Contributed talk in ALife & Society, July 31, 2019, 11:30 a.m. in room USB.4.005

Artificial Democratic Life. Re-engineering the autonomy of the social, a research program

Xabier E. Barandiaran

watch Publication New constraints and opportunities often give rise to the emergence of new forms of life or their radical transformation. Such is the case of the internet and the way in which it has radically transformed social life. In the era of Artificial Intelligence and Algorithmic Governance, the combination of corporate controlled social networks, big data analytics and political cyberwar, the issue of how to build public infrastructures for peaceful, deliberative and privacy-aware democratic life becomes essential. By \emph{Artificial Democratic Life} I mean the design and deployment of artificial infrastructures aimed at enhancing or improving social (human) democratic life understood as a decentralized, egalitarian, and participatory decision making and commitment generating system of interactions. Artificial Life as a discipline and as a community has much to contribute to the contemporary challenge of redesigning democracy in the network era, in understanding democracy as a form of life, one that evolves into increasingly higher complexity and diversity while preserving homeostatic invariants and designing the infrastructures capable to resiliently enhancing it. We identify some opportunities and specific challenges that can be faced using Alife simulation techniques and conceptual resources.