Towards Individual Power Design

Abstract

We started the setup of a virtual laboratory for the study of power struggles where autonomous agents embody different capabilities. The scenario is a caricature of hierarchical production societies which are driven to be structured into different organizational forms. Under the assumption of limited rationality, we look at diverse mechanisms able to drive theagent choice of action and to act. In our simple setup, an agent will look to shift to a new leader when placed in a poor individual situation. On the other hand, if the agent is comfortable, it might lower the pression imposed to its subordinates. Our agent models are yet too naive to distinguish motivation from will: the decision procedures aren’t sophisticated enough to enable the consideration of reasoning processes running at each deliberation step. Thus we can’t identify reasons (or motives) driving action selection. However, there is a causal relation from agent’s state and its choosing process (but not its action).

Along the present paper, special care is given to the validation of conjectures, where the data collected from the simulations is subject of statistical analysis towards their infirmation/refutation. Our present research around power will try to highlight new points of view over the architecture of an agent and the inner spot of potency, without loosing rigour on experimentation. Our initial experiments point out that, in these organisations, 1) Life Expectation and Individual Productive Capacity are related with the Hierarchical Rank and 2) If, under certain critical circumstances, agents can change to new leaders – or eventually become ones – Global Productive Capacity reach higher numbers but Life Expectation is lower.