Adversarial Systems & Complex Adaptive Dynamics Research
dis·sen·sus /dɪˈsɛnsəs/ — from Latin dissentire, to disagree. In political philosophy (Rancière, Mouffe), the productive disagreement that remains when consensus is impossible or undesirable. The group is named for it: not dysfunction, function.
We study complex adaptive systems — machine collectives, institutions, markets, minds — and specifically what happens in them when the parts want different things. Systems like these rarely settle. They persist by continually absorbing the friction of their own disagreement, and that process, rather than any equilibrium, is what we try to measure.
September research update
A corrected vision-language release, the approved Digital Finance author copy, and current work on multi-agent evaluation.
Dissensus is an IASEAI affiliate
An organisational affiliation with the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI.
Accepted at Digital Finance
The multi-moment cryptocurrency event study is forthcoming; the September author copy is now available.
Complexity science, applied to systems that disagree with themselves
Dissensus is an independent research group in London. The subject is complex adaptive systems: many interacting agents, no central controller, behaviour at the aggregate level that none of the parts intends. That description fits a multi-agent AI system, an institution deciding who gets a vote, a regulator and a cryptocurrency market, which is why the group's papers look scattered until you notice they are asking one question in four different places.
The specific question is what happens when the parts want different things. We study coordination, delegation and the cost of competing objectives through formal models and empirical controls. Alignment, stakes and information loss motivate the questions; whether a particular measure captures them is something the experiments have to establish.
The current front of the programme is AI: multi-agent coordination and how coordination findings are manufactured, authorization and standing for artificial systems, and how the first AI crisis will actually be governed. The market and philosophy strands supply the formal apparatus and the empirical instruments that work depends on. It is one programme rather than a collection of side interests, and the work runs from formal proof through simulation to empirical estimation, because a claim of this shape has to survive all three. What is finished, stalled or abandoned is on Research; what is open is on Projects.
Who does the work
A founder, two research assistants, an operations associate and a cross-disciplinary affiliate. Full biographies are on About.
Three ways into the lab
Dissensus is small, independent, and open at the edges. The research runs regardless, but it runs faster and argues better with more people in the room.
Three of the tasks open right now, at the size they actually are:
The lab started this year and very little about it is settled, which is the actual reason to join now rather than later: what it works on and how it decides a result is finished are still open questions. There is no funding yet, so none of these roles are paid — the limits are set out plainly rather than buried.