Second Life: Emergence of swarm communities? (DRAFT) Dr. Alexandra Bal, Ryerson University Introduction: Synthetic Agents within Second Life In March 2008, Eddie, a new type of avatar, was introduced to the virtual world Second Life 1 . Eddie is unique in that he is an artificial intelligent agent, embodied within a virtual avatar. According to his makers, as an AGI agent (Artificial General Intelligence) Eddie possesses behavioural, cognitive and emotional abilities equivalent to that of a four year old boy (Bringsjord, 2008). In the long term, designers of intelligent behavioural technologies, such as Eddie, hope to create synthetic organisms capable of auto-governance who, able to learn from their own experience, will somehow remain controlled by humans (Yang and Bringsjord, 2007). Such an aim may seem futuristic but intelligent applets are already involved in decision making activities that influence human scientific, economic and cultural life (Goertzel, 2006). Still lacking the emotive abilities Eddie seems to display, these agents are part of synthetic communities, where they interact with other agents, sorting and analysis data in universes parallel to humans' (Park et al, 2004), or interacting with humans in hybrid mediated or physical environments (Nehaniv and Dautenhahn, 2007). Incorporating synthetic agents to simulation environments such as Second Life adds a layer of complexity to cyberspace that cannot easily be comprehended. Part of the complexity comes from the fact that both technologies represent distinct new media. Since specific new media exist at the intersection of multiple ideological frameworks, mixed multiple new media promises to murk our ability to apprenhend the scope of change they represent. 1 A virtual word where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three‐dimensional space that uses the metaphor of the real world (Second Life, 2008).