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A new study from DeepMind suggests AI may be able to make better decisions than humans by a team of researchers at UK-based AI company DeepMind. DeepMind is to solve intelligence, developing more general and capable problem-solving systems, known as artificial general intelligence. Guided by safety and ethics, this invention could help society find answers to some of the world's most pressing and fundamental scientific challenges.
AI can devise methods of wealth distribution that are more popular than systems designed by people, new research suggests. The researcher's team shows that ML systems aren't just good at solving complex physics and biology problems, but may also help deliver on more open-ended social objectives, such as the goal of realizing a fair, prosperous society. It trained an AI system to find a popular policy for distributing public funds in an online game but they also warn against AI Govt.
Many of the problems that humans face are not merely technological, but require us to coordinate in society and our economies for the greater good. Building a machine that can deliver beneficial results humans actually want is called value alignment. One key hurdle for value alignment is that human society admits a plurality of views, making it unclear to whose preferences artificial intelligence should align.
DeepMind researchers have developed a new approach that combines AI with human democratic deliberation to come up with better solutions to social dilemmas. AI is proving increasingly adept at solving complex challenges in everything from business to biomedicine, so the idea of using it to help design solutions to social problems is an attractive one. The AI discovered a mechanism that redressed initial wealth imbalance, sanctioned free riders, and successfully won the majority vote.
This AI to learn from more than 4000 people as well as from computer simulations in an online, four-player economic game. Players also voted on their favorite policies for doling out public money. This AI-devised policy won more votes from human players. It is possible to harness for value alignment the same democratic tools for achieving consensus that is used in the wider human society to elect representatives, decide public policy or make legal judgments.
The AI-designed mechanism probably fared well because basing payouts on relative rather than absolute contributions helps to redress initial wealth imbalances, but forcing a minimum contribution prevents less wealthy players from simply free-riding on the contributions of wealthier ones. The DeepMind researchers do raise concerns about an artificial intelligence-powered tyranny of the majority situation in which the needs of people in minority groups are overlooked. But that isn't a huge worry among political scientists.
It is fascinating how it delivered a version of the liberal egalitarianism policy. We are still a long way from machines helping set public policy, but it seems that AI may one day help us find new solutions that go beyond established ideologies. And Democratic AI is a research methodology for designing potentially beneficial mechanisms, not a recipe for deploying AI in the public sphere.
