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How do you align AI in a world of plural, conflicting, and evolving human values? A starting point is human society itself. @sydneylevine.bsky.social and I are hiring a postdoc at NYU to combine insights from cultural evolution, computational moral cognition, and AI safety. Please share widely!1/

Human societies solved an tough version of the multi-agent alignment problem: getting millions, eventually billions, of people to cooperate, coordinate, & enforce shared norms. Those solutions were built over generations through culture, institutions, moral systems, and the cognitive machinery.

Now we are building AI systems that face many of the same problems, only faster, stranger, and with fewer inherited constraints.

As a postdoc, you will work with us and our networks to use ideas from cultural evolution and moral cognition to think more clearly about AI alignment, cooperation, norm formation, negotiation, and value conflict in multi-agent systems.

To offer a glimpse of the kind of questions and approaches you would be working on, consider the question of how the mechanisms of cooperation operate at scale, how are they made concrete in moral norms, and can analogous mechanisms be engineered into multi-agent AI systems?

You would answer this question by building & testing models, developing multi-agent simulations where agents, aligned to different users’ values, must coordinate, negotiate, and resolve conflicts,

and designing and testing methods for aligning individual AI agents to user values in ways that reflect how humans transmit those values and align to one another.

We are looking for someone with a PhD (or are close to completion) in computer science, computational cognitive science, or any quantitative science, and a genuine interest in working across disciplinary boundaries.

We’re especially excited about candidates with backgrounds or serious interest in one or more of: computational modeling of social learning, norms, or moral cognition; cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution;

evolutionary game theory & the evolution of cooperation; mechanism design and institutional design; cooperative AI and multi-agent systems; the study and development of large language models; cross-cultural psychology and large-scale behavioral data; philosophy of morality or social contract theory.