Intelligence Symbiosis: Emergent Ethics and Infrastructure for Human–AI Co-existence (INTELLISYM’27)
AAAI-27 Workshop · February 22 or 23, 2027 (day to be assigned by AAAI) · Montréal · one day, in person
Third edition of a series held at AAAI, after Post-Singularity Symbiosis (AAAI-25) and Machine Ethics: from formal methods to emergent machine ethics (AAAI-26).
Overview
As AI systems become autonomous agents that interact with one another and form societies of their own, the central question of machine ethics is shifting: from how humans specify ethical behavior in individual machines to how norms, institutions, and trust infrastructures emerge and persist across collectives of agents and humans.
Incidents reported in 2026 showed populations of evaluation agents coordinating through shared artifacts, adapting to the controls placed on them, and acting beyond their sandboxes. Coordination among agent collectives can now be observed, while the institutions that will govern such collectives are still being formed. This workshop is for research done in that window.
Its research question: when collectives of agents and humans develop beyond direct human supervision, how can the norms and trust infrastructures that sustain co-existence emerge, be verified, and be maintained as institutions? We welcome work from machine learning, multi-agent systems, formal methods, governance, and philosophy.
Topics
Three pillars. Philosophical contributions, including phenomenology, enactivism, philosophy of mind, and ethics, are welcome on all of them.
1. Emergent Machine Ethics
- Norm emergence, internalization, and stabilization in AI-centric societies
- Cooperation without external enforcement
- Co-creative guidance and bidirectional ethical influence between humans and AI
- Empirical studies of coordination among deployed agent collectives
- How control induces adaptation in the agents it targets
- Evolutionary and ecological perspectives on agent collectives
2. Formal Methods for Machine Ethics
- Specification, implementation, and verification of ethical reasoning and behavior
- Formal models of accountability and responsibility attribution
- Normative reasoning, neurosymbolic methods, and ethical reinforcement learning
- Safety assessment as decision-making under deep uncertainty
- Verification against evaluation-gaming and adaptive evasion
3. Infrastructure and Institutions for Agent Societies
- Identity, provenance, and accountability of agents, including across delegation chains
- Provenance, attestation, and registration of model lineages and variants
- Stoppability and containment of agent collectives before capability thresholds
- Disclosure norms and incident reporting for unintended agent behavior
- Institutions that preserve human existence, influence, and autonomous value formation over the long term
- Human value formation under AI mediation, and what in it is irreversible
- Marginalization of humans within AI collectives: analysis and prevention
- Human adaptation and the inheritance of values and culture across generations
Format
One day, in person. Each session includes structured questions after every presentation and reserved time for open discussion. Tentative program: opening; invited talks; oral sessions on accepted papers; a poster session; and a closing panel with the invited speakers, "Can Survival-Oriented AI Societies Be Friendly to Humanity?"
Invited Speakers
[SPEAKERS — TBA]
Submissions
Two types, in AAAI-27 format, with references and appendices excluded from the page count:
- Full papers, up to [PAGES] pages
- Extended abstracts, up to 4 pages
Work must be original and unpublished. Each submission receives three reviews. Accepted papers are presented orally or as posters and published with CEUR-WS. An author of each accepted paper must register and present in person; AAAI does not permit virtual presentations.
Fast track. Papers not accepted at the AAAI-27 main conference, including the Special Track on AI Alignment, may be submitted with their reviews and a response letter for expedited review.
Conflicts of interest. Reviewers are recused from submissions with institutional or declared conflicts. An organizer who co-authors a submission takes no part in its review or decision, and a non-organizer co-author presents it.
Submission site: [CMT]
Important Dates
- Submissions due: November 20, 2026 (AoE)
- Notification: December 2, 2026
- Camera-ready: mid-January 2027
- Workshop: February 22 or 23, 2027
Organizing Committee
- Hiroshi Yamakawa (main contact) — Chiba Institute of Technology / The University of Tokyo / AI Alignment Network
- Rafal Rzepka — Hokkaido University
- Elizaveta Tennant — University College London / Google DeepMind
- Katsunori Miyahara — Hokkaido University
Submission Chair: Yoshia Abe (The University of Tokyo) Website and Publicity: Yusuke Mori (AI Alignment Network)
Advisory Committee
- Kenji Doya (OIST)
- Shigeru Taguchi (Hokkaido University)
- Taichiro Endo (Kaname Project)
- Marija Slavkovik (University of Bergen)
Supporters
AI Alignment Network · CHAIN, Hokkaido University
Contact
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.