Ex Machina: Coevolving Machines and the Origins of the Social Universe

If we could rewind the tape of the Earth’s deep history back to the beginning and start the world anew–would social behavior arise yet again? While the study of origins is foundational to many scientific fields, such as physics and biology, it has rarely been pursued in the social sciences. Yet knowledge of something’s origins often gives us new insights into the present. In Ex Machina, John H. Miller introduces a methodology for exploring systems of adaptive, interacting, choice-making agents, and uses this approach to identify conditions sufficient for the emergence of social behavior. Miller combines ideas from biology, computation, game theory, and the social sciences to evolve a set of interacting automata from asocial to social behavior. Readers will learn what it takes for an adaptive system of simple agents to become social–and what it means for a system to be social in the first place.