ALIFE & SOCIETY

SCHEDULE:

SESSION 1 (1130-1300CET)
1130-1135: Welcome & introduction to the Special Session
1135-1200: Innovation and informal knowledge exchanges between firms (Juste Raimbault)
1200-1225: A Participatory Complex Systems Modelling Approach Towards Rewilding in the UK (Imran Khan and Christopher Sandom)
1225-1250: AgTech that doesn’t cost the Earth: Creating sustainable, ethical and effective agricultural technology that enhances its social and ecological contexts (Alan Dorin, Alexandra Penn and Jesús Mario Siqueiros García)
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SESSION 2 (1400-1530CET)
1400-1425: Detecting New Phase Transition Points in Large-Scale Numerical Simulations of an Adaptive Social Network Model (Hiroki Sayama)
1425-1450: Minimal Models for Spatially Resolved Population Dynamics – Applications to Coexistence (Rudolf M. Füchslin, Krütli Pius, Thomas Ott, Stephan Scheidegger, Johannes J. Schneider, Marko Seric, Timo Smieszek and Mathias S. Weyland)
1450-1530: Panel Discussion: Closing the Loop on COVID19 Modelling (Aymeric Vié, Hiroki Sayama, Steen Rasmussen, Mikhail Prokopenko)

The conference theme of ALIFE2022 is “La DOLCE vita”: how to improve the quality of real life for all. This theme recognises ALIFE’s unique potential to contribute to the real-world complex and living systems-related issues that societies face today. Within this exciting context, the ALIFE and Society Special Session will once again aim to provide a home for extended and critical discussion of how our discipline could, does and should engage with the grand societal, ecological, and planetary challenges of our time. 

We aim to emphasise that quality of “life” is fundamentally wrapped up in the quality of society. This necessitates interactionist perspectives rather than individualist approaches to “quality”. Further, when we discuss Artificial Life for “Real Lives”, we must always make sure that we ask the question “whose real lives?” and place equity (from global to socio-demographic to economic dimensions), practicality, and the reality of socio-economical-political contexts at the heart of what we propose.

We believe that Artificial Life, with its combination of tools, approaches and philosophy, has immense potential to engage with pressing real world problems. However, we must develop this potential from ideas into experiments and practice in collaborations with other disciplines and those working on the ground.  This will require us to think both critically and creatively about our possible roles and our assumptions. 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.

Moving beyond the myth of the technological fix, our focus is not on providing technological solutions to what are fundamentally social problems. Rather, we are proposing an agenda where ALife-based perspectives are explored that enable (or are a catalyst for) ecological and social solutions to ecological and social problems. ALife research has the potential to provide philosophical perspectives, modelling approaches, insights, methods, and technologies that enable us to conceive, understand, contextualise, and interact with eco-socio-technical systems in new ways.

Following on from the success of previous years, the ALife and Society special session will consist of short talks (based on submitted abstracts) interspersed with structured discussion. We welcome all contributions from any field, and particularly welcome contributions that: reflect on the pragmatics and implications of ALife applications on the ground; present lessons from real-world applications of ALife, describe work that engages with societal challenges; discusses emerging issues in bio-socio-tech-environmental interfaces, or that make new connections between ALife/AI and other disciplines with real-life applications.

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

Potential speakers are invited to submit abstracts or papers on the session themes via the ALife 2022 website: http://2022.alife.org where all relevant information may be found. 

Organisers: Peter Lewis, Imran Khan, Alex Penn