Artificial societies and Aristotle - 1

I tracked down this article, "Seeing Around Corners," from the April 2002 issue of The Atlantic. It touches upon a couple of things that came up this morning, especially regarding Wolfram and automata.

Lots of interesting stuff in the piece. Here are a few snippets, including some that point toward tough questions for Aristotle. (What say you, Jim?)

The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought.

If even the crudest toy societies take on a life and a logic of their own, then it must be a safe bet that real societies, too, have their own biographies. Intuition tells us that it is meaningful to speak of Society as something greater than and distinct from the sum of individuals and families, just as it is meaningful to speak of the mind as something greater than and distinct from the sum of brain cells.

Artificial societies suggest that real ones do not behave so manageably. Their logic is their own, and they can be influenced but not directed, understood but not anticipated. Not even the Olympian modeler, who writes the code and looks down from on high, can do more than guess at the effect of any particular rule as it ricochets through a world of diverse actors.