Problems even on the frontiers of Automated Sociometry?   

  The Bioethics of interaction on the frontiers of Advanced Automated Sociometry?  

Disclaimer

No promises or guarantees are expressed or implied, all herein representing no binding commitments to anyone else. Any specific existent or future contracts and guarantees, commitments whatsoever, are simply not delineated herein, remaining an entirely separate matter. Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, a “safe harbor” may be provided for forward-looking statements, estimates reflecting the best judgment and current expectations and projections concerning future events even outside of our control, and therefore a number of risks and uncertainties that results may differ materially from those suggested by such forward-looking statements. In so far as this document constitutes a prediction or prognosis, such is merely best effort. But this document is not a promise by anyone to anyone else. Only whatever prospect in and of it self may be deemed promising. Such may be hoped. 
 

This document is the product of discussion and correspondence between Douglas Wilson and Aaron Agassi. 

Douglas Wilson is the visionary software engineer who has pursued the realization of the technology as his life's work. Aaron Agassi is an aspiring Entrepreneur and developer of new business models for Interaction on the frontiers of ever more advanced automated Sociometry. 

 
  Automated Sociometry

A Proposal for an Internet-Based Venture:

New business models in application of future interaction on the frontiers of advanced automated network  Sociometry?  

 

“The most interesting products are the ones that people need but can't articulate that they want.”  — Livio DeSimone

 

“The world, in short, inclines to appear an ill-lit mine, wherein one quarries gingerly amidst an abiding loneliness.”  — 'The Certain Hour' by James Branch Cabell

 

“Everyone must recall occasions when he has been strongly drawn into some Path followed with complete success. For instance: electoral cabal to elect a certain candidate; cabal on 'Change in the stock-jobbing game; cabal of two pairs of lovers, planning a partie carrée without the father's knowledge; a family cabal to secure a desirable match. If these intrigues are crowned with success, the participants become friends; in spite of some anxiety, they have passed happy moments together while conducting the intrigue; the emotions it arouses are necessities of the soul.”

— Charles Fourier Townsend

If it’s free, then you are the product. Said the naughty nurse at the sperm bank. Like that’s a bad thing? Be the product! As long as there will be value in return.

Automated Sociometry and Project Kriosgrad are two vastly different social entrepreneurship business models showcased here on FoolQuest.com nevertheless bearing in common strategy of offering transformative services to the public that urgently need to be universal and free of charge in order to function broadly as necessary in society, all at comparably negligible cost from tremendous profit potential in the range of lucrative fee and commission based service byproducts, with the empathy and deep human understanding for reframing commerce for innovation of whole new areas for growth. Automated Sociometry is one of three different innovative proposals on FoolQuest.com for new venture creation in social technology to improve social life for the end user. The others are Creativity Should be Social and Planet Frolic. Plus CliqueBustersTM for combating pandemic bullying

The business world is rife with innovation envy, the yearning to inspiration towards game-changing innovation. Many make genuine efforts and significant spending on R&D and taking onboard creative designers and turning to Innovation consultants. Yet results are often disappointing. due to a tendency towards exclusive reliance upon analytical thinking which merely refines current knowledge, thus to accrue only small improvements. Whereas in the alternative, The Epistemological Methodology of Design Thinking recognizes the advancement of knowledge and understanding from one stage to the next: from mystery and the as yet unexplainable, to heuristic rule of thumb that guides us toward solutions, to algorithmic predictable formulae for producing answers, to programming code when formulae becomes predictable enough for full automation. As knowledge advances through the stages, productivity increases and costs drop, producing tremendous value.

The very lives we lead, human interaction most broadly, often seem so random, mysterious, unfathomable beyond control. We so often find ourselves at the mercy of destiny. But all manner of scientific study is ongoing, advancing through the above stages, and every technological application is brought to bear, onto the market. Scientific inquiry and technology brought to bear, includes not only Sociometry, but, data mining, personality profiling and more.

Automated Sociometry  is a proposal for a new Internet-based venture from new business models from projected future interaction on the frontiers of ever more advanced automated Sociometry, with data mining and personality profiling,, even artificial intelligence, to provide online support for social activities while collecting valuable data, using  software to be developed to support personality and compatibility estimation for helping people form strong networks of social contacts and to support social interaction their networks, by collecting personality and interest data through questionnaires and other interaction and from other sources, then suggest online and real-world social connections and activities, as well as goods, services, and entertainment. Ongoing user feedback and other data is to be gathered for continual improvement of advice proffered from data bases. No more silly webforms to figuratively shoehorn personal and business life into literally a series of boxes, specifically text dialogues to generate perplexingly irrelevant pages and tables of interest to no one. Yes, now those damn Behaviorists have got the computers programming us! Such is textbook example of an internal process ever more impressively refined and all external purpose forgotten! Human interaction is key, not ever more convoluted computer interaction to shape and constrain human interaction. So why cut the metaphorical foot to fit the proverbial shoe? Not when instead, computers can actually learn to ask more interesting questions in order ever better predict and abet human inclination and interaction more richly than ubiquitous superficial social network addiction. Theoretically, evryone and everything in he world, is six or fewer degrees of separation by whatever hypothetical chain of intriductionsm from anyone else in the world. All manner of social connection and social capital are to be cultivated and facilitated, including friends, lovers, job hunting, help wanted, business contacts, entrepreneurial partners, investors, mentors, teachers, and more. "It's not what you know, but who you know" (or rather, who knows you!) that makes one influential. In the future, everyone will be influential!

Global security in the face of (Anti)Social Media and the empty illusion of social life:

What does the future hold? In the words of Paul Raven: “Science Fiction isn’t dying at all; it’s metastasizing!” (Anti)social media long by design has steadilly eviscerated communication and interaction, while opening the floodgates upon an annoying deluge of endless empty gossip. And TikTok Is Worse Than You Thought. Apparently, TikTok is a high tech Chinese conspiracy to inculcate callow youthful depravity in the decadent West, whist the Chinese version of the algorithm instead fosters earnest hard working militarism in their own young. Shades of 'I Remember Babylon' by Arthur C. Clarke! In order to win the information war for global democracy, something completely different and antithetical shall be required, a major advances in a democratizing breakthrough technology, Automated Sociometry online, with an algorithm to serve deeper human needs, not only extrinsic and practical, but also even intrinsic and innate, beyond the endless clikbait scroll, exploitation for fashion, fascism, or anything else. Because an algorithm can only be no better than the programmer's imagination of best positive reinforcement for realization of emerging Artificial Intelligence instead of artificial stupidity.

 Business opportunity: New business models for Automated Sociometry 

It may be generally accepted that common interests and passions remain a key factor in building relationships. But in actuality, interests in common may turn out to be the least predicator in interpersonal compatibility. Indeed, interests in common need not correlate with shared core values or character, by far more profound. And it may be generally accepted that people make friends as a result of chance propinquity by spending casual time with one another. But as shall be seen, this simply is not true. In truth, given limited options, people have often come to accept the need to cultivate and acquiesce to tolerable relationships with whomever most continually proximate. Hence a necessity of lowered expectations and fearful timidity. A sore travail.  

We all form each our own vivid picture of what we want our lives to be, and particularly in the imagination of an ideal social circle, the better to connect to vital resources and meet personal needs, tangible and intangible, all crucial to optimal fulfillment in authentic well-being and human thriving. But the course remains uncharted and perilous, even after all the sages of old, the cutting edge of modern science, and the most wildly popular mass market gurus. Nothing is really obvious. Even the most ingenuous effort to meet  the most genuine need simply to share one's interests and passions, is also quite naturally motivated by many other social impulses. Alas however, even at best, connection forged upon common interests, simply does not carry the entire freight, so to speak, of broadest human social needs and desires. Indeed, as it turns out, shared interests as such, are least among compatibility criteria in friendship, social embedment and connection, not isolation and dopamine. And the powerful allure of whatever perception of communal identity is perhaps most notoriously irrelevant of chimera.

 

Alas, human striving remains all to often misguided and derailed: Indeed, all manner of very particular cultural niche market segments are often defined by what turn out to be the mere trappings of misdirected focus upon mystique. To wit: the mystique associated with whatever focus of shared interest (cause, ideology, coveted acquisition, topic of conversation or group activity, etc.) merely howsoever associated in the mind, with whatever actual deeply frustrated value. Thus does whatever such particular ostensible purpose or focus, then assume place as the object of desire, replacing confused and forgotten pursuit of happiness. Subsequent ensuing fetish fixation of obsession may then become internalized into sublimation. -All in lieu of every relevant due diligence of investigation and strategy. For a real strategy must be as informed by investigation into whatever might be truly of essence. For there can be different possible means to the same ends. And it remains crucial to distinguish goals that are merely means, from the over arching goals that are the desired ends. All to often the distinction becomes lost, between goals as are ends unto themselves, and goals merely being means along the way to whatever ends. Worse, focus is often misdirected even upon mere set pieces that may so easily vary as life's drama unfolds even much the same plot. So: How can the pursuit of happiness be reclaimed and steered back on course? I have proposal. This is my request for comment, my invitation to critical and strategic discourse, my outreach for collaboration partners.

 

I remember a TV documentary about an annual tribal festival of once yearly dispensation for extramarital encounter, via a ritual so arduous, competitive and complicated that for the most part it ends in frustration and heartbroken exhaustion. But the majority of social outreach of any kind, is similarly unrealistic. -the interminable rat race of eking out meager small talk on the social minefield. A man once posted online, a tabulation of the considerable time and money that must be expended upon online dating, before even arriving at "a cup of cofee" and the first unsuitable face to face encounter and mutual rejection. There is no calculation of the sheer aggravation. And it’s much the same networking for any other purpose, personal, professional or other. Can there be no better way? Showcased here on FoolQuest.com one project proposal for any such alternative is Creativity can be Popular. The other is this one before you now, Automated Sociometry.

According to 'Social Failures and Social Solutions: Evidence from OkCupid' "Social failures involve social interactions, such as affect, social support and advice giving; [...] Social failures are social interactions that do not occur, but would make two or more people better off if they did. [...] Social failures capture the difference between interactions that do happen and those that should happen." Inaccessibility of information is also a kind of social failure. Some social failures are more important than others, depending upon what might be at stake in forging relationships. And there are many possible causes and factors in social failure, And there remain many possible causes and factors in social failure, even short of pandemic bullying outright, including all manner of obstacles and social restrictions on interaction and relationship. Major problems needing to be addressed by whatever means, include prudery, sexism, and prevailing intimidation and resultant inhibition and reticence to break the ice and make first contact, especially on the part of women towards men.

Even without all of the above difficulties and more, it makes no sense for people to continue making social connections in the current haphazard way, depending on chance meetings in grocery stores, bumping into people on the street, or talking to them in the elevator. The probability of such chance encounters leading to close relationships or important contacts is already low without all such above additional difficulties, and most of the resulting relationships are unsatisfactory and the process actually time consuming, labor intensive and often frustrating. It's always nice, instead, to get a good introduction. And that's another reason why extended social networks are so crucial. This proposal is for a true solution to that problem, one in which good data and powerful algorithms replace chance and accidental meetings, and where the benefits of extended social networking will be better facilitated for all with lower maintenance.

• Confronting alienation: Alas: social success ≠ fulfillment and how the sheer restrictive and trivializing irrelevancy of online dating exacerbates human superficiality.

Almost all businesses on the Internet collect data. The business proposed herein is to concentrate on creating accurate general-purpose user profiles, accurately performing social network analysis, and then assisting people in becoming more and better integrated into society by providing valid and helpful suggestions. Even user dissatisfaction with suggestions are to be solicited as feedback to help tune user profiles. The concept is for the online environment to adapt to the user, not the reverse.

Stimulus struggle is the perpetual striving to obtain and maintain the optimum degree and kind of stimulation from the environment. And this includes every crucial social stimulus provided by anyone eliciting response from anyone else within the same social environment. Human happiness greatly hinges upon the success of stimulus struggle, particularly of social and even intellectual stimulus struggle. First of all, pleasurable wellbeing is attained during optimal stimulus struggle, particularly social stimulus struggle. Secondly, it may be that more optimal social stimulus struggle really is the key to life, after all! More optimal social stimulus struggle heightens performance, sustained cooperation and results. More optimal social stimulus struggle is more sociable. Better sustained and more optimal social stimulus struggle is more optimal also for making connection, forging and nurturing relationships and friendship. And nothing galvanizes social interaction and stimulus struggle quite like the interaction of compatible personalities.

Unlike self-help programs exhorting us to change ourselves in order better to adapt, Advanced automated Sociometry is to be more flexible and open the way for end users to forge good relationships while just being themselves, to address their own needs, not the endless vexation of an essentially broken delivery system. Personal growth should come as a natural by product of life improvement, rather than the other way around. As life unfolds, future interaction on the frontiers of ever more advanced automated lSociometry is to facilitate continued collection of feedback and longitudinal social network data to adequately reflect their new lives and acquired tastes, thereby keeping these users returning again and again for new suggestions.

Business Use of the Data

The initial collection of personality and interest data is to have many other applications including marketing and public opinion research. Social network data about the links between people are to add precise information about a population, thus to replace the pseudo-demographic information often used in market studies. (Also see: Advanced Auromated Socometric services to Media Industry.)

Together with the personality and interest data, the social network data is to become a uniquely comprehensive set of pyscho-social information, much more valuable than the usual vague, general, and impersonal data more commonly used. It is the acquisition and utilization of this unprecidentedly precise data that would distinguish the business proposed herein from all others.

With appropriate precautions, some of the aforementioned data may be sold to external users, but it may be the more profitable to use the aforementioned data internally by accepting market research and public opinion polling contracts. Such research would be easy beginning from the existing data and would also expand and enhance the data base.

Psychometric assessment is currently utilized in the corporate world, for recruitment prescreening, assessing how best to engage each employee, tailoring training and development, and ongoing weaning out and firing of dissatisfied and unsatisfactory employees. Psychometric basement then, guides all manner of efforts in adaptation, investment of resources, and ultimately all of the sheer bad blood and bad karma of layoffs and termination. Whereas, at a tremendous saving in resources, Advanced Automated Sociometry will achieve best employee optimal reciprocal engagement, cultivating employee development, even without any culling out and firing, all resultant from optimally compatible matching of individuals and work groups.

Matching People to Goods and Services

• Data mining no longer anything new or scary: How Target figured out a teen was pregnant before her father did!

• Cracking the enigma of membership: Social-network mapping designed to locate karasses wherever they emerge amid the granfalloons

Relevance engines shorten decision cycles by utilizing information continually gathered from end users, in order to interactively facilitate mass personalization, expertly delivering information, contacts and alternatives of action in response, as will matter to different people at precisely the right times and circumstances or situations.

Indeed, the same software used for matching people to one another can also be used to match people with products and services, using all the same data as discussed above. Such a service is to enable suppliers to conduct precision advertising, resulting sales right on target and even desirable(!), a welcome change for the consumer used to the omnipresence of the random deluge of mostly inappropriate advertisement. Currently advertising must be kept entertaining rather than informative so as not to annoy, or it risks becoming the hit or miss nuisance advertising we see so much of today. Future interaction on the frontiers of ever more advanced automated Sociometry is to change all that, earning lucrative marketing referral commissions for the service provider. The system is to also to be deployed directly for online sales of our own.

Initially, the proposed business venture is to obtain the usual display advertising revenue that funds many Internet sites, but soon should be able to offer some of the same advertisers much more effective precision targeted direct advertising to specific people, to meet customer needs and tastes precisely. -And never in any greater volume than are to be congenial and likewise tailored to the individual user who's continued trust and good are to must ever remain crucial.

The rehabilitation of Big Brother online: Towards a friendly subversion of "digital surveillance" and the obsolescence of

Centralized personal medical history is badly needed order to improve efficiency, accountability, and the better to save lives without such tremendous and needless bureaucratic waste, and yet rightly feared for danger of abuse in abrogation of individual liberties. It is the consequential use and abuse of data that should be at issue. In and of itself, for an uncomprehending data base to meticulously compile information on my shopping habits, is for me something akin to being glimpsed naked by a pet dog or cat: Not much of an issue, barring any abnormal sense of intimacy or fetish! When you have endured the damage of inaccurate and malicious gossip, with all the insane abuse of power inspired thereby, then talk to me about privacy and the violation thereof. -Never mind real physical violence and invasion of personal space!

 

While it is true that future interaction on the frontiers of ever more advancautomated Sociometry may well open the way to consumer profiling with the potential for even more sophisticated consumer manipulation through marketing and advertising, such an approach would be tragically short sighted, because the age of the captive audience to passive media is on the wane. And if clear value is not sustained for the end user, Luddite sentiment, consumer resistance, alienated resentment at perceived invasion of privacy will continue mounting. Trust and consent must be earned. Ultimately, if disappointed consumers do not perceive value received, they are to tend simply to soon surf on by and take their digital lucre to another online portal! And future ventures predicated upon ever more advanced automated Sociometry must depend upon long term growth. The proposed venture into interaction on the frontiers of ever more advanced automated Sociometry is to be the best portal of preference. That is why profiling and matching must be used constructively, and not just manipulatively, in order to match people to products and services for customer satisfaction, pleasure and utility, as well as simply paring down the massive clutter and ubiquitous nuisance of hit or miss mass advertising. Matching people to products is easy. The products don't have to like you back!

Social apps on smart phones as yet remain in the infancy of what is called: proximity matching. With the notorious Lovegety in Japan, passersby mutually interested in meeting new people, can be introduced to one another in Real Time. In the future, Artificial Intelligence will actually monitor, detect and correctly and appropriately interpret even subtle interactions between end users, in order better to prompt end user contact and further interaction.

Intelligent Supply Chain

Since the proposed venture into interaction on the frontiers of ever more advanced automated Sociometry is to profile, match and network people for compatibility, for every purpose under the sun, from the data it is to collect, this technology may also become the single greatest integrated component tool for intelligent supply chain in this new century, not only to tailor marketing precisely to individual needs and preference, but also to chart and invent entirely new and improved supply chains by the same means of social network optimization, and even apply combinatorial optimization in the exchange of resources, even towards implementation of the goals of R. Buckminster Fuller's World Game to better coordinate "spontaneous cooperation" in the resolution of needless and catastrophic shortages and the cultivation of world wide prosperity. 

Social Relationships

The services provided is to cover many kinds of relationships:

• new friends
• love, romance, sex...
• roommates, house mates, domestic partnership...
• e-pen pals, matched by interest,
• matching for peak efficient communication,
• matching for optimum empathy,
• matching for error covariance,
• matching for maximal productivity, tangible or intellectual
• co-workers, matched to communicate, brainstorm, work together
• all manner of effective and compatible matched teams and work groups
• matching to offer/receive the life guidance of a mentor.
• employment: anonymous job hunting/ help wanted, qualified leads.
• entrepreneurship: Matching up business partners to start new ventures.
• matching to Venture Capitalists, too!      And browse: The Biz Plan Metacontest (proposal)
• activity partners -- sports, crafts, etc.
• Politics, Activism, research, projects
• scientific investigation, arts, performance, social events
• and so much more.

There may be application, also, to Transactional Analysis, at least within the limits thereof.

This breadth of application is crucial for collecting good data and providing better service to users. Highly specialized services such as marriage minded match-making cannot build up a user-base of people who trust the service; because if it works, the user no longer needs the service; and if it doesn't work, trust will be lost forever. So, either way, no one stays.

Networking important new relationships through life is an ongoing process, and an important service resource such as computer automated Sociometry in making those all important connections is to build a relationship of trust with the end user. Consumer trust to take to the bank!

Expansion Strategy

Any promising business is created with expansion in mind. The proposed venture automated Sociometry is to progressively gain entry into most services that can exploit user-profile data and generate valuable new data in the process. High quality data about people is a precious resource which can be exploited in many ways. Concentrating upon services that not only use such data but generate more of it is to allow an aggressive penetration of several service sectors, with an excellent chance of coming to dominate them quickly. An obvious target is the increasingly competitive search engine sector.  Precise user profiles are to be utilized in the generation of search results much more useful than any current search engine can offer. Instead of simply returning a lot of matches to the given keywords, based only on the words themselves, the user profile is to be used to prioritize those matches for hither to unprecedented true relevance.

Running a search engine is also to facilitate access to the Web, applying the same advanced automated network Sociometric software as for social network analysis, gennerally. The resulting web-site profiles is to be almost as useful as profiles of individual users, and for much the same reasons.  Keeping track of what people search for and which hits they choose to pursue is to also factor into user profiling, thus even achieving the very Holy Grail of Information Filtering by functioning as the long predicted personal user information filter that selects for you exactly what you want to see, without forcing you to specify in impossibly minute and complete detail.

Analogous targets include newsgroups and mailing lists, which can be mapped, profiled, and recommended to users, a service not currently available anywhere online.  If such recommendations are presented as clickable links on a web pages, then the click-through can be used as feedback to estimate user interests in those areas, and further improve our user profiles.

In general, the proposed business venture is to be able to expand in a natural way, offering more and more services, by utilizing the user-profile data to deliver new services or better results than any existing services in those areas. All such expansion is to increase the amount of retained Knowledge Capital and opportunities for revenue.

Automated Sociometry for Human Resource needs

Expansion is to require new people, which is a serious matter, since ultimately it is the human resources that make a business succeed or fail.  Software and faster hardware would need to be added, marketing would need to be accomplished, and the whole process would require additional management. Unless planned carefully, such expansion is hazardous, and finding good people is often a problem these days since the rapid expansion of the Internet has outstripped the ability of universities to train qualified people.  Having a pool of well profiled users is to better facilitate filling possitions as they open, and also to ensure that new employees will be are compatible with one another to work well together and productively.

In short, the services to be provided can also be used to make the proposed venture a success.  That would continue to remain true as new services are to be added and the business is to expand in order to dominate segments of industry that do not yet have access to the high quality data collected facilitating highly sophisticated automated Sociometry. As well as selling the (anonymized) data gathered, various fee based services are to be offered to industry for companies to become better functioning societies. Human Resource Management services capitalizing upon ever more sophisticayed automated Sociometry, are to facilitate not only hiring and outsourcing, but internal profiling, matching, and social network optimization, for best corporate structure and optimally compatible, happy and productive work groups.

Software Functionality

The proposed venture automated Sociometry is to develop and deploy a powerful estimator for compatibility, programmed to improve estimates with ongoing feedback from users, to be processed into suggestions by a matching mechanisms based upon combinatorial optimization. Regardless of any negative connotations for the term 'optimization' engendered by a long simmering public loathing and resentment towards the centennially outmoded and some what quaint notions of Assembly Line uniformity inherent in our societal legacy of deeply entrenched and flagrantly obsolete late 19th Century Modernism, the proposed venture into automated Sociometry is to make no attempt whatsoever to impose control upon or in any way manipulate the end user, who is only to be prompted with suggestions upon request. We now understand that with explosive exponential diversification and an ever increasing need for flexibility to cope with the burgeoning complexity of our times, the imposition of simplistic standardization simply no longer optimizes very much of what we actually do. And so, we have progressed. Yet, alas, the unfair stigma lingers in Paranoid Reactionary Neo-Ludite mythology. The specter of Centralized oppressive bureaucratic standardization still gives efficiency a bad name. Because what has succeeded victoriously for mass produced engines of war, has failed disastrously for serving and guiding diverse people in times of peace.

Optimization, in specific, has been a part of the discipline of Operations Research, for half a century or more, though usually within the Military Industrial Complex. A quaint Cold War legacy born out of the Second World War effort. Within such fairly dictatorial regimes as armies and large corporations, such practices have been fairly successful, though unambitious. Outside of that context or beyond such limited scope, this approach has quite simply failed. But the proposed venture into automated Sociometry, by contrast, is to be designed for flexibility, enhanced democracy and freedom. not oppressive centralized inefficient outmoded bureaucratic standardization, with woefully inadequate feedback. By contrast, the principle of combinatorial optimization is reciprocal, decentralized, open to improvement, multidirectional and responsive, readily adapting to complexity, not standardized and over simplified. An idea who's time is nigh.

Of course, hypothetically, the advancing technolog of automated Sociometry technology, like any other tool, can still be abused. But the proposed venture into the advancment of ever more sophisticated automated Sociometry, is to be in the inception of a competitive service provider on the open market. And, at present, we do not project any majority market segment that currently prefers oppressive standardized inefficient controlling centralization, to flexible service, congenial human contact, stimulating interactivity, decentralization and decision input into their own lives. Nor are the rigid old ways competitive any more for organizations.

Despite all unfortunate historical connotations to the contrary, the word 'optimization' simply denotes the procedure or procedures of improvement used to make a system or design as efficient and effective or functional as possible, in such a way that the desired return is maximized and whatever resource expenditure minimized, especially the mathematical techniques involved or computing. In this case, for finding desirable combinations, and networking successful interpersonal matches and connections for all purposes. But, math aside, how many of us really have any such personal system what so ever, muddling through our own lives as we do, and passing like ships in the night? More often, it seems, the system, chaotic and cumbersome such as it is, has got us, and by the proverbial short hairs! But with ongoing support and assistance facilitated via ever more advancd automated Sociometry,  the end user is to finally be able to really seize personal control, cope capably with the run away complexity of our times, experience new freedom and initiative, and realize vast improvement in every aspect of his or her own life.

Advanced Features

Optional advanced features are to include an extensive menu selection of optimization measures, schemes, methods, and priorities, as well as the actual compatibility-criteria for the sophisticated user to choose from. even thereby gathering more data in the process. Nevertheless, what is to be most devious in the steady desensitization of any applicable phobias, and the growing acceptance of  interaction via ever more advanced automated lSociometry, would be that usually, the suggested options would tend to work best. Unless, that is, there are to be special contingencies, circumstances or preferences, unforeseen by profiling, where in the advanced features menu would indeed finally serve an actual practical benefit by offering needed real adaptability, all from a user friendly interface. Rather than simply accepting user specifications, software must cooperate interactively with users to help them develop requirements that are to be meaningful. The same capability is then to be useful in developing their own personal descriptions, as an aid to personal growth, self help and education. Anywhere there is a personal free choice, there may be an application for computer assisted thinking.

To be successful, the proposed venture into automated Sociometry must begin generating models or profiles of its users, and must safeguard user's privacy and security. The quality of these profiles is to be such as to directly affect the quality of the suggestions being offered, so anything that can make the profiles more accurate is to be considered. Data is to be acquired in many ways, so the system must include support for data manipulation, storage, visualization, and access. Several mathematical techniques are to be used to condition data prior to use. Most of this must be automated to allow for large numbers of users, but having many users also allows sophisticated data correction algorithms to be used. This data is then to be employed in the genneration og user profiles for processing through the estimator and matcher, generating the all important suggestions. User feedback in response to suggestions can then be used to refine the profile, perhaps generating queries about some of the data. Advanced mathematical methods such as Kalman filtering can be used to model the user as a dynamic process, incorporating elements of personal growth and maturation.

Automated Sociometry online

The proposed venture into future interaction on the frontiers of advanced automated Sociometry  is to collect data from individuals and make suggestions, but also to support online interaction between different people on all manor of various different platforms. All such functionality can be integrated with automated Sociometry in order to filter out displeasing chance mismatch, also providing tailor made stimuli to engender topics of conversation found to be of interest for carefully matched participants.

The ability to coordinate multiple users permits rapid turnaround, with people supplying input continuously as they navigate the Internet, with personal profiles being updated as they go. Such rapid online action is not new in itself, but probably goes beyond the human ability to adapt to social circumstances. With ever more sophisticated automated Sociometry, instead, people are to experience such freedom and confidence they might on their home turf with friends, even while actually interacting with new people in the world at large.

As a strategy to expand local telephonic access, Computer Telephony functionality, distributed access software packages are to even be upgradable to support local access franchises, complete with Voice Menu and FAX-on-Demand interface. Thus, corporate customers and entrepreneurs are to be wooed to become local telephonic access and venue franchisees.

Data Acquisition

Questionnaires, carefully designed, are to collect information useful for matching people. As well as questions about personality and interest, the system may use other data, such as personal address books and browser bookmarks, if the user permits access to that information. Through providing services over a period of time, future interaction on the frontiers of ever more advanced automated Sociometry is to allow data to be queried and corrected in an interactive process, and are to also be able to improve its own capabilities by using corrections, feedback, and new questionnaires, and by providing many different forms of matching, continue providing services to end users over a long period of time, during which the amount and quality of data collected can continue to accumulate and improve. Supporting the end user in this way over a period of time is to collect what is called longitudinal data, which just means data collected over a long period of time -- the hardest to obtain and among the most valuable.

Users are to be encouraged to supply a a great deal of information and even permit access to data stored on their own machines. As the users are to be told, "The more you tell us, the more we can tell you!" With the integration of search engine and online shopping services, the system may use search keywords and purchase records, again, in so far as the user permits access thereto.

Collective communications

In future interaction on the frontiers of ever more sophisticated and advanced automated Sociometry, ongoing referendum are to shape political participation and influence in the world to come, allowing individuals to select and to rate their approval of messages published by others, so that as a message gains approval, it can become a message from a body of those who highly approve thereof.

Automated Sociometry may also poll types of individuals it learns are most responsive, one way or another, to different messages. Profiling is to identify these position statements as those of a majority or subgroup, who are to to also develop their own electronic forums and social networks. Thus the positions of different intersecting and therefore, it is hoped, unifying groups, by nationality, ethnicity, gender, economic class, religion, or common vested or public interests, such as, for example consumers or environment, are to be identified and become public.

These are to include groups and cross sections that have failed to organize, such as consumers in Japan who are over charged while foreign markets are undercut by Japanese companies, or groups that didn't even know they existed, such as the growing number of people who are finding themselves concerned about the ongoing danger of asteroid collision with the Earth, and related issues, opportunities as well as threat, of Pro-Space Activism, now that the Media has finally begun to raise consciousness, even though government and industry, by in large, remain unconcerned. All manner of groups, from the obvious to the exotic, are to then be availed of the opportunity to communicate collectively with leaders and experts, and even engage one group to another.

To mitigate the problem of the lowest common denominator blandness that tends to arise from sorting and prioritizing messages by approval rating alone, various message sorting strategies are to be offered also to bring messages highly rated as interesting to light, and not only the most approved of. Messages are also to be rated by controversy, to help stimulate public debate and keep unpopular opinions alive. As with web searching, messages are to be ranked by likely individual user preference from prior input and also as gleaned from responses among similar profiles. And likewise messages of interest and other data are to be sortable for groups by demographic of affinity or for the sake of controversy. People are also to be matched into small groups that are to be the most inventive and effective for many purposes, along with brainstorming tools for the interplay of novel ideas, and cutting edge of personal information management for informed and educated participation.

Marketing

The proposed venture intoautomated Sociometry must not only support the end user, but provide support for marketing. To obtain a large user-base it is important to establish this business as a known brand name, through a process known as the "The Branding Spiral,"  continually changing content and promotions, to keep users returning to the website to steadily expand and update their data. (And also review Media Content Creation strategy...) 

Free online newsletters, updates and such, optimally customized, are to be used to alert users to new matches and ever changing content at the site. Online and real-world social activities are to be announced, discussed, and rated. Many new quirky and fun activities and projects are to be supported, to catch media attention, including:

• brainstorming
• think tanks
• field researchers of the obscure
• Debunkers of the Paranormal! 
• specialized chat rooms for odd balls.
• multi-party tandem video games
• collaborative creation in art and music
• shared 3-D White Boards for collaborative Kinetic Art
• jam global online with new pals in our real time MIDI music mixer!
• Cyberfiction
• aspiring screen writing collaborative workshop and contest,
• bargain hunting, group buying and Barter Association, circles and networking
• judgment matched partnerships for lucrative commissioned e-trading
• Street Theatre Commandos, Militant Absurdists, and random Performance Artistes
• Nerd resistance cells against cliques of petty malicious bullies
• and more, for groups of well-matched people to have fun, get things done, and bond.

Marketing Affiliate Program

Future interaction on the frontiers of ever more sophisticated automated Sociometry is to easily identify and solicit qualified prospective Marketing Affiliates by personality profile, even without prior work experience.  This includes chat room junkies, influencers, prospective local Computer Telephony Chat line franchisees, and local public speakers in different contexts, who are to all be offered personal webpages and voice mailboxes customized to their needs. Matching and social network optimization are to also to assemble downlines for compatibility, efficiency, and productivity, for Multilevel or Network Marketing.  Or, to put it another way, interaction on the frontiers of advanced network automated Sociometry is to easily optimize the social network for MLM as an after thought to every other purpose. Social activity and event suggestion are also to be utilized to help the Affiliates have fun promoting local access. A common cliché is to say that any given product or service 'are to sell itself'.  Interaction on the frontiers of advanced automated Sociometry might be the first to literally live up to such a claim, being designed with the social network in mind, to include functionality intended to forge new links between people, making their networks stronger. Automated Sociometry thus would already tend to propagate among new end users.

Social Needs and Compatibility Services

Affiliates are typically tasked with introducing the service to friends, associates and acquaintances to begin logging in, playing with interface, downloading software, and filling out questionnaires, so that suggestions pertinent to those relationships may be proffered, at least for activities and potential common interests. Or, best of all, a perfect suggested new unmet friends in common to help balance imperfect existing relationships. Because, often the very similarities that draw people together may make them badly incompatible.

Social environment optimization is particularly important for mitigating the short comings of stable and close relationships that are nevertheless defenseless from the world, and even counterproductive, because similar compatible partners may magnify weaknesses and faults in common. And crucial help may be underserved, unavailable or dysfunctionally networked. Even a shared sex partner may be discreetly suggested, if and as indicated by the data. But this is an area requiring great discretion, and is mentioned more as an indication of just how well future interaction on the frontiers of ever more sophisticate automated Sociometry may perform and the degree of trust  to be elicited from users. Yet entirely feasible

Growth Potential

Local user base growth, in every area, are to become very important to the end user.  This point are to be hammered home by ongoing promotion.  To start with, users are to be educated about pool size and it's importance, including all the explanation of compatibility levels given above.  This is to be only the first step in an ongoing process making use of existing social contexts as well as standard marketing techniques.

To use existing social connections we need only to ask people about the others in their life, explaining that the best way to find the best matches for a given person are to be to use social context information as well as all the personality and interest stuff.  People must be allowed to refuse, and should also be able to keep the identities of their social contacts hidden, but we can indeed give better service if they tell us about those people, identify them, or both.

If they do identify their social contexts, those people might even be targeted directly, with respect doe the privacy of our original users, and not pass their evaluations on to the people they evaluate, but with that guarantee, it is still a resource for drawing new users.  And this might serve as the lead into any Affiliate Program.

End users are to be informed about the need for enlarging our pool of  potential matches and especially  for enlarging local data bases, for optimal combinatorial matches face to face, until they are as good as the ones they are to already be experiencing long distance.  Thus online success is to be utilized to motivate good local word of mouth and expansion, as well as Nationally and Internationally, via the Net. As an immediate incentive, integrated into the system, to keep the end user interested, answering questions and coming back for more, an immediate return for supplying information about themselves is to be connection to the interactive Artificial Wisdom experience data base, offering pages of detailed information supplied by similar people, including their worst mistakes, greatest succeses (all suitably anonymized), tastes, preferences, and almost anything else. This growing data base is likely also to become invaluable as consumer information for marketing. These people, well matched to share information in this way, are to actually be incompatible and even volatile for direct communication, as often happens, because they are to tend to be too much alike.  Instead, they are to each be matched with others for those all important complementary dissimilarities crucial to a good compatible match.

Social Network Optimization

As rewarding as the online Internet experience can be, the most important function of applied Sociometry might be help in reworking the end user's own personal neighborhood in the social network.  Sociologists and anthropologists use the term social network to describe the interconnection of people by different social relationships. Social network analysis is a recognized application of sociology, and large corporations sometimes employ consultants to perform social network analysis on their network of employees.  Optimization is the next step after analysis, and is usually done manually by corporate management after the consultant's report is received, probably because management insists on exercising that power. Ever more sophisticated automated Sociometry is to improve the social network by suggesting stronger connections and checking connectivity, therefore to include functions for social network analysis and limited optimization under user control.  Essentially this adds network connectivity to each definition of compatibility, to accomplish more than merely creating isolated and insular cliques connected only internally.

What is Compatibility?

No single definition of compatibility is to be relied upon exclusively, since there must be at least as many mechanics of compatibility as there are social relationship types.  Again, questionnaires are to be carefully designed in order to collect information useful for matching people -- different questionnaires for different kinds or purposes of compatibility.  All are to be refined through continual feedback.

In general, compatibility is to be estimated by carefully weighing similarities and differences, using the results of social surveys where appropriate.  Similarities of interest, social class, religion, and level of education, are generally good signs of compatibility. But people who want to take the lead in some area of their lives should not be matched to people with the same desire.  Or else there are to inevitably be friction.  That also applies to people who need to claim the same piece of territory in their common environment. Thus certain differences are also crucial to compatibility, as are similarities.

Matching according to such rules is complicated, but probably more reliable that depending on users to specify what they want.  Whether it is an employer telling a corporate headhunter what kind of new employee he wants, or a man describing the kind of woman who interests him, people are just not very good at it. People simply are not very good at understanding or stating what they want from another person.  And that applies to most of the social relationships listed above.  Ever more sophisticated automated Sociometry may utilize such information (along with all the other data) if the user cares to provide it, and can even take it literally, if the user insists.  But it is better used as yet another clue to the user's personality.

Rather than simply accepting user specifications, ever more advanced and sophisticated automated Sociometry is to cooperate interactively with users to help them develop requirements that are to be meaningful.  The same capability would then be useful in developing their own personal descriptions, as an aid to personal growth, self help and education, thus also supporting each person as an individual, regardless of all interpersonal uses.

Pool Size and Compatibility Levels

Growth of the user-base is essential for increasing returns on investment, and equally so for providing good service.  Just as an insurance plan works better if it has a large pool of subscribers, any attempt to match people is projected to work better with larger pools of candidates. Indeed, pool size is central to a scale for describing the quality of social relationships.  It is a logarithmic scale like the Richter scale for earthquakes, or the Beaufort scale for winds. The scale in question describes the average compatibility as would be expected if one were able select the best out of a certain number of candidates.  The scale in question utilizes base-10 logarithms, but for most purposes you just need to count the zeros.   There are 3 zeros in 1000, so the best 1 in 1000 is said to be Level 3. That's a common level of compatibility for ordinary friendship.

According to Douglas Wilson, level 6 would be the best 1 in 1,000,000 and would describe a very unusual level of compatibility.  Of course you could not actually evaluate a million candidates, but it still makes sense as a way of specifying a level of compatibility. Since this is a logarithmic scale, Level 6 is not just twice as compatible as Level 3, just as an earthquake measuring 6 on the Richter scale, is not just twice as severe as one measuring 3 on the same scale.  How could we describe Level 6 compatibility?  Perhaps meeting such a person would shake up your life like the corresponding earthquake. And in order to help each of us find near-perfect, Level-6, 1-in-a-million, compatibility for ALL of the kinds of social relationships listed above, and more would require that the pool size, the number of participants, is one million or more.  That is easily obtainable online, and for people who only want online or e-mail relationships that number would suffice.

Considering that people can move, can use telecommuting to work, and can make other adaptations if a relationship is good enough to warrant them, that number would indeed suffice. But for more local relationships there is no substitute for a large number of participants in a smaller greater metropolitan area.

Service Portal

The proposed business venture would need to maintain a website serving as a portal, or entry point, where the user are to find many services and links to other sites. The most obvious of these services are suggestions of books to read, movies to watch, places to visit, events and gatherings to attend, food to eat, wine to drink, goods, services, and so on. Some such functionality is available in existing online services, such as online bookstores which suggest books based on what you've bought in the past, but such narrow focus makes them less reliable. Better to suggest books based on all that data, including one's taste in books, but also one's taste in movies, places, events, food, wine, and so on. Ever more advanced and sophisticated automated Sociometry is to make all this possible, and perform much better because of it. All the other data, aside from reading preference, may, on the face of it, seem irrelevant to suggesting books, but that's just not so -- because lifestyle influences everything. Good detailed personality profiles, functioning computer models of peoples' personalities, interest, education, etc. are to make it possible to suggest all sorts of things, any and all things -- online things like newsgroups and mailing lists, and everything that can be imagined offline.

Hone application

Future interaction on the frontiers of advanced automated Sociometry is to include a number of other services, some just to be more useful, some to encourage people to supply data, some as education, and some purely as entertainment. Some of that functionality may be better provided by software on the user's own machine instead of an online service, though both are possible. Versions of the software for home or office computer use are to be marketed, to run locally on one's own computer or network, also to be designed to connect to the website and even other home or corporate software enabled computers, and actually assist people with social activity of the more mundane sort, with address book, scheduler, and so on, all integrated with Unified Messaging, but more intuitively and interactively. Unified Messaging integrates email, FAX, voice mail, and more, all remote accessible.

Of course, remote access software already exists, to enable people on the road to fully use their desktop computers and networks by remote control, via other computers, particularly their laptops, even when they are away, elsewhere, or traveling.  Other software schedulers and email clients are abundant, even as freeware. Better future interaction facilitated via automated Sociometry will be of ever greater help, the more it will be used, and the more data to be mined and applied. And the proposed venture is to provide more intuitive operation with greater versatility than anyone else. As before access to this data may be restricted by the user, but again, "The more you tell us the more we tell you!" And the better the software are to learn to respond to the user.

There are many other possibilities for home use, some of which are quite sophisticated and could therefore command a high price and/or generate large sales figures::

• Voice Interactive
• autodial ordinary or Internet telephone calls,
• graphic mapping of social networks,
• Artificially Intelligent Personal Communications Nexus
• Dynamic real time electronic social network monitor
• Unified Messaging [email, voice conference, FAX, etc.] broadcast
• keyable to selected regions of the user's social network graph,
• integrated personal Rolodex with compatibility hints,
• consolidated interaction schedule and record
• organized statistical structured data search with animated global graphic
• interactive shared information structure and fluid interactive shared knowledge base
• consolidated interactive communications history, relational data base, and bio
• brainstorming tool kit with universal sharable graphic mind mapping formats
• Voice Recognition to identify callers,
• Voice Stress Analysis to detect unease, evasion or lying,
• intonation and enunciation analysis to identify a caller's dialect
• complete Net Detective and genealogy tool box
• Skip Tracing, asset research, background, and more
• Speech-to-Text / Text-to-Speech
• functionality by voice control
• universal right click menu of features
• availability of home software features for use in all other software
• control by user interface of system and all other software
• compatibility with all your existing text tools, input and communication
• context sensitive grammar & spellchecker:
• keyed to dialect preference in your profile, or a caller's accent
• learns to recognize each user's individual mistakes and spelling errors
• Internet integration to online dictionaries and Thesauri
• an expanding range of new capabilities to dominate more markets...

 

Use in the workplace

Any single particular automated Sociometry enabled computer would be readily configured to cooperate with other similarly enabled computers, sending requests for information and digesting what comes in. Enhanced or professional versions of such advanced automated Sociometry software, with such network functionality unlocked, and more, are to be marketed at a high price to professionals fields where projected demand is high. Interoperation and remote access, HTML integrated, are to even facilitate web service on a dynamic IP, without the added expense and problems associated with a static IP.

A Service Web night even offer it's own hierarchy of domain names, using the same technology by which chat tools differentiate users by handles and passwords, even though it are to appear as our own special hierarchy of domain names. And we are to even reserve all the most potentially valuable domain names for lucrative re$ale, later on, after automated link Sociometry catches on and becomes standard.

A compatible freeware sownloadable JAVA Applet/ browser plug-in might be required to open browser access to the Service Web, for the general public. The JAVA Applet versions would be dowloadable, again each time, for WebTV and other Net computers with no local disk drives to store even so much as a browser plug-in. For convenience and to further promote the brand name, the plug-ins are to appear as a prominent button on your browser tool bar.

While leaving plenty of short catchy domain names up for grabs by our valued customers, all the most potentially valuable Service Web domain names of major Name Brands, Fortune 500 Companies, celebrities, and the like, may be reserved for lucrative re$ale later, after automated Sociometry catches on.

A MetaBrowser TM as Internet user default option is to open different WebSites and WebPages in whichever Browser they are designed for, are most friendly to, have less glitches in on the user's system, and are "best viewed with". And, to provide an attractive basic demo of better service via distributed access computing, a spectacular animated browser integrated visual route tracing including sound FX and even optional speech output with automatic simple rerouting via participating Service Web TM servers through a branded matched advertising supported pop up console, in case of time outs, routing problems, stubborn cached routing misinformation and other such blockages, misdirections and bottle necks as occur along the Net. The Console pop up at every redirected download page or other file, with updated routing information and new advertising material, can be designed to automatically minimize again upon completion of the download. Meanwhile, with each hop, a transparent trace route map line animation are to overlay the entire screen, play out, and quickly vanish; data saved into the log, to be replayed or forwarded to Tech Support later on. The animation and console info animation are to also integrate with local area social network diagramming spectacular animated browser integrated visual route tracing including sound FX and even optional speech output with automatic simple rerouting via participating  servers through a branded matched advertising supported pop up console, in case of time outs, routing problems, stubborn cached routing misinformation and other such blockages, misdirections, all with updated routing information and new advertising material, but automatically minimize again upon completion of the download.

Meanwhile, with each hop, a transparent trace route map line animation are to overlay the entire screen, play out, and quickly vanish; data saved into the log, to be replayed or forwarded to Tech Support later on. Time outs are to simply be indicated by a flashing browser icon, clickable to repeat the animation and console info. Visual route tracing animation is also to integrate with local area social network diagramming. Also included are to be such popular gimmicks as a different flashy downloading browser skins and cursors for each page, to expand the appeal of the freeware, promote interaction via automated Sociometry, and further expand the user base.

Entertainment and Education

Automated Sociometry is to facilitate not only actual social activity with real people, but also rehearsal or play, in video simulation. Manipulation of user profiles might be utilized in simulation rehearsal for real life, by creating plausible interactive virtual profiles from social survey data. Such functionality, catering to an intense interest in peer socializing, could also be presented as entertainment, something like a video game, which may be of interest to girls and young women -- a market not well served by current first person shoot'em up video-games. Whether seen as a game or a serious application, the mass of social survey data available and the generally question-and-answer format makes possible a simulation which can provide a very good rehearsal, allowing people to plan social activity and anticipate what form it might take, also to help young people learn about themselves, try out various social roles, and see what real life may be like and have fun doing it.

Usage on the go

Was that you? Where we sparking? Were you interested? Such tenuous and awkward nagging thoughts are to finally be put to rest. Chance flirtation is to be verifiable online for all parties, afterwards, by entry data describing the encounter, and followed up by profiling, matching, activity/venue suggestions, interaction, bonding, and electronic fun and games. And for more instant gratification, with highly marketable personal hardware and software, portable wireless computing and communications enabled with proximity site to site connection are to facilitate automated quick matching of compatible desires and expectations, far superior to current rudimentary inadequate inflexible shallow fad singles electronic toys and Smartphone apps. For more serious networking, sophisticated palm top software and remote touch tone rolodex service is to be integrated. Even Distributed Access for active badges and Smart Cards.

Impact and personal growth from automated Sociometry

In short, if only the right people cross our paths, lighten our hearts, open our eyes, minds, and doors before our paths, all can be right with us all.

Participating together via ever more advanced and sophisticated automated Sociometry, users are to gradually improve their social lives and the social network around them, reinventing society, creating a society that are to work better for them. Within a short time they are to find online or e-mail relationships, and that are to help, because even online friends can help people make decisions and live better lives.

Indeed, compatible relationships help people make better decisions. This is known as error covariance. People who err on either side of correct answers in quizzes, for example, have been found to make surprisingly correct estimates together, and to exercise improved judgment. And that educational experience even inculcates in each person improved judgment individually, over time. But that is only one facet of personal growth, improvement, and well being. And there are to be matches for various emotional needs to improve personal disposition.

Alas, the opposite of successful error covariance, alas all to often the consequence of common bad matching, is the tendency to groupshift, a special case of groupthink in which the norm for consensus overrides the honest and realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action, wherein group interaction leads members, reinforcing one another, in exaggeration toward a more extreme position, to each and all shift their positions toward a more extreme position in the direction they were already leaning, either more conservative even to the point of the moribund and willfully blind, or, more often, the embrace of even fanatical or just needlessly ill advised and foolhardy greater risk tolerance.

But with the benefit of future interaction on the frontiers of ever more sophisticated advanced automated Sociometry, and through their new online friends, xxx end users are to have the opportunity to build close-knit networks of real-world contacts, including good friends, a compatible spouse, a good job, and all the other social relationships already listed. As automated  Sociometry propagates, users in large cities are to meet compatible people face-to-face, and if users in smaller regions can get involved through visits to nearby cities, each user is soon thereafter to become embedded in a self-sustaining group of compatible individuals.

Access for All

It must be anticipated that at upon inception, most people in the network-neighborhood of any person will not be participants in interaction via automated Sociometry, indeed many won't even be online. To reach such people future interaction automated link Sociometry must include many forms of access. User-chosen designation and password, rather than website account, workstation, phone line, or ISP username, will allow access on another person's machine or any computer or telephone they can use, anywhere. Internet access is now commonly available from home, at work, at school, and from various places that allow anyone who walks in off the street, such as public libraries and Cyber Cafes, allowing even people with no e-mail account access. Also integrated are to be free email accounts, anonymous email forwarding, and web email boxes, the better serve end users. But even without such additional identity shielding services, all users are to still to effectively remain anonymous within the system.

With Computer Telephony, the system is also to be accessible by phone and even HAM/Packet radio, with Voice Mail, Paging, and Conference Bridges (chat lines). There are to even be a Telephonic/Internet hybrid interface, and compatibility with TDY for the deaf. Questionnaires are to be Touch Tone Voice Menu or even Voice Interactive, with optional emotional response input using Voice Stress Analysis, or custom FAX back text questionnaires. FAX-on-Demand answers consisting of checked boxes, return FAXed, are to input to the system by Optical Character Recognition. Even Cable TV boxes and Video Game Systems are to also be adapted for input. And there is to be support from a matched radio club, to advise Amateur Radio associations in providing telephone relays and Internet on ramps from local and state wide HAM/Packet Radio networks, for access even in the most remote areas.

A bold initiative would be to bring the blessings of sophisticated automated Sociometry even to developing counties where it is most sorely needed. To take this unprecedented cutting edge democratizing vital social technology to places where computers, networks, and even telephones or Short Wave Radios even still remain scarce. If such initiatives succeed, a billion or so people may be affected, and as their lives get better they may join the developed world and be easily integrated into it, and provide the global economy with crucial new growing markets and opportunities. Future interaction on the frontiers of advanced automated Sociometry may even include underground social networking facilitator cells working covertly under conditions of oppression or instability. A cunning alternative to the hazard and hardships of open dissidence under such conditions, and a stop gap short of  the national disaster of violent conflict.

Automated Sociometry at the cutting edge of Psychological research

Functionality of automated Sociometry is to be continually self improving utilizing end user feedback. Questionnaires are also to be designed to test different Psychological theories, looking for certain key responses, to then test predicted further responses. Unpredicted variances, especially consistent ones, are to produce marketable data for the improvement of Psychological theories, however increasingly comprehensive, as automated Sociometry expert systems are continually educated by Psychologists and Psychotherapists. As a comprehensive research, ever more advanced automated Sociometry may rival the Human Genome Initiative as the single most important Scientific project of our times.

Psychotherapy, not to mention Behavior Modification, even methods used in brainwashing and mind alteration generally, recreational or otherwise, chemical or non chemical, is yet another of those technologies long predating Science, formal or otherwise, to explain it all. Thus, in ancient tradition, explanation and diagnosis still appeal to the Supernatural. Indeed, even Sigmund Freud, the father of modern Psychodynamic clinical practice and theory, still extensively resorts to Mythology and fiction literature in general, building upon the prior insights of Shamans and Playwrights. After all, Psychology, like all Scientific hypothesis, and for that matter, Psychotherapy like any other yet to be better explained technology, arising and evolving, where else, if not from from trial and error, is inherently conjectural.

A particular long standing criticism of Psychotherapy and Psychology, by Thomas Stephen Szasz most notably, is the assertion that we do not know why Psychotherapy works when it works, or why it fails when it fails. But what is the basis for such criticism? And is it fair? Indeed, what is this alleged explanatory failure of Psychological theory? Because, certainly explanatory theories exist. And Psychological theory may actually be deemed cogent, plausible, meaningful, valuable, profound and even supportable, even despite being deemed somewhat general. The answer is that the basis for Szasz's criticism would be the argument that at least an important and high degree of explanatory ability of a theory can be put into doubt by it's predictive unreliability. Because if it does not predict, then it only vaguely explains the different observed outcomes. And, alas, success or failure prediction of therapy is notoriously unreliable.

And as Karl Popper points out, to be more precisely and less approximately true and in better or closer correspondence with reality, a statement must first be clear. In other words, Szasz's criticism is not actually a falsification of Psychology, but only really amounts Popper's attack upon the very falsifability and therefore testability of Psychology as a theoretical framework, perhaps still too lyrical and not as rigorous as one might wish. Psychology is based upon observation, field work, case study, even introspection and insight. For whatever reason, complexity, variability, unknown individual experience and context, the difficulty of truly controlled experiments, human conduct may not be strictly repeatable. And so, as things stand, it has been better to simply admit this and to refrain from demanding of Psychology the standards of an Empirical science, even though only repeatable evidence can claim for psychiatry the status of an Empirical science. There has been frustratingly little to do except to lament that such, after all, is Soft Science. But what a disgrace if orthodox followers of Freud, like those of Marx, actually have never wanted their theories to be testable, but, rather, sacrosanct!  

However, now, personality profiling, with the focus upon combinatorial optimization shows great promise in better explaining and even predicting individual human response, even therapeutic success or failure. Because, first such personality profiling identifies in greater detail and specificity the needs (from the superficial to the profound) of each individual in question (as derived from identification of all the pertinent and varied triggers and inputs, -which are all, after all, no more than social stimuli- then correlated with individual unique and distinct sets of response), at long last beyond Szasz's famous iconoclastic and perhaps somewhat facile dismissive glib generality that everyone can benefit from just about any sort of attention somehow. Thus, it may even some day come to pass that ever more advanced automated  Sociometry may actually render even essentially Freudian Psychodynamics precise enough to be testable!

And the facility of meeting those needs by matching to other compatible personalities would apply as readily for patients to Psychotherapists and Psychotherapeutic modalities no differently than any other relationships and activity suggestions. Something hither to left, if not completely to sheer chance, then, to the best diagnostic intuition, talent and ability, of which ever evaluating therapist, to then hazard best possible referral.

It takes a Global Village

All this applies because matching by combinatorial optimization also applies to compatible patients, therapists, and therapeutic modalities, being that these are still relationships and preferences. If, indeed, as and when therapy are to still be needed or desired.

However special Psychiatric issues need not even always apply even for hardened criminals, who's biggest problems, and their solution, are so often societal. Future interaction on the frontiers of ever more advanced automated Sociometry may also vastly improve criminal rehabilitation, taking literally the prisoner's euphemistic description of destructive misdeeds as "mistakes", are to work wonders first of all by simply matching cell mates for error covariance and the exercise of improved judgment. Where as, as thing are now, it is well known that prison only further criminalizes by an exchange of bad influence, that even facilitates veritable criminal education! Therapy is limited to patients, individual and groups, that show up for their appointments. People coming in need of help after things have already gone wrong for them. While criminal rehabilitation, badly under funded, in so far as it is available, has a cast off and literally captive audience participation. But automated Sociometry holds promise to reach more people and even to treat social network itself. Modern Psychotherapy, in it's various forms and applications, has been saddled with the thankless task and band aid solution of cleaning up society's messes, and relinquished it's edge of an agenda of social reform. Future interaction as facilitated by ever more sophiticated automated Sociometry, holds the promise of greater efficiency in broad application, even perhaps fulfilling the dream of Psychotherapy as a social cause. Profiling and matching by combinatorial optimization hold the promise of filling the needs of psychiatric patients no differently than anyone else. Many people whose problems would formerly have taken them to therapy in the past may be able to do better, instead (or additionally) in a new and better social environment. Because many there are of those needing professional help largely for the want of any other place to turn, lacking someone to talk to who would also accept them, legitimize or validate them and their problems, and help in working them out. And as and when Therapy is still needed or desired, future interaction on the frontiers of advanced automated Sociometry may still help to match patients to the right therapists and therapeutic modalities, a matter so crucial and so neglected.

Indeed, beyond even outreach, where and when whatever mode of intervention is indicated, an optimized society are to evolve to become better, more aware and involved, in responding in proportion also to the aid of people in danger from abuse, grave or petty, as well as those who present whatever danger to others or to themselves, to see them all at last imbedded in a close knit optimized social network, with important relationships and connections facilitated by combinatorial optimization.

 

 

Authors:

Douglas P. Wilson dp-wilson@shaw.net visionary software engineer. 

Aaron Agassi aaronagassi@comcast.net aspiring Entrepreneur. 

Of interest:

• Problems even for future interaction on the frontiers of Advanced automated Sociometry
• Bioethics on the frontiers of advanced network Sociometry 

Of concern: Business Report

Copyright © 2000 - 2022 Aaron Agassi aaronagassi@comcast.net

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