Abstract

this paper. Objects are things which can be distinguished from others. This notion brought us "macroscopic programming". Concurrent objects are the "real" self-contained objects including virtual processors. This provided us with easy concurrent programming. Objects and concurrent objects are the cells for autonomous agents. Autonomous agents are based on the notion of the individual, are reactive, and try to survive. They form a society. Then, I described and showed our recent research accomplishments toward the society of agents: the Intimate Computer, the Computational Field Model, the Apertos object-oriented OS and the VIP mobile host protocol. Finally, I raised a controversial proposal for volitional agents, that would provide safer and more cooperative interaction with humans and other agents, and that would provide an evolutionarily stable society, with which we can cohabit. The notion of volitional agents is a conjecture, without any proof. We don't know how to make a volitional agent. We don't even know what "desire ", or "aggressiveness" mean. But a new way of understanding collective behavior in terms of dynamic, non-deterministic, stochastic, and irre10 versible processes is taking root in various scientific fields. I have already mentioned this trend in biology, ethology, and the theory of evolution. We can also see similar movements in AI, such as the Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky [32] and the Subsumption Architecture by Rodney Brooks [6]. It is also happening in Chemistry and Physics. For example, a new view is given based on Thermodynamics by Ilya Prigogine [41]. It is giving us the sign of departing from the "reductionist attitude" or the "Cartesian attitude" in science. The notion of Open Systems was advocated by philosopher Karl Popper [39, 40] and...

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