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Generating Publics for Your Investment: Punishment, Trust, Inequality, and Polarization

Talk by Joanna J. Bryson, University of Bath

Info about event

Time

Friday 25 November 2016,  at 11:00 - 13:00

Location

Change of venue: Room 1481-225, Jens Chr. Skous Vej, 8000 Aarhus C

Organizer

AR

Abstract:

Cooperation is often viewed as an unlimited good, but then why do we need to put on our own oxygen mask before assisting others? In fact, each individual must budget their investment capacities between many possible opportunities, which must generally include sufficient individual investment to maintain group survival. In this talk I will describe our research (with Simon Powers, Karolina Sylwester & Benedikt Herrmann) in accounting for cultural variation by global region in cooperation as measured by the public goods game, with a special focus on accounting for anti-social punishment, that is, the costly punishment of those who contribute to the punisher's own good. I will also describe recent work (with Nolan McCarty) extending these models to account for political polarization and why it correlates with income inequality. Finally, I will briefly describe some implications for this work on the question of how AI should be incorporated into our society.

About:

Joanna Bryson is a Reader (tenured Associate Professor) at the University of Bath, currently visiting at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP). She has broad academic interests in the structure and utility of intelligence, both natural and artificial. She is best known for her work in systems AI and AI ethics, both of which she began during her PhD in the 1990s, but she and her colleagues publish broadly, into biology, anthropology, philosophy, cognitive science, and politics. She is currently collaborating on a project funded by Princeton's University Center for Human Values, “Public Goods and Artificial Intelligence,” with Alin Coman of Princeton Psychology and Mark Riedl of Georgia Tech. This project includes both basic research in human sociality and experiments in technological interventions. Other current research includes work on understanding the causality behind the link between wealth inequality and political polarization, work on transparency in AI systems, and work on machine prejudice deriving from human semantics. Bryson holds degrees in Psychology from Chicago and Edinburgh, and in Artificial Intelligence from Edinburgh and MIT. At Bath she founded the Intelligent Systems research group (one of four in the Department of Computer Science) and heads their Artificial Models of Natural Intelligence. 

Contact:

Joanna Bryson, jjb@alum.mit.edu