Potential Impact. The project has the potential to have a huge impact if successful. The impact can be summarised by saying that at present information and communication technologies are in general slaves to the demands of their users; the project will show how autonomous, virtual agents can self-organise to survive in a challenging virtual world, operating in ways that the software designers have not imagined. Perhaps the most dramatic impact of the project will be the change in world-view among the public that such a development could trigger. The idea of autonomous agents capable of virtual ‘life’ in parallel with human activity is one that is recognised as a realistic possibility among the IST community, but so far exists only as science fiction among the public. For example, the press would no doubt relate the outcomes of the project to the disotopias foretold in many science fiction stories. As usual with technological developments, such scare-mongering would fail to acknowledge the benefits that one could also anticipate. We suggest some practical examples of the use of ideas stemming from the project below.
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