AI Safety Needs Social Scientists

We've written a paper arguing that long-term AI safety research needs social scientists to ensure AI alignment algorithms succeed when actual humans are involved. Properly aligning advanced AI systems with human values requires resolving many uncertainties related to the psychology of human rationality, emotion, and biases. The aim of this paper is to spark further collaboration between machine learning and social science researchers, and we plan to hire social scientists to work on this full time at OpenAI. The goal of long-term artificial intelligence (AI) safety is to ensure that advanced AI systems are aligned with human values -- that they reliably do things that people want them to do. At OpenAI we hope to achieve this by asking people questions about what they want, training machine learning (ML) models on this data, and optimizing AI systems to do well according to these learned models.