A New Home for a Vital Conversation: Introducing the ALife Societal Impact Section and Going Back to Bio-Inspiration for the Internet

Welcome to the new societal impact section of Artificial Life, the home for a community-wide conversation on how ALife can contribute to our common future. We inhabit an era of multiple, global-scale societal challenges that concern understanding and managing complex adaptive systems and living, lifelike, and hybrid technologies. Many of these challenges are genuinely existential. All are potentially profoundly disruptive for good or ill. The future of complexity, of adaptive, digital technologies, of synthetic biology and ecology, of ubiquitous AI, and of social, economic, and political upheaval is here, and our institutions and social norms seem unprepared to deal with it. This future clearly contains enormous challenges, but also tremendous opportunities to shape a better society. We believe that the artificial life community has a key role to play in this future and in the debate surrounding it, both as producers of potentially disruptive technologies and as a community with a deep-rooted experience in considering complex systems, as well as in connection with the philosophical approaches and tools required for the job. The boundary-spanning, open, and creative nature of the artificial life community makes us an ideal fit to engage in this vital debate. However, we must reflect critically on how our work can be genuinely, practically useful in the real world today as well as being fantastical and exploratory. We also have a great deal to learn from other disciplines and practices: the social sciences, humanities, and arts and those who deal day to day with societal problems on the ground. The aim of this section is to bring in voices from all over the artificial life community, so as to provide a home for an ongoing conversation about the current and potential societal impact