Dear all,

The next ALife & Society Seminar will take place on Monday 28 November 2022, at 2pm GMT (== 9am EST, 11pm JST).

We are delighted to welcome Professor Jeremy Pitt, from Imperial College London, UK, to deliver the seminar. Details below.

Please join at the following Zoom link:
https://herts-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/92723234544?pwd=MEFVTDV5QVlKWGRrOGFkY2ZPaFBkdz09

Title: It's Not A Matter of A(Life and Death): It's More Important Than That

Abstract:
Cooperative Survival "games" are situations in which, following a catastrophic event, no-one survives unless everyone survives, i.e., there has to be a critical mass of survivors to gather sufficient resources to distribute amongst themselves in order for enough of them to progress to the next "turn". This scenario has been explored in the context of multiple inter-dependent games (gather resources, distribute resources, and invest resources (or not)) and multiple self-organisation mechanisms (gifting, governing, and forecasting). Some experimental results from simulation of this scenario will be discussed, as well as related work  based on other Cooperative Survival situations, inspired by the film The Platform (El Hoyo) and the TV Series Squid Game. These raise further questions about agent-based decision-making in the context of an “awareness" of its own mortality (it's action selection may result in receiving a terminate self message) and "level" of survival (i.e. it is not the cell or ant that survives, it is the body or nest). The talk will conclude with some reflections on this work for its social implications, particularly with respect to addressing high stakes, existential risk, one-shot wicked problems.

Bio:
Jeremy Pitt is Professor of Intelligent and Self-Organising Systems in the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. His research interests focus on developing formal models of social constructs and processes using computational logic, and their application in self-organising multi-agent systems. Some of this work is summarised in his recent book "Self-Organising Multi-Agent Systems: Algorithmic Foundations of Cyber-Anarcho-Socialism" (World Scientific, 2021). He also has a strong interest in the impact of technology on people and society, and since 2018 he has been Editor in Chief of IEEE
Technology and Society Magazine.

All are welcome!

Cheers,

Peter & Imy