ALIFE & SOCIETY IX

This session continues the tradition of the ALife & Society Special Session: now in its 9th year.

Artificial Life, through its combination of philosophical perspectives, modelling approaches, insights, methods, and technologies, has immense potential to engage with pressing societal, ecological, and planetary problems. Many of these are one-shot wicked problems, where the quality of “life-as-we-know-it” is fundamentally wrapped up in the quality of society and our environment. Addressing these problems necessitates interactionist perspectives rather than individualist approaches to “quality”, which place equity, sustainability, and the realities of our socioeconomic and political contexts at the heart of research.

In doing this, we also cannot escape questions of ethics and power, and our special session provides a space for the ALife community to engage explicitly with these. The ALife and Society Special Session aims to offer a home for the necessary extended and critical scholarly discussion on how our discipline could, does, and should engage with the grand societal, ecological, and planetary challenges of our time.

Following on from eight previous special sessions, this special session welcomes ALife-based research and perspectives that can help enable (or be a catalyst for) addressing societal, ecological, and planetary problems. Our special session will facilitate scholarly discourse on these areas, where ALife perspectives can be developed from ideas to experiments and practice, in collaboration with other disciplines and those working on the ground on these grand challenges. We propose a programme consisting of a combination of full papers and extended abstracts, as well as a sister workshop which aims to extend this discourse through group-based discussions and a scholarly panel.

Topics of Interest include (but are not limited to):

• ALife in the real world: case studies and learning from work on real-world ecological and societal challenges 

• Using ALife perspectives to tackle wicked global problems, including those targeted by the UN Sustainable Development Goals (e.g. poverty, hunger, climate change)

• ALife and the environment: sustainability, ecological change, agriculture, conservation 

• Communicating and educating society on ALIFE

• Using ALife to empower and enable social action

• The design of ecological-social-technological systems as hybrid living systems.

• Using ALife approaches to learn from, and engage with, complex ecosystems where the interaction between parts and feedbacks between levels are fundamental for emergence

• Co-evolution of the self, society, biosphere, and/or technology

• Philosophical, ethical, and practical approaches to Artificial Life in the Anthropocene

• Societal implications and impacts of hybrid living/lifelike technologies and AI systems with agency

• New opportunities and challenges in ALife that merit reflection on societal impact or ethical ramifications

• Technical, philosophical and social implications of synthetic biology and ecology

• Approaches for managing dynamic, multi-level living systems

• Emergent interactions and dynamic aspects of the organism-environment boundary in socio-ecological-technical systems

• Visions of artificial futures: ALife-inspired visions and fiction for the Anthropocene

• Participatory appropriation - political, economic, cultural - of ALife/AI technologies

Organisers:
Imran Khan (Independent) - imy@imytk.co.uk

Peter Lewis (Ontario Tech University) - peter.lewis@ontariotechu.ca 

Alex Penn University of Sussex, Alexandra.Penn@sussex.ac.uk

Alan Dorin (Monash University) - alan.dorin@monash.edu