In this episode, Adam speaks with Doctor Torsten Ensslin about simulating reputation networks and their manipulation using Information Theory.
Torsten is an Astrophysicist and cosmologist at the Max Plank institute, where he’s held many titles and positions. His current scientific work investigates theoretical cosmology and information field theory.
As he discusses in this episode, Torsten co-created a simulation of how reputation propagates through a network of agents and how those agents can manipulate their communication strategies, through lies, targeted deceit, propaganda, and many other tactics, in an effort to achieve domination over their networks.
One of the theses of Torsten’s work is that in order to understand the impact of our AI on our existing systems, it’s important to have a deeper understanding of those systems to begin with. His simulation is a first step in that direction: an attempt to model the interaction of various agents according to information theoretic principles and study the consequent emergent phenomena.
There are two versions of the paper.
The first is a shorter summary of the work, light on the math, and can be found here: https://psyarxiv.com/wqcmb/.
The longer version of the paper can be found here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.05414.pdf.
Enjoy!
Related Episodes
Discovering Temporally-Aware Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
Designing algorithms by hand is hard, so Chris Lu and Matthew Jackson talk about how to meta-learn them for reinforcement learning. Many of the concepts in this episode are interesting to meta-learning approaches as a whole, though: "how expressive can we be and still perform well?", "how can we get...
X Hacking: The Threat of Misguided AutoML
AutoML can be a tool for good, but there are pitfalls along the way. Rahul Sharma and David Selby tell us about how AutoML systems can be used to give us false impressions about explainability metrics of ML systems - maliciously, but also on accident. While this episode isn't talking about a new exc...
Introduction To New Co-Host, Theresa Eimer
In today's episode, we're introducing the very special Theresa Eimer to the show. Theresa will be taking over the hosting of many of the future episodes. Theresa has already recorded multiple episodes and we are stoked to air those shortly.We also spend a few moments explaining my relative absence i...