Understanding Ethics via Artificial Intelligence and Game Theory

What is it about?

Using an agent-based model to tackle age-old questions about ethics in society.

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Photo by Boba Jovanovic on Unsplash

Photo by Boba Jovanovic on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The importance of ethical conduct has been long known, and continues to be a pressing concern not only for society in general, but also in business, and in the applications of artificial intelligence (AI). However, while AI is among the foremost of contemporary fields where ethics is a concern, AI has not itself previously served the purpose of clarifying the consequences of ethics -- or the lack thereof -- for society as a whole. While it is of interest to make models and AI systems more ethical, our purpose here was to model ethical and unethical behaviors in society, to understand the consequences of each. To model agent interactions we used a paradigm called a continuous prisoner’s dilemma (a variant on the prisoner’s dilemma, a classic staple of game theory).