From: "Christakis, Nicholas" To: "Jeffrey E." leevacatiorvagmail.com> Subject: Re: HW thanks Sent Saturday, September 24. 2016 11:59:30 AM dear jcff: we are doing a number of new things. one of my favorite projects, currently under review so i cannot share all details, involves an initiative in what we call `dumb Al.' we are going in a different direction than others who are increasing the sophistication of Al technologies. we are decreasing it. we are developing simple sorts of AI, and we are creating bots that we drop into groups of humans (creating `heterogeneous systems' of hots interspersed among real humans) so as to facilitate the performance of those groups. through a bit of thoughtful programming and careful inter-position of the bots, we can enhance group performance in a number of valuable and useful ways, we think. we think there are many applications and could be transformational, as you put it, though, judging from the sons of things you probably hear about, perhaps not. and we have two other sustained, ongoing efforts: breadboard.yale.edu (software with which we create artificial societies of real people, which allows us to do experiments, e.g., this recent paper in Nature: http://humannaturelab.net/paperlineauality-and-visibility-of-wealth-in-experimental-social- networks/ ) and http://hutnannaturelab.net/honduras-social-networks/ (a large field experiment in Honduras in which we are trying to create artificial tipping points to foster large-scale behavior change) finally, we have some other cool work involving alternative currencies and the role of network cycles in economic systems (basically, without cycles, the systems perform terribly). best, nicholas On Sep 24, 2016, at 7:40 AM 9/24/16, jeffrey E. [email protected]> wrote: thanks, what are you currently working on? have you seen any discovery that is trasnformational. in your field.? it seems little new in many others. BTW, sol goldman was one of my first c