendency to suppose that strings must alternate more than they do. And what we found in our Mechanical Turk survey was exactly this: Predictably, people would generate a nonrandom number. For example, faced with 0, 0, there was about a 70 percent chance the next number would be 1.

From this single behavioral quirk, it is theoretically possible to construct a way in which a group of humans can act as what is known as a logic gate in computer science. By running such a question through a survey of enough people, and feeding *those *results to other people, you can turn them into what computer scientists call a “NOR” gate—a tool to take two pieces of binary input and yield consistent answers. And with just a handful of NOR gates, you can make a binary adder, a very simple computing device that can add two numbers together.

What this means is that, given sufficient numbers of people, and their willingness to answer questions about random bits, we can re-deploy humans for a purpose they were not intended, namely to act as a kind of computer—doing anything from adding two bits to running Microsoft Word (albeit really, really slowly).

And of course, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its planet-sized computer makes an appearance. Read the rest here.

Top Image: brown_family_album/Flickr/CC