Sorin Adam Matei
Reviews

Technology Review: A Letter to the Editor from Joshua Epstein

Sorin Adam Matei

Is inequality innate in the world or not? How about online w0rlds?

I wish to avert a misunderstanding of my research that could arise from the review article, “Artificial Societies and Virtual Violence” by Mark Williams, which appears in the July/August issue of Technology Review. The review concerns two books: Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell, 1996. Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science for the Bottom Up (MIT Press) and Joshua M. Epstein, 2006. Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling (Princeton University Press). The review is both favorable and well done, so I offer this as a clarification rather than a critique, but an important clarification nonetheless.

Referring to the Sugarscape model developed in Growing Artificial Societies, the article reads:

“Essentially, Epstein and Axtell found, Sugarscape functioned as a model of a hunter-gatherer society, reproducing a common feature of human societies: skewed wealth distribution. Granted, the notion that crude automata moving around a computer grid suggest that wealth inequality is an innate feature of human societies will be disliked not only by Marxists but by most of the rest of us…”

via Technology Review: A Letter to the Editor from Joshua Epstein.

Sorin Adam Matei

Assistant Vice President for Partnerships in Strategic Defense Innnovation and Professor of Communication at Purdue University, Director of the FORCES initiative leads research teams that study the relationship between technological and social systems using big data, simulation, and mapping approaches. He published papers and articles in Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Information Society, National Interest, and Foreign Policy. He is the author or co-editor of several books. The most recent is Structural differentation in social media. He also co-edited Ethical Reasoning in Big Data,Transparency in social media and Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets: Theory and Methods (Computational Social Sciences) , all three the product of the NSF funded KredibleNet project. Dr. Matei's teaching portfolio includes technology and strategy, online interaction, and digital media analytics classes. A former BBC World Service journalist, his contributions have been published in Esquire and several leading Romanian newspapers. In Romania, he is known for his books Boierii Mintii (The Mind Boyars), Idolii forului (Idols of the forum), and Idei de schimb (Spare ideas).

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