RDVP Seminar: Howard Rheingold (4/29/2005)

Howard Rheingold came to speak about the need to start studying cooperation in a more formal way, a topic he treated in greater depth in a course he taught winter quarter. With an interesting background (and wardrobe), he is an entertaining speaker. At times, I felt that he glossed over the existing work in this area. Economists, especially in the area of game theory, problems of fair division, and coalition formation, have been studying this for years. (Indeed, a good part of the reason that I abandoned distributed artificial intelligence, another discipline very interested in cooperation, is that catching up to what the game theorists had already done would have taken years.) His dissection of the prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons, just scratched the surface and focused more on the "pop" articles rather than the academic ones, though Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons did look like an interesting book. More news to me was his report of neuroscience studies that showed that punishing cheaters excites the same areas of the brain as gaining rewards. "Altruistic punishment is the glue that holds society together," was his quote in describing the Ultimatum game. (One person is given $100 to split with a second person (with whom he cannot communicate). If the second person "accepts" the split, they get the money, divided as proposed. If the second person does not accept, they both get zero.)

All in all, I'm happy that he kept it high level, since that left more time, for the areas where I think Howard's viewpoint is unique: technology trends. He talked about the emergence of the cell phone as a way that 1.5B to 3B people will have broadband data access on a "just-in-time" basis, and the implications for information distribution, transactions, forming connections, and maintaining trust and reputation. He covered a laundry list of technologies that allow corporations to benefit from the cooperation of others (e.g., Open Source movement, Amazon API, Google Adwords, Wikipedia, eBay reputation server, ThinkCycle, Folding@home) as well as a set of technologies that make such volunteerism/cooperation that much easier (e.g., email, blogs, wikis, blog rolls, buddy lists, PageRank, etc.)

He also left quite a bit of time for discussion, which led to some interesting comments about migration: the move of people from the countryside to the cities where there may be jobs or from a poor country to a richer one. Technology is a new enabler, however, for these migrants to stay in touch with (and send money to) their home communities on a scale not previously possible.