Agents and their social life

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"If computers could create a society, what kind of world would they make? Thanks to the work of an ambitious project that adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, "‘computer society"’, in which millions of software agents will potentially evolve their own culture, we could be about to find out. With funding from the European Commission's 'Future and Emerging Technologies' (FET) initiative of the IST programme, five European research institutes are collaborating on the NEW TIES project to create a thoroughly 21st-century brave new world -– one populated by randomly generated software beings, capable of developing their own language and culture." (read more by clicking on the titlte of the blog).

Imagine a vertical line. At the bottom, some very elementary agents, simple tasks, unsophisticated lives, blind mechanisms of sort. But they get together, and a level up in our vertical line, the next family of agents are just a bit less elementary, their tasks a bit less trivial and simple. They are not so unsophisticated, so uninteresting. Move up one more step, and you will encounter societies of ever more complex agents. Then, all of a sudden, there is us, you and me and mom and dad, and Jane and Peter. But it lasts only one step. The next is your family or your group of friends, a party, a company, some sort of society of human agents which has already lost that special spark that we call mind.
From the mindless bottom of sub-atomic particles to the mindless top of the universe, we are just one of the billionth stations where Being calls at, in its journey from simplicity to complexity. The question is: can we reproduce this ontological journey?

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