There is a new virtual online community, but you are not invited!
In fact, when I say “virtual” community I really mean it. This is a community that resides within about 50 computers at various institutes and is made up of artificial intelligences.
The New Ties (New and Emergent World models Through Individual, Evolutionary and Social Learning) project is building artificial personalities to populate a virtual world. The “agents” (yesss, Missster Annnnderrrrson) will be built with potentials for pain and satisfaction and they will live in a world with challenges. They will need to gather resources to survive, but they will exist in competing tribes. The programs will be able to reproduce with other agents of the opposite gender and create offspring with mixed “genetic” traits of their parents.
The program is still having the bugs worked out (I have not seen reports on insects staying in the system, but they may be), but it is almost ready to go live. It is interesting to watch how this has all been going together. It is built as a P2P system by people communicating using chat and other internet system just like so many open source systems are done. In fact, they even have the software available for others to test and work with. I have not seen the licensing on the code, but since it uses the Counter Strike rendering engine I doubt the full thing could be open source.
Here is some more useful information from a while back.
Here is the thought.
What if the experiment works out fantastically?
What if the “agents” become something almost sentient and begin to build beliefs that go beyond the physical structure around them.
What if they begin to question their existence and origins?
What if they develop religion and the ideas of Creationism within their own world? What about Intelligent Design?
What if they become in need of a savior? Would someone be sent to them?
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