It can also be regarded as a machine, in which specific tasks are performed by human participants, whose interaction is mediated by an infrastructure (typically, but not necessarily, digital).
[2] The idea of social machines has been around for a long time, discussed as early as 1846 by Captain William Allen, and also by authors such as Norman Mailer, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
[9] Tim Berners-Lee and James Hendler expressed some of the underlying scientific challenges with respect to AI research[10] using semantic web technology as a point of departure.
[11] Nello Cristianini and Teresa Scantamburlo argued that the combination of a human society and an algorithmic regulation forms a social machine.
[12] Cristianini's book The Shortcut discusses extensively social machines as a model for many online platforms where participants automatically annotate content during usage, in this way contributing to the overall behaviour of the system.