Report on the ISAL Special Session on ALife and Society, ALife XV, Cancún, Mexico, 2016

摘要

As part of the society-themed Artificial Life 2016 Conference, ISAL organized a special session on artificial life and its societal impact. This was a deliberate attempt to bring in new voices, to challenge ourselves as a community, and to start to build a movement within ALife to genuinely engage with society. Our motivation was a strong conviction that not only does our community have a responsibility to contribute to questioning societal trajectories and to shaping new approaches, but that we are uniquely positioned to do so. As yet our collective response has been fragmented and relatively underexplored. Our aim is to start the conversation, make connections, build a movement, and kick-start initiatives to engage with the future of society critically and creatively and forge the agenda for the way ahead. A diverse program of invited and contributed talks presented new perspectives on this broad theme. Speakers aimed to act as provocateurs, suggesting new approaches, highlighting challenges and opportunities, and asking key questions, sparking off group discussion, which continued throughout the conference with online collection of ideas and follow-up discussions throughout the week. This article gives an overview of the ideas and themes brought forward and where we might go from here.The tone for the session was set with a forcible reality check from the invited speaker Luis Garcia Barrios, who has many years' experience of transdisciplinary participatory research with smallholders in the tropical mountains of Mexico. He asked us to consider what artificial life and complexity science offer the median human being, who, he reminded us, is working class and poor. He focused particularly on the rural poor, engaged in small-scale agriculture and hence intimately involved with the management of the complexity of living systems, yet marginalized by technological and societal change—people who are facing real, rather than artificial, suffering and death, in often brutal circumstances. With large-scale global economic and societal change, many rural communities of small farmers have seen their status diminish from stewardship of nature to a scrabbling, unstable existence begging at the edges of society. Interacting continuously with complex agroecosystems and intimately concerned with their dynamics, these farmers have an affinity for complexity-sensitive, ecosystemic approaches. However, although they have the potential to provide valuable ecosystem services, they are often forced into downward spirals of ecosystem degradation by the demands of the broader socioeconomic context. In parallel, the predominant visions of modern bio-smart farming (closed-loop hydroponic systems served by robots, for example) are of simplified, disconnected agroecosystems, which, although potentially resource-efficient, neither provide ecosystem services nor use human skill or labor. Luis discussed the alternative provided by agroecology, in which agricultural ecosystems are designed, constructed, and managed with the benefit of ecological science to provide both food and ecosystem services. Practitioners consider agroecology not simply a science, but a practice and a social movement—one to which artificial life could perhaps contribute.Despite their inclination towards complexity-sensitive views and practice, there is still much that farmers and agroecologists could learn and assimilate from complexity science and artificial life. Luis and his group work directly with farmers, introducing them to fundamentals of complexity and ecological dynamics, through games, models, and participation. This provides them with the tools and knowledge to make better management decisions informed by up-to-date science, for their own socioecological systems. The sharing, testing, and co-producing of complexity insights and tools as they apply in the real world and impact peoples' lives is, he suggests, an area in which the ALife community could contribute substantiall