Prevailing top-down systems in politics and economics struggle to keep pace with the pressing challenges of the 21st century, such as climate change, social inequality and conflict. Bottom-up democratisation and participatory approaches in politics and economics are increasingly seen as promising alternatives to confront and overcome these issues, often with utopian overtones, as proponents believe they may dramatically reshape political, social and ecological futures for the better and in contrast to contemporary authoritarian tendencies across various countries. Institutional specifics and the associated collective human behavior or culture remains little understood and debated, however. In this article, I propose a novel research agenda focusing on utopian democratisation efforts with formal and computational methods as well as with artificial intelligence - I call this agenda Artificial Utopia. Artificial Utopias provide safe testing grounds for new political ideas and economic policies in-silico with reduced risk of negative consequences as compared to testing ideas in real-world contexts. An increasing number of advanced simulation and intelligence methods, that aim at representing human cognition and collective decision-making in more realistic ways, could benefit this process. This includes agent-based modelling, reinforcement learning, large language models and more. I clarify what some of these simulation approaches can contribute to the study of Artificial Utopias with the help of two institutional examples: the citizen assembly and the democratic firm.

本文针对21世纪政治与经济中自上而下系统面临的气候变化和社会不平等等问题，提出底层民主化和参与性方法作为解决方案。研究提出“人工乌托邦”这一新颖议程，通过形式化和计算方法结合人工智能，安全地测试新的政治和经济理念，显示出这些方法在理解人类集体行为和改善制度方面的潜力。

人工乌托邦：模拟与智能代理助力民主化未来