Related papers: Can Society Function Without Ethical Agents? An In…
We consider social learning in a changing world. Society can remain responsive to state changes only if agents regularly act upon fresh information, which limits the value of social learning. When the state is close to persistent, a…
Social, supervised, learning from others might amplify individual, possibly unsupervised, learning by individuals, and might underlie the development and evolution of culture. We studied a minimal model of the interaction of individual…
Why do people who disagree about one subject tend to disagree about other subjects as well? In this paper, we introduce a model to explore this phenomenon of "epistemic factionization". Agents attempt to discover the truth about multiple…
Over the next few years, society as a whole will need to address what core values it wishes to protect when dealing with technology. Anthropology, a field dedicated to the very notion of what it means to be human, can provide some…
When creating (open) agent systems it has become common practice to use social concepts such as social practices, norms and conventions to model the way the interactions between the agents are regulated. However, in the literature most…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
The deployment of capable AI agents raises fresh questions about safety, human-machine relationships and social coordination. We argue for greater engagement by scientists, scholars, engineers and policymakers with the implications of a…
We develop a general problem setting for training and testing the ability of agents to gather information efficiently. Specifically, we present a collection of tasks in which success requires searching through a partially-observed…
As intelligent systems are developed across diverse substrates - from machine learning models and neuromorphic hardware to in vitro neural cultures - understanding what gives a system agency has become increasingly important. Existing…
Data have power. As such, most discussions of data presume that records should mirror some idealized ground truth. Deviations are viewed as failure. Drawing on two ethnographic studies of state data-making in a Chinese street-level…
Nowadays, the users' browsing activity on the Internet is not completely private due to many entities that collect and use such data, either for legitimate or illegal goals. The implications are serious, from a person who exposes…
Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing…
Precise information is essential for making good policies, especially those regarding reform decisions. However, decision-makers may hesitate to gather such information if certain decisions could have negative impacts on their future…
We use a model of opinion formation to study the consequences of some mechanisms attempting to enforce the right behaviour in a society. We start from a model where the possible choices are not equivalent (such is the case when the agents…
Reward schemes may affect not only agents' effort, but also their incentives to gather information to reduce the riskiness of the productive activity. In a laboratory experiment using a novel task, we find that the relationship between…
Success-driven social learning, in which individuals preferentially adopt the ideas and methods that appear most successful, is a foundational principle of collective behavior across systems ranging from ant colonies to scientific…
We provide a model to investigate the tension between information aggregation and spread of misinformation in large societies (conceptualized as networks of agents communicating with each other). Each individual holds a belief represented…
The rise of social media has enabled the widespread propagation of fake news, text that is published with an intent to spread misinformation and sway beliefs. Rapidly detecting fake news, especially as new events arise, is important to…
In designing an intelligent system that must be able to explain its reasoning to a human user, or to provide generalizations that the human user finds reasonable, it may be useful to take into consideration psychological data on what types…
Society is characterized by the presence of a variety of social norms: collective patterns of sanctioning that can prevent miscoordination and free-riding. Inspired by this, we aim to construct learning dynamics where potentially beneficial…