AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation.

Finding agreement through a free exchange of views is often difficult. Collective deliberation can be slow, difficult to scale, and unequally attentive to different voices. In this study, we trained an artificial intelligence (AI) to mediate human deliberation.

Scaffolding cooperation in human groups with deep reinforcement learning.

Effective approaches to encouraging group cooperation are still an open challenge. Here we apply recent advances in deep learning to structure networks of human participants playing a group cooperation game. We leverage deep reinforcement learning and simulation methods to train a 'social planner' capable of making recommendations to create or break connections between group members.

Human-centred mechanism design with Democratic AI.

Building artificial intelligence (AI) that aligns with human values is an unsolved problem. Here we developed a human-in-the-loop research pipeline called Democratic AI, in which reinforcement learning is used to design a social mechanism that humans prefer by majority. A large group of humans played an online investment game that involved deciding whether to keep a monetary endowment or to share it with others for collective benefit.