Is The Success of AI Dependent on Social Understanding and Cooperative Intelligence?

Thursday, May 6, 2021

Cheriton School of Computer Science Professor Kate Larson and her international colleagues have published a commentary in Nature about the need for cooperative artificial intelligence — beneficial AI with social understanding.

AI assistants and recommendation algorithms interact with billions of people every day, yet they have little understanding of humans. Professor Larson and her colleagues argue that AI needs social understanding and cooperative intelligence to integrate beneficially into society.

This need is particularly urgent as in the coming years AI systems that interact quickly and complexly with each other and with humans will become ever more common. From city streets and roads to consumer and financial markets, from mass communications technologies to cyber and physical security systems, AI systems that engage poorly with humans not only will fail to deliver their promised benefits, but they may also disrupt personal and societal relationships in disastrous ways.

Learn more about this research.