Imagine a world with 8 billion human minds and a trillion non-human, human-level AI minds. With such ratios, what is a “society”? Agentworld, a new Antikythera research unit, investigates new frameworks for understanding, modeling and composing the medium-term future of hybrid human-AI societies.

The present moment is characterized by technologies that have outpaced our concepts, necessitating new conceptual frameworks. Diffusionism holds that the long-term impact of making functional general intelligence widespread, inexpensive, and accessible will be overwhelmingly positive, yet disruptive. This widespread machine intelligence will challenge entrenched institutions and concentrated cathedrals of power.

For contemporary evolutionary theory, to alter an ecological niche is not the privilege of any one species but an almost universal adaptive strategy. What then does it mean to speak of "artificial life,” "artificial intelligence,” "artificial bodies” (robotics) and even an "artificial ecology?” How do different cultural perspectives inform an understanding of comparative and convergent artificialization?