About this project
The aim of this four-year project is to address the question “How does culture emerge as a novel property of social animals?” or, to put it another way “why do we (humans) have culture?”. This is a difficult question. The archaeological record from a few hundred thousand years ago tells us almost nothing about how early humans made the transition from being social animals to cultural.
We are approaching this question in a radical new way: by building an artificial ‘society’ of robots; programming the robots with what we believe to be a necessary set of initial conditions (i.e. social behaviours), then ‘free-running’ this robot society. What we then hope to observe is the emergence of ‘proto-cultural’ behaviours - evidence for the very early steps in the transition from social to cultural.
The project poses huge technical as well as philosophical difficulties, for instance
- “what are the initial conditions - the pre-requisites for culture?”.
- Once we have these “can we program a group of robots with these pre-requisites, and what environment do the robots need to ‘live’ in?”.
- Assuming something interesting does happen, “how can we make sense of what we observe, bearing in mind that it will be robot- rather than human-culture?”.
- Then, perhaps the biggest question, if we believe we do see evidence of the emergence of a robot proto-culture “is what we have learned about how that proto-culture has emerged, generalisable from robots to humans (or indeed any social species)?”.
The project is a trans-disciplinary collaboration of six UK university partners: Abertay-Dundee, Exeter, Leeds Met, Manchester, Warwick and UWE (project lead). The project started on 1 September 2007 and will run until 29 February 2012.
For more detail see: