When videos go viral, protests are organized online, or extremist groups quietly recruit teenagers on social media, Florida Polytechnic University physicist Dr. Pedro Manrique sees patterns that physics can help explain.
With enough data, he can find clarity where others see confusion.
Physics is typically used to understand how the world works, and that understanding helps solve problems and drive technological advancement. Manrique has applied this approach to areas as diverse as artificial intelligence, armed combat casualties and antibiotic resistance.
In this vein, he recently co-authored a book that seeks to establish a framework for the interaction of human, technology and AI systems.
“We are entering a time in which the three are going to coexist and interact in many different ways, and there are many questions about it,” Manrique said. “The interactions can lead to large-scale events, which is something we’ve seen in videos that go viral or protests that are called from internet sources.”
Manrique added that there’s an urgent need to identify these interactions, predict them, and know how to respond.
“The idea is to lay out a new physics of the interaction of human, technology and AI systems so we can describe it, see the direction it will take, and learn how to mitigate or amplify the behavior, if desired” he said. “We believe this is the first book of this kind.”
An example of this is Russian social media activity in 2015 and 2016 regarding the undertakings of a terrorist organization, including the recruitment of teenagers.
“If you understand the mechanisms behind the interactions yielding the formation of these terrorist movements in social media, you can equip parents and authorities with additional tools to help take care of our teenagers and conceivably prevent a sudden rise in online support for terrorism,” Manrique said.
The application of physics to unexpected problems is a pull Manrique said he cannot ignore.
In addition to studying the interaction of human, technology and AI systems, he has explored patterns of casualties in conflicts using yearslong data from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He examined how group sizes fluctuated over time, identifying patterns that signal troop growth and periods that may be critical for events such as significant attacks.
“Not many people have looked into this issue from a physics angle – there are many, of course, in political science and other disciplines, but the data is hard to analyze if you don’t have a background in math or science,” Manrique said.
Manrique’s book, “Introduction to Online Complexity: The New Social Physics of Extremes, Misinformation, and AI,” is available online.
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Lydia Guzmán
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