A world co-populated with many billions of AGI-level agents is the basis of a very different kind of society than any we have known. There is considerable intellectual, economic and scientific interest in Agentic AI, defined broadly as discrete AIs tasked to perform intricate actions that go beyond what we might expect from a tool, or even from a technology, instead increasingly closer to the complex goal-directed motivations of humans. Agential AI will enable not only the individual coordination of fleets of interacting actions on one’s behalf, but also produce new forms of synthetic social relations. Most “conversations” will be between agents and other agents, nested within larger temporary aggregates. As we watch agentic doubles of ourselves do things on our behalf, we enter into psychological relationships with the double in the mirror, a shadow who now speaks back to us. How might we clarify this mechanistic organic agency that seems to frustrate easy terminological categorization? What even is “agency” in this context and how may human agency -past, present, future– be re-examined in light of it? Agentworld explores the phases of agent design, proliferation, alignment and ultimately the realization of a new society of minds.

A far greater challenge than the engineering of AGI-level models will be the intricate integration of their new possibilities across diverse human cultures. Presuming that alignment must always be bi-directional between society and new technologies, Diffusionism explores the phases and strategies by which the diffusion revolution will unfold. “Diffusionism” holds that the long term impact of making functional general intelligence widespread, inexpensive, accessible and useful will be, on net, extremely positive. The augmentation and amplification of collective and individual intelligence will upend every institution predicated on a scarcity of access of agency.  How can traditions and discourses contribute to transformation (rather than regulation)? Cen we shift from the obsession on hard alignment with societal norms to the reimagination of planetary society in the age of heterogeneous machine intelligences?

No two cultures define “artificial” the same way. For some the word implies artifice and deception, and for others merely the man-made. Philosophy, anthropology and science have defined the concept in myriad useful but dissimilar ways.  For contemporary evolutionary theory, to alter an ecological niche is not the privilege of any one species but an almost universal adaptive strategy. If so, is the artificial to be found at the deepest levels of life itself? 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?