New Value Institute

Lab

Multi-Agent Value Systems Lab

Investigates how distinct value systems interact, conflict, and change across human, ecological, biological, and artificial agents.

Development Focus

Multi-Agent Value Systems

Lab Function

Emergent outcomes from conflicting value functions

Current Status

Experimental system development

Central Question

How do distinct value systems interact, conflict, and become negotiated across human, ecological, biological, and artificial agents?

What the Lab Develops

Developed alongside The Butterfly Entangled Effect, the Lab constructs and tests experimental conditions in which human, ecological, biological, and artificial agents bring distinct value systems into a shared field. It examines how values are expressed, made legible, assigned authority, brought into conflict, negotiated, and transformed, and where responsibility remains when artificial systems mediate those relations.

Founding Corpus

The Butterfly Entangled Effect

Source Materials

  • Distinct value systems
  • Ecological thresholds
  • Dormant and living material systems
  • Conflicting objectives
  • AI-mediated environmental regulation
  • Machine-readable value
  • Biological survival conditions
  • Spectatorship as environmental pressure
  • Distributed responsibility

Development and Testing

Developed alongside The Butterfly Entangled Effect, the Lab prototypes conditions in which ecological, biological, human, and artificial agents bring different priorities, dependencies, and forms of value into a shared system. It studies how those values become legible, enter conflict, acquire authority, and change through interaction.

Its components require scientific, technical, artistic, and ethical testing within the project context. The Lab does not claim a completed engineering architecture or a validated ecological control system.

Experimental System Components

  • Distinct value systems
  • Value conflict and negotiation
  • AI-mediated environmental regulation
  • Living and dormant material systems
  • Ecological and biological thresholds
  • Machine-readable value
  • Distributed responsibility
  • Spectatorship as environmental pressure

Outputs

  • Artistic and scientific experiments
  • Multi-agent value-system frameworks
  • Ethical and institutional assessments
  • Technical and conceptual prototypes
  • Bounded system tests

Possible Test Contexts

  • Climate governance
  • Biodiversity
  • Conservation
  • Environmental monitoring
  • AI-mediated ecological systems
  • Smart cities
  • Automated systems with competing objectives
  • Multi-agent ethics

Development beyond the Source Work

Development beyond the founding project requires scientific validation, technical testing, ethical review, and clearly bounded environmental cases.

Documentation

Collaborate

Develop and test artistic, ecological, or AI-mediated multi-agent value-system components within a defined project context.

Explore system prototyping

Related Work