Scaling Rational Cooperative Intelligence for Pluralistic AI Futures
One plausible extrapolation of current AI trends is that we are headed towards pluralistic AI futures: scenarios where a plethora of AI agents, systems and services are deployed towards various ends by various actors. How can we influence this process so that it occurs not just safely — avoiding AI-powered conflict and anti-human equilibria — but also in the direction of mutual flourishing?
In this talk, Dr. Tan Zhi Xuan will explore how we can scale cooperative intelligence by advancing the cooperative capacities and dispositions of the agents, while creating institutions and incentives that promote AI and human cooperation at scale. She will introduce recent research on rational cooperative AI — a paradigm for building coherent AI agents that are cooperative-by-design.
Across domains such as assistive planning and natural language contracting, rational cooperative AI offers an approach to addressing the jaggedness and unreliability of current generative AI. A rational approach also enables the development of "self-governing" AI agents that can learn to follow and enforce societal norms, as well as institutional rules and mechanisms that operate well even when enforcement power and information flow is decentralised.
Dr. Tan will conclude by discussing the deeper connections between reasoning, rationality, and cooperation, and how a cooperative theory of reasoning could ultimately lead us to more human-aligned reasoners.
NUS Presidential Young Professor
Research Scientist
A*STAR Centre for Frontier AI Research (A*STAR CFAR)
Dr. Tan Zhi Xuan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore, with a joint appointment as a Research Scientist at the A*STAR Centre for Frontier AI Research (A*STAR CFAR).
Dr. Tan’s research focuses on scaling cooperative intelligence via the rational analysis and design of intelligent systems. Together with her research group, the Cooperative Systems & Intelligence (CoSI) lab, Dr. Tan aims to enable the development of AI systems that can cooperate as proficiently as humans, and design institutions and incentives that promote mutual benefit and flourishing in an increasingly automated future.