Many Collect ive Adaptive Systems (CASs) exist in nature: think of ant colonies, where large collectives of ants operate autonomously but interact with other ants and the environment to provide resilient global behaviors that sustain their colony. Following scientific studies that were aimed at understanding and predicting the evolution of these systems, and fueled by technological advances, research has started to investigate CAS engineering: the methods, tools, and techniques for building CASs. This naturally leads to a vision where collectives of humans and computational elements, situated both in the digital and physical worlds, collaborate to give rise to "intelligent" collective behavior supporting novel kinds of applications and services. Humans can be involved in two ways: both as users and as components of the CAS, in the sense that human behaviors and limitations are often integral to the system description. This has significant social implications that need to be considered by CAS researchers: in this paper, we share a discussion that took place between some experts thinking about CAS engineering, focusing on the social implication of CASs and related open research challenges. We hope that this provides a useful context for future research projects, research grant proposals, and research directions.

中文翻译：

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集体适应性系统的社会影响

自然界中存在许多集体适应系统 (CAS)：想想蚂蚁群落，在那里，大量蚂蚁自主行动，但与其他蚂蚁和环境相互作用，以提供维持其群落的弹性全球行为。在旨在理解和预测这些系统演变的科学研究之后，在技术进步的推动下，研究已经开始研究 CAS 工程：构建 CAS 的方法、工具和技术。这自然会导致一个愿景，即位于数字和物理世界中的人类和计算元素的集体协作产生支持新型应用程序和服务的“智能”集体行为。人类可以通过两种方式参与：作为用户和作为 CAS 的组成部分，从某种意义上说，人类行为和限制通常是系统描述不可或缺的一部分。这具有需要 CAS 研究人员考虑的重大社会影响：在本文中，我们分享了一些考虑 CAS 工程的专家之间的讨论，重点关注 CAS 的社会影响和相关的开放研究挑战。我们希望这为未来的研究项目、研究资助提案和研究方向提供有用的背景。