“The initiative will build upon existing collaborations among faculty and across disciplines at Duke, and position new interdisciplinary dialogue and research in the field of society-centered AI.”
— Gary Bennett, Dean of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
How will AI shape the future of society? How will society shape the future of AI? These two questions are inextricably linked, but the diverse group of scholars studying them are too often segregated from each other by disciplinary boundaries. Scholars of human behavior urgently require deeper understanding of how AI systems are trained to evaluate whether their societal impact will be positive and equitable. But computer scientists will also need more sophisticated theories of human behavior to advance AI beyond dyadic interactions between a chatbot and a single user. AI agents are already being deployed in byzantine health systems, social media networks, and global financial markets. To do so, they must navigate human culture, social psychology, and emergent group behaviors. Ensuring that AI and human interests co-evolve in a productive manner will not only require advances in open-source computing and new security guardrails. It will also require answers to more fundamental questions about which parts of society we want to reinforce or reform— and how agents respond to such incentive structures. Answering these questions will require a new field of study: Society-Centered AI. This new field will shape a range of critical policy issues in government, business, and the nonprofit sector, some of which are described in the recent White House executive order on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” and the European Union’s “Artificial Intelligence Act.”
Duke began recruiting social scientists with strong interests in computer science more than a decade ago— long before many of our peers. Our faculty also includes leading computer scientists, statisticians, and engineers with unusually strong interest in the societal impact of technology.
SCAI meetings have gathered more than seventeen faculty not only from the departments of Political Science and Computer Science, but also Statistical Science and Sociology, as well as the Pratt School of Engineering, the Fuqua School of Business, the School of Law and the Social Science Research Institute.