TY - JOUR

T1 - Virtual Cities

T2 - From Digital Twins to Autonomous AI Societies

AU - Nechesov, Andrey

AU - Dorokhov, Ivan

AU - Ruponen, Janne

PY - 2025

Y1 - 2025

N2 - Virtual Cities (VCs) transcend simple digital replicas of real-world systems, emerging as complex socio-technical ecosystems where autonomous AI entities function as citizens. Agentic AI systems are on track to engage in cultural, economic, and political activities, effectively forming societal structure within VC. This paper proposes an integrated simulation framework that combines physical, structural, behavioral, cognitive, and data fidelity layers, allowing multi-scale simulation from microscopic interactions to macro-urban dynamics. A composite fidelity metric (F0) provides systematic approach to evaluate accuracy variations across applications in VCs. We also discuss autonomy of AI entities and classify them according to their capacity to modify goals - ranging from "tools"with fixed objectives to "entities"capable of redefining their very purpose. We also outline the requirements to define a coefficient to evaluate the degree of autonomy for AI beings. Our results demonstrate that such virtual environments can support the emergence of AI-driven societies, where governance mechanisms like Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and an Artificial Collective Consciousness (ACC) provide ethical and regulatory oversight. By blending horizon scanning with systems engineering method for defining novel AI governance models, this study reveals how VCs can catalyze breakthroughs in urban innovation while driving socially beneficial AI development - consequently opening a new frontier for exploring human-AI coexistence.

AB - Virtual Cities (VCs) transcend simple digital replicas of real-world systems, emerging as complex socio-technical ecosystems where autonomous AI entities function as citizens. Agentic AI systems are on track to engage in cultural, economic, and political activities, effectively forming societal structure within VC. This paper proposes an integrated simulation framework that combines physical, structural, behavioral, cognitive, and data fidelity layers, allowing multi-scale simulation from microscopic interactions to macro-urban dynamics. A composite fidelity metric (F0) provides systematic approach to evaluate accuracy variations across applications in VCs. We also discuss autonomy of AI entities and classify them according to their capacity to modify goals - ranging from "tools"with fixed objectives to "entities"capable of redefining their very purpose. We also outline the requirements to define a coefficient to evaluate the degree of autonomy for AI beings. Our results demonstrate that such virtual environments can support the emergence of AI-driven societies, where governance mechanisms like Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and an Artificial Collective Consciousness (ACC) provide ethical and regulatory oversight. By blending horizon scanning with systems engineering method for defining novel AI governance models, this study reveals how VCs can catalyze breakthroughs in urban innovation while driving socially beneficial AI development - consequently opening a new frontier for exploring human-AI coexistence.

KW - AI autonomy

KW - AI governance

KW - Virtual cities

KW - artificial collective consciousness

KW - blockchain

KW - digital twins

KW - predictive modeling

KW - urban metaverse

KW - virtual economies

KW - virtual twins

UR - https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/34e50726-3a2c-3444-a6f4-0fa4807a5a01/

UR - https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85216527844&origin=inward&txGid=3bc2dd21bef8fc6f87e9120511685c3e

U2 - 10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3531222

DO - 10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3531222

M3 - Article

VL - 13

SP - 13866

EP - 13903

JO - IEEE Access

JF - IEEE Access

SN - 2169-3536

ER -