"Artificial Life and Society: Philosophies and Tools for Experiencing, Interacting with and Managing Real World Complex Adaptive Systems

Many of the grand challenges that society faces are concerned with understanding, managing and indeed creating complex living, lifelike or hybrid systems at multiple scales. Conventional approaches have often been unsuccessful in dealing with the inherent non-linearity, adaptability and self-organised behaviours of these systems. In fact the underlying technologies often transform the involved organizations and society as a whole. New paradigms are clearly required and the ALife community can play a key role. Artificial Life offers both tools and philosophical approaches which are well matched to the nature of these systems and can provide important perspectives on how to move forward.