“I was good friends with Iain Couzin, one of the world’s foremost animal behaviorists,” Rahwan said, “and I thought, ‘Why isn’t he studying online bots? Why is it only computer scientists who are studying AI algorithms?’
“All of a sudden,” he continued, “it clicked: We’re studying behavior in a new ecosystem.”
Two years later, Rahwan, who now directs the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, has gathered 22 colleagues — from disciplines as diverse as robotics, computer science, sociology, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, anthropology and economics — to publish a paper in Nature calling for the inauguration of a new field of science called “machine behavior.”
Directly inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen’s four questions — which analyzed animal behavior in terms of its function, mechanisms, biological development and evolutionary history — machine behavior aims to empirically investigate how artificial agents interact “in the wild” with human beings, their environments and each other. A machine behaviorist might study an AI-powered children’s toy, a news-ranking algorithm on a social media site, or a fleet of autonomous vehicles. But unlike the engineers who design and build these systems to optimize their performance according to internal specifications, a machine behaviorist observes them from the outside in — just as a field biologist studies flocking behavior in birds, or a behavioral economist observes how people save money for retirement.
“The reason why I like the term ‘behavior’ is that it emphasizes that the most important thing is the observable, rather than the unobservable, characteristics of these agents,” Rahwan said.
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“All of a sudden,” he continued, “it clicked: We’re studying behavior in a new ecosystem.”
Two years later, Rahwan, who now directs the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, has gathered 22 colleagues — from disciplines as diverse as robotics, computer science, sociology, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, anthropology and economics — to publish a paper in Nature calling for the inauguration of a new field of science called “machine behavior.”
Directly inspired by the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen’s four questions — which analyzed animal behavior in terms of its function, mechanisms, biological development and evolutionary history — machine behavior aims to empirically investigate how artificial agents interact “in the wild” with human beings, their environments and each other. A machine behaviorist might study an AI-powered children’s toy, a news-ranking algorithm on a social media site, or a fleet of autonomous vehicles. But unlike the engineers who design and build these systems to optimize their performance according to internal specifications, a machine behaviorist observes them from the outside in — just as a field biologist studies flocking behavior in birds, or a behavioral economist observes how people save money for retirement.
“The reason why I like the term ‘behavior’ is that it emphasizes that the most important thing is the observable, rather than the unobservable, characteristics of these agents,” Rahwan said.
- More Here
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