Why we are Social

Something to think about whenever we do Social.   I note Davis mentions Byron Reeves, who we used as the basis for some of our work with consumer facing chatbots.  His book,  The Media Equation, is worth a look.

Why Facebook Is the Junk Food of Socializing  By Jim Davis  In Nautil.us

ave you ever been walking in a dark alley and seen something that you thought was a crouching person, but it turned out to be a garbage bag or something similarly innocuous? Me too.

Have you ever seen a person crouching in a dark alley and mistaken it for a garbage bag? Me neither. Why does the error go one way and not the other?

Human beings are intensely social animals. We live in hierarchical social environments in which our comfort, reproduction, and very survival depend on our relationships with other people. As a result, we are very good at thinking about things in social ways. In fact, some scientists have argued that the evolutionary arms race for strategic social thinking—either for competition, for cooperation, or both—was a large part of why we became so intelligent as a species. .... " 

Energy Saving Game

In Fastcodesign: A way to turn household energy saving into what they call an addictive game.    Called Power House, on Facebook. Mentioned by collaborator Byron Reeves at Stanford:

" ....  As it happens, Power House was developed by researchers with the explicit goal of getting players to reduce their energy consumption in the real world. And it seems to have worked. In the January 2015 issue of Environment and Behavior, communications scholar Byron Reeves and three Stanford colleagues report that people who played Power House demonstrated more energy-efficient behavior immediately afterward—both in a lab and their own homes. ...  "

Turing Test Breakthrough, Could Mr Clean do Better?

The Turing Test is the classic test for AI.  Can a machine consistently fool a person into thinking it is a person rather than a machine?  Article claims that just this weekend a milestone has been passed.   Not a technical source, so its hard to place complete reliance on this reporting.  Update: Some skeptics ...  See also the WP article on the Turing Test here. The article does give a nice non technical overview of the test and related issues.  I would not worry that this in particular warns of a dangerous future, machines can already fool many people most of the time, even when they have their guard up.  That has fascinating implications for marketing.  See my notes on The Media Equation.   See also my notes on how we tried to make Mr. Clean beat the Turing Test.

Gamification!

It has been called 'serious games', 'total engagement', 'turning work into play' and collaborative competition. Now Russell Brumfield, who we worked with on a scent branding project, has come up with a set of methods to game-ify real work in the enterprise. He has published some presentations in Youtube to introduce them. I can see these methods being combined with simulations to serve up exactly the kinds of problems that can be solved with games. I will follow with more information here as I learn it. See also my review of Byron Reeves' Book: Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete. Which does an excellent job of positioning the value of these methods.