The advent of artificial life will be the most significant historical event since the emergence of human beings…We must take steps now to shape the emergence of artificial organisms; they have the potential to be either the ugliest terrestrial disaster or the most beautiful creation of humanity.

In AI, something that excites and worries many researchers is “emergent capabilities” – a phenomenon observed in all complex systems in which complex network interactions lead to entirely new traits and abilities. We build and rely on complex systems in the first place to handle change, but if that system becomes too unpredictable, it stops being useful and might even be dangerous. This is the core problem in science: can we design predictable systems with unpredictable properties? Can we find simple rules and theories to explain complex phenomena without losing their most important parts?

It might surprise people that artificial life ("Alife") is not a new field – it has deep roots in evolutionary biology, information science, computer engineering, psychology, and art. Alife blends the fanciful with the practical – looming sculptures of wiggling network interactions alongside urgent warnings about how *not* to train humans how to use AIs. To solve the world's toughest problems, it's probably good to start by understanding what makes us 1) intelligent or 2) alive.

Each death from COVID-19 was, in some ways, a failure to apply collective intelligence (CI). Better modeling, participatory policymaking, and community engagement could likely have 1) increased trust in public health agencies, 2) suggested less burdensome and more cost-effective interventions, and 3) supported better preventative policy design years before the world locked down. Today, we explored how CI can be used to design better institutional incentives that lead to better decisions.

Artificial life is a provocative and profoundly ambitious field. It challenges things most of us take for granted: that humans are unique, that consciousness is inscrutable, and that life itself is distinct from other physical processes. “We really want to create artificial life,” said a slide from ALIFE 2023’s opening remarks today. “Anyone can create it. We want to release the recipes for it and change the world.”