I will present our work on understanding and modelling strategic decision-making in the face of existential risks that has been performed with students and international collaborators in my group in Brussels. The workhorse of this research is the collective risk dilemma (CRD), a formalization of the problem of climate negotiations, wherein the goal is to reach a common good, but selfish considerations may result in failure with potential cataclysmic outcomes.
I will first introduce this dilemma and will present a series of behavioral experiments that reveal how people act in such scenarios and how changing uncertainties affect the outcomes.
Second, I will show how both multi-agent evolutionary and reinforcement learning approaches can match the experimental observations, providing thus hypothesis generators for future experiments.
Third, I will introduce the idea of delegating the decision-making in the CRD to autonomous agents and discuss how the experimental results are changed when humans are not in the loop. This research fits into the ongoing work to understand the origins of cooperation and coordination and how AI may help (or not) to reach better outcomes.
Prior to this story and in light of my sabbatical visit to Umeå, I will quickly introduce my group and some of the other work we do on building intelligent methods for health applications, decision-making based on expert advice and AI governance.