On Twitter and Machiavellian Intelligence

Four short months and 135 tweets ago I wrote about joining Twitter. Slightly reluctant, confused by how it worked and - if I'm completely honest - a bit sniffy about whether I could be bothered with it at all.

But just a week ago I stunned myself by realising that Twitter is now the first thing I check in the morning. Not email. After the best part of 15 years of first ritually checking my email Twitter has knocked email off the top spot(1). So what happened? What is it about Twitter that is so compelling, so addictive? Why do I love Twitter?

Actually that was just the first surprise. The second was to realise I was so pleased when my number of followers reached 50, then 60 - and last week 70.

But the thing that shocked me rigid a week ago was this. I found myself wondering how I might contrive person X (who I admired) to notice me and become my follower. What the hell was I thinking! Who's in control here - me or Twitter; do I have obsessive compulsive twitter syndrome? Do I need help - maybe go cold turkey for awhile?

But then I started thinking about it and realised that there is a very ancient instinct at work here, and Twitter is just tickling that instinct in me. Perfectly. I'm talking about Machiavellian intelligence. The kind of social intelligence that is present to some degree in all primates and well developed in Chimpanzee and monkeys such as Rhesus Macaques. So what is this kind of social intelligence? Well, if you find yourself thinking: I'm going to make friends with him and pretend I like him, but not because I want to be his friend. Oh no: he has a friend that I really want to be friends with and - through this deception - I might achieve that goal. Then you are engaged in the social politics of Machiavellian intelligence. For anyone interested in intelligence, the evolution of human intelligence, or indeed AI, Machiavellian intelligence is very interesting because it requires Theory of Mind. It was probably already well developed in the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimpanzee, around 6 million years ago.

I don't know whether it was intentional, but the very smart people who created Twitter have somehow built an ecosystem perfectly suited for this kind of game. The basic ingredients are these: firstly everyone has followers and people they follow (following). The fact that you can easily see the number of followers and following for those you follow, or who follow you, means that very quickly you establish exactly where you are in the Twitter social pecking order. These numbers mean alot to us. The alpha-tweeters are those with huge numbers of followers. They are, in the terminology of memetics, meme-founts - leaders of fashion. But even for those of us with modest circles of followers and following, the balance of numbers is significant. Our Machiavellian instinct tells us that those with a greater number of followers than following are, on balance, leaders whereas those whose following outnumbers their followers are, on balance, followers and therefore of lower Twitter status. Please understand I'm absolutely not saying they are less worthy individuals, only that this is what our Machiavellian instinct tells us in the game of Twitter.

The second ingredient that is, I think, significant is the fact that you can easily see which followers or following you have in common with someone. So it is not just a matter of numbers, it's personal. Among those you follow, and those who follow you, you really can work out very quickly who is connected to who - and the connections have social structure. If I and someone else follow each other, then we are - in a sense - equal. If, on the other hand, I see that I'm following someone else, but they don't follow me, then my Machiavellian instinct places them higher up the Twitter social scale than me. Again this may not correlate at all to real-life standing. The point I'm making is that we can't help making these Machiavellian inferences - and Twitter makes it so easy.

This brings me to the third and most brilliant ingredient: Re-tweeting. The politics of re-tweeting are fascinating and complex. Having one of your tweets re-tweeted is the equivalent of being stroked, and we love being stroked. I certainly experience a quantum of happiness(2) when one of my tweets is re-tweeted, and I'm even happier if it's re-tweeted several times. Conversely, I'm disappointed if a tweet that I thought was especially witty, insightful or apposite to current events fails to be re-tweeted. Indeed it appears to be good manners to thank those who have RT'd a tweet - which says alot of how much we value RTs. And of course to be re-tweeted by a Twitter celebrity is a precious honour, the equivalent of a favour by one of the princesses of the Twitter court.

So Twitter is powerful stuff. It's not just a micro-blogging site, it is a quite remarkable place in which we can play out to the full our ancient instinct for Machiavellian social politics.

And of course Twitter has proven itself to be a marvellous vehicle for grass-roots political activism. Is that something to do with Machiavellian intelligence too?

So now I don't feel quite so bad about my new-found Twitter addiction.

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(1) Apart from a short spell of Guardian Soulmates 3 years ago:))
(2) I propose a new unit for a quantum of happiness: the RT (re-tweet).

How and Why do we have Culture?

In the run up to Science Week (7-16 March) the BA have been asking both the public and scientists for their big questions (see my previous blog What do Aliens look like). When I was asked for my Big Question I didn't have to think too hard, because I'm part of just about the most exciting research project of my life. That project is called The Emergence of Artificial Culture in Robot Societies, and sets out to answer the question "how can culture emerge as a novel property of social animals?" or to put it another way "how and why do we (humans) have culture?".

Of course you may be wondering what business a robot guy (me) has to do with a question of - essentially - evolutionary anthropology, which on the face of it has nothing to do with robotics. Well, firstly I've spent the last ten years working on Swarm Robotics - basically building robot swarms to try and understand how swarm intelligence works, and a robot swarm is a kind of primitive society of robots. Secondly, that work has opened my eyes to the extraordinary power of emergence, or self-organisation*. And thirdly, I'm passionate about trying to work on research problems that completely cross discipline boundaries, ideally across the arts/humanities, social- and natural-science boundaries. The question "how and why do we have culture" is just such a question.

I won't explain now how we intend to address this research question in detail. Suffice it to say that we are going to use a radical approach - which is to build a society of real robots, program them with (what we believe to be) a necessary and sufficient set of social behaviours, then observe them free running. Of course the big question then is will anything happen at all that is capable of being robustly interpreted as evidence of emerging proto-cultural behaviours and - if it does - would we even recognise it (since this will be an emerging robot- not human- culture; an exo-culture if you will).

I'm privileged to be part of a team that includes a computer scientist, theoretical biologist, philosopher, social scientist and art historian/cultural theorist. For more detail here is the announcement on EPSRC grants on the web. Not least in order to mitigate the risk that we fail to recognise anything interesting that might emerge, but also because we strongly believe in Open Science, the whole project will be on the web - live robots, data and all - as soon as we're up and running.

And here's a picture of 2 of the robots we plan to use (called e-pucks). We've added some 'ears' so that they can chirp at each other; the artificial culture lab will have around 50-60 of these robots.

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*Emergence is - in my view - both ubiquitious (everywhere from physics, to life, intelligence and culture, to galaxies) and for more important than I think we realise. I would go so far as to say that I believe natural selection (although beautiful and powerful) is on its own insufficent to explain the astonishing complexity of many biological and societal systems. I think you need natural selection + emergence.

Anthropomorphism and robotics

Spent the last two days at a really interesting workshop: Practices of Anthropomorphism: from Automata to Robotics. The best thing about the meeting was the mix of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, art and robotics. Terrific. The key to creativity, IMHO, is working with people outside your own discipline. It can be tough, mind you, outside the comfort zone of familiar ideas and frameworks. But that's precisely the point. Recall Koestler's brilliant "The Act of Creation" - creativity happens when two previously disconnected ideas intersect, meaningfully. (Or, humour, if the intersection is absurd.)

So, what were the creative outcomes of the workshop? Well, there were plenty of "ah ha!" moments (as well of lots of "ha ha"). For me the big insight was the realisation (obvious I guess to the anthropologists) that human beings are so utterly pre-disposed, hard-wired even, to anthropomorphise. Whether we like it or not we are, it seems, anthropomorphiliacs with a compulsion to attribute anthropic qualities to and develop emotional attachments with animals or artefacts, almost anything from the everyday to the exotic, the banal to the sublime. This is very interesting to a roboticist on a number of levels. For example, even simple robots are imbued with characteristics they don't have (cute, inquisitive, happy, ill) and at the other end of the robot spectrum humans will anthropomorphise and thereby compensate for the shortcomings of humanoid or android robots. In other words robot builders don't need to worry about making android robots into perfect artificial humans - cartoon robots will do - like NEC's PaPeRo shown here (thus also neatly avoiding the Uncanny Valley). You may think this is just another fraud, like de Vaucanson's defacating duck. And, in a way, it is. But as long as we, the roboticists, are completely honest and transparent about the real capabilities of our robots: what they can but especially what they cannot do, then it is a fraudulent contract that humans and robots can willingly and beneficially submit to.

This brings me to another question. Why are we so fascinated by robots? I think the answer lies in another surprising innate ability of humans. That is our ability to tell the difference between animate and inanimate. I think we love robots because they behave as if they are animate, yet we know them to be inanimate artefacts. We are, I believe, delighted by this deception.

A final thought: if, as Gabriella Airenti brilliantly argued at the workshop, anthropomorphism is an (inevitable) consequence of imitation and theory of mind, then it's surely not inconceivable that future intelligent robots might also develop this tendency. Except that, for them, it would be robomorphism.