Artificial-agent technology has become commonplace in technical research from com-puter graphics to interface design and in popular culture through the Web and computer games. On the one hand, the population of the Web and our PCs with characters who reflect us can be seen as a humaniza-tion of a previously purely mechanical interface. On the other hand, the mechanization of subjectivity carries the danger of simply reducing the human to the machine.

E-mail-based conversations between thousands of people-very large-scale conversations (VLSCs)-now take place in a variety of on-line public spaces such as Usenet newsgroups and large listservs. This article describes the author's prototype Conversation Map system, which can automatically analyze and graphically summarize thousands of e-mail messages exchanged in VLSCs. Example conversation maps of nine VLSCs are presented.

Research in artificial intelli-gence, artificial life and cogni-tive science has not yet provided answers to any of the most perplexing questions about the mind, such as the nature of consciousness or of the self; in this article the authors make a suggestion for a new approach. They begin by setting their project in the broader cognitive science context and argue that little recent research adequately addresses the question of what are the necessary requirements for conscious experience to be possible.

Artificial Life is developing into a new type of discipline, based on computational construction as its main tool for exploring and producing a science of life “as it could be.” In this area of research, the generation of complex virtual systems, in place of the traditional empirical domain, has become the actual object of theory. This entails a profound change in the tradi-tional relationship between ontological, epistemological and methodological levels of analy-sis, which forces us to recon-sider the differences apparently firmly established between science and philosophy.

Marrying traditional methods of computer programming with an artistic temperament allows the birth of a new phenomenon: the aesthetic program. The work of the author and his students builds on visual ap-proaches in programming as well as in software modeling, leading toward a gradual evolution from program to model.