Shaping Influence and Influencing Shaping: A Computational Red Teaming Trust-based Swarm Intelligence Model
This work addresses the lack of guiding models for managing complex sociotechnical systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing principles without claiming broad breakthroughs.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling influencing and shaping in sociotechnical systems by defining these concepts and introducing a model based on Computational Red Teaming principles, with results validated through simulation in an artificial society.
Sociotechnical systems are complex systems, where nonlinear interaction among different players can obscure causal relationships. The absence of mechanisms to help us understand how to create a change in the system makes it hard to manage these systems. Influencing and shaping are social operators acting on sociotechnical systems to design a change. However, the two operators are usually discussed in an ad-hoc manner, without proper guiding models and metrics which assist in adopting these models successfully. Moreover, both social operators rely on accurate understanding of the concept of trust. Without such understanding, neither of these operators can create the required level to create a change in a desirable direction. In this paper, we define these concepts in a concise manner suitable for modelling the concepts and understanding their dynamics. We then introduce a model for influencing and shaping and use Computational Red Teaming principles to design and demonstrate how this model operates. We validate the results computationally through a simulation environment to show social influencing and shaping in an artificial society.