The Need for Greed in Artificial Decisionmakers

We usually teach our children not to be greedy. Many of the ethical principles ingrained in cultures worldwide emphasize the importance of one’s place in a larger community. However, there is need for some greed to prevent needless self-sacrifice. We explore this balancing act between caring for the broader community and caring for one’s own needs and desires through the lens of artificial decisionmaking agents. Using our modern reimplementation of the societal simulation Sugarscape, we explore the outcomes of societies where the agents employ varying amounts of greed. We show that entirely selfless and entirely selfish societies are doomed to collapse in most instances. We also show that societies that are 10% to 80% greedy have high wellbeing across a variety of commonsense metrics. These results highlight the exciting promise of developing computationally-derived guidelines for ethical behavior for individual agents which correspond to significant societal impacts.