Machine teamwork - part of their culture ?

Cooperation is a fundamental component of natural evolution as it determines many levels of biological organisation, from individual cells to eusocial animals, e.g., honeybees and vampire bats. Since the pioneering work by Axelrod, game theorists have thoroughly studied the mechanisms that promote cooperation, but many questions still remain open. How can cooperation exist in a world of selfish individuals? How can you trust your team? How does the environment affect the decision-making? What is rational? How can we build teams of humans and machines that work together to achieve a common goal? In this talk, we attempt to answer some of these questions by embarking on a journey to explore the existence of cooperation in nature and the apparent contradiction with 'survival of the fittest'. Throughout this journey, we will learn to translate the properties of biological cooperation to what enables machines to learn to cooperate with other machines or humans in complex environments.

Do we want robots to have culture? What does culture mean for robots? What does cultural robotics look like currently? Can robots truly possess culture, or is it merely the culture of their programmers reflected in them? I explore responses to these questions in line with my research in critical cultural robotics.