Iyad Rahwan is the Director of the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. He is a pioneer in the emerging fields of machine behavior and machine culture, in which AI systems are studied through the same scientific evolutionary lens long used to understand the behavior of living systems.

As AI systems become increasingly autonomous and begin interacting with one another as well as with people, understanding their behavior may become as important as understanding the technology itself. David Sloan Wilson and Iyad Rahwan explore what it means to study AI as a new kind of evolving actor, and what that perspective can teach us about building more cooperative relationships between humans and intelligent machines.

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This episode is from the podcast, Evolving Alignment.

Evolving Alignment explores one of the central questions of our time: How can humanity and artificial intelligence coevolve in ways that enhance cooperation, creativity, and human flourishing?

Hosted by evolutionary scientist David Sloan Wilson, each episode features leading thinkers from fields including evolutionary biology, cultural evolution, artificial intelligence, economics, psychology, philosophy, complexity science, and the social sciences. Rather than focusing on the narrow technical challenge of aligning AI systems with human interests, these conversations examine the broader evolutionary processes that have enabled living systems to solve problems of cooperation at ever higher levels of complexity, producing increasingly sophisticated forms of biological and cultural organization.

Can we learn from the deep history of evolution to shape a future in which humans and AI cooperate rather than compete, and develop new forms of collective intelligence we can only begin to imagine today? Evolving Alignment brings together many of the world’s leading researchers to explore these questions—and to consider how the choices we make today may influence the future evolution of intelligence itself.

Evolving Alignment is presented by Human Energy, a catalytic hub for evolving collective consciousness. ‍Learn more about Human Energy here, https://www.humanenergy.io/about