“Climate Stresses and Ethical Choices: Can Agents Survive and Still Be Good?”
HAPPENING ON FRIDAY, September 18, 2026. 4:00 PM, at the Judith R. Duavit-Vazquez and Class of 1984 Lecture Room (UPSE Room 105)
🎓 UPSE-PCED Friday Seminar, featuring Dr. Raul V. Fabella, a social scientist, UP professor emeritus, honorary professor at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM), and a member of the National Academy of Science and Technology (NAST). His current research interests are the foundations of the social sciences, rational choice, and the role of group membership in decision-making.
🧠📚💡Lecture Title: “Climate Stresses and Ethical Choices: Can Agents Survive and Still Be Good?”
Abstract: In a recent Archiv upload, Waldner and Mikulainnen (2026) asked a rhetorical question “Can Agents be good and still survive?” Using a simulation model where the agents employed are computer models (Bayesian Neural Network, and GPT 4.0) who are rewarded only for individual survival, when the existential risk approaches extreme levels, all agents abandon ethical behavior in favor of selfish behavior: thus being “good” is an inferior strategy. Hammond (2025) (The Suicide Region: Option Games and the Race to Artificial General Intelligence” concurs: shows that there are suicide regions where rational actors deploy unsafe AI and existential risks fails to provide the deterrence. This is a canonical outcome of games played by strictly rational agents.
We provide a simple model of a composite game of a game against nature and an economic collective action problem, the Nederlander-CAP, where, as the cost of failure (Ostrom salience, becomes extreme, agents gravitate towards the ethical behavior: cooperate with others.) This is the sense in which Charles Darwin (1871) wrote: “… a tribe with many members ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good would be victorious over other tribes and this would be natural selection.” Yes, being good is a winning survival strategy!
đź“ť Please register using the links below or by scanning the QR codes in the poster:
đź“ŤOnsite: https://tinyurl.com/29bj3ecs
đź“ŤZoom: https://tinyurl.com/2u53b2fz
We’d love to see you there!
Source: UP School of Economics Facebook