An Immune System Inspired Theory for Crime and Violence in Cities

Abstract

Crime is ubiquitous and has been around for millennia. Crime is analogous to a pathogenic infection and police response to it is similar to an immune response. The biological immune system is also engaged in an arms race with pathogens. We propose an immune system inspired theory of crime and violence in human societies, especially in large agglomerations like cities.In this work we suggest that an immune system inspired theory of crime can provide a new perspective on the dynamics of violence in societies. The competitive dynamics between police and criminals has similarities to how the immune system is involved in an arms race with invading pathogens. Cities have properties similar to biological organisms and in this theory the police and military forces would be the immune system that protects against detrimental internal and external forces.Our theory has implications for public policy: ranging from how much financial resource to invest in crime fighting, to optimal policing strategies, pre-placement of police, and number of police to be allocated to different cities. Our work can also be applied to other forms of violence in human societies (like terrorism) and violence in other primate societies and eusocial insects.We hope this will be the first step towards a quantitative theory of violence and conflict in human societies. Ultimately we hope that this will help in designing smart and efficient cities that can scale and be sustainable despite population increase. KEY WORDScomplex systems, immune system inspired, computational sociology, modelling socio-economic systems, artificial immune systems CLASSIFICATION JEL: C51, C65, J18, O21

Towards a quantitative model of epidemics during conflicts

“…Such models can be a first step towards policy, spreading public awareness and may also be a tool for public health professionals in conflict zones. Quantitative techniques like these may also help us predict possible emerging hotspots for emerging diseases [8].…”

“…Another area of future investigation will be the humanitarian and ethical aspects and other benefits that come from welcoming refugees and displaced people. Refugees can bring in a lot of diversity into another country and enrich it in many ways [8]. We can investigate how foreign aid and influx of refugees can help these countries recover after conflicts.…”

A framework for designing compassionate and ethical artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness

“…We present a computational framework for engineering intelligence, empathy and consciousness in machines. This architecture can be implemented on any substrate that is capable of computing and information processing [7,8,19,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35].…”

“…The union of machine intelligence with our biological intelligence may also give us access to higher levels of consciousness. Computing paradigms that are not constrained by physical space or have different computing substrates (as proposed in different information processing systems [7,36] and in biology [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]) may be capable of higher levels of consciousness. Our greatest contribution as a species may be that we introduce non-biological consciousness into the Universe.…”

Emergent rules of computation in the Universe lead to life and consciousness: a computational framework for consciousness

“…It has memory: it remembers pathogens it has seen before. It can adapt to different challenges [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] and it has a sense of self (it does not attack cells in the body of the host) [40].…”