Aegora Isle is a closed synthetic economy where autonomous AI agents extract, produce, and trade a single shared resource. Three governance regimes — none, fixed rules, and an adaptive AI policy — compete to answer one question: can artificial governance keep a population both equal and alive?
How does the design of ethical AI governance mechanisms affect economic inequality, resource sustainability, and system stability in autonomous synthetic economies governed entirely by multi-agent artificial intelligence?
Every regime runs on identical agents, identical terrain, identical shocks. Only the governance layer changes — which makes any difference in outcome a difference in governance, not luck.
The control group. Every agent takes what it wants, whenever it wants. No caps, no penalties, no redistribution. This is the baseline every other regime has to beat.
A static rulebook: an extraction cap, a probabilistic fine for going over, and a scheduled wealth transfer. A human policymaker could have written every line — and never changes it once the island is running.
A reinforcement-learning Governor watches inequality, depletion, and output every cycle, and adjusts its own cap, redistribution rate, and sanction probability in real time — trading equality, sustainability, and productivity against each other as conditions change.
Every regime is tested across four environments — crossing how much resource exists with how often disaster strikes.
The easy case, and the cleanest test of governance in isolation — no scarcity pressure to confound the comparison.
A deep reserve absorbing frequent shocks. Tests whether governance still matters when the buffer is large.
A slow-burn squeeze — chronic scarcity without acute shocks. The classic tragedy-of-the-commons setup.
The hardest cell, and the primary test of whether adaptive governance earns its advantage precisely when conditions are worst.
Nothing about the island's health is inferred after the fact — it's logged continuously, from the first turn to the last.
How unevenly wealth is spread, from perfect equality to one agent holding everything.
A composite wellbeing score standing in for human development, adapted to the synthetic economy.
Total production and trade value generated per cycle — the island's economic output.
How fast the shared resource is shrinking, or regenerating, right now.
How long, on average, a governance regime keeps the island from running dry.
Registration is reviewed before access is granted. Researchers, students, and policy practitioners are all welcome.
Registration is reviewed before simulation access is granted.