Related papers: The Ecosystem Path to General AI
Representations are internal models of the environment that can provide guidance to a behaving agent, even in the absence of sensory information. It is not clear how representations are developed and whether or not they are necessary or…
Complex change is often described as "evolutionary" in economics, policy, and technology, yet most system dynamics models remain constrained to fixed state spaces and equilibrium-seeking behavior. This paper argues that evolutionary…
Biological neural networks can perform complex computations to predict their environment, far above the limited predictive capabilities of individual neurons. While conventional approaches to understanding these computations often focus on…
This paper presents Wanderer, a model of how autonomous adaptive systems coordinate internal biological needs with moment-by-moment assessments of the probabilities of events in the external world. The extent to which Wanderer moves about…
Climate change poses an existential threat, necessitating effective climate policies to enact impactful change. Decisions in this domain are incredibly complex, involving conflicting entities and evidence. In the last decades, policymakers…
This paper introduces Experiversum, a lakehouse-based ecosystem that supports the curation, documentation and reproducibility of exploratory experiments. Experiversum enables structured research through iterative data cycles, while…
The behavior of ecological systems mainly relies on the interactions between the species it involves. We consider the problem of inferring the species interaction network from abundance data. To be relevant, any network inference…
How do landscape fragmentation affects ecosystems diversity and stability is an important and complex question in ecology with no simple answer, as spatially separated habitats where species live are highly dynamic rather than just static.…
While we have witnessed a rapid growth of ethics documents meant to guide AI development, the promotion of AI ethics has nonetheless proceeded with little input from AI practitioners themselves. Given the proliferation of AI for Social Good…
We introduce a simulation environment to facilitate research into emergent collective behaviour, with a focus on replicating the dynamics of ant colonies. By leveraging real-world data, the environment simulates a target ant trail that a…
We describe a biologically-inspired research agenda with parallel tracks aimed at AI and AI safety. The bottom-up component consists of building a sequence of biophysically realistic simulations of simple organisms such as the nematode…
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have been strongly driven by the use of game environments for training and evaluating agents. Games are often accessible and versatile, with well-defined state-transitions and goals allowing for…
Given the growing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods across all aspects of environmental sciences, it is imperative that we initiate a discussion about the ethical and responsible use of AI. In fact, much…
Two of the most socially consequential issues facing today's children are the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the rapid changes to the earth's climate. Both issues are complex and contested, and they are linked through the notable…
Ecologists have long suspected that species are more likely to interact if their traits match in a particular way. For example, a pollination interaction may be more likely if the proportions of a bee's tongue fit a plant's flower shape.…
Animals and robots exist in a physical world and must coordinate their bodies to achieve behavioral objectives. With recent developments in deep reinforcement learning, it is now possible for scientists and engineers to obtain sensorimotor…
As AI systems are integrated into social networks, there are AI safety concerns that AI-generated content may dominate the web, e.g. in popularity or impact on beliefs. To understand such questions, this paper proposes the Digital Ecosystem…
The capacity of an embodied agent to understand, predict, and interact with its environment is fundamentally contingent on an internal world model. This paper introduces a novel framework for investigating the formation and adaptation of…
We study a model of a multi-species ecosystem described by Lotka-Volterra-like equations. Interactions among species form a network whose evolution is determined by the dynamics of the model. Numerical simulations show power-law…
We study the evolutionary dynamics of games under environmental feedback using replicator equations for two interacting populations. One key feature is to consider jointly the co-evolution of the dynamic payoff matrices and the state of the…