Invited Speaker: Gillian Hadfield (University of Toronto) on The Normative Infrastructure of Cooperation

In this talk, I will present the case for the critical role played by third-party enforced rules in the extensive forms of cooperation we see in humans. Cooperation, I’ll argue, cannot be adequately accounted for—or modeled for AI—within the framework of human preferences, coordination incentives or bilateral commitments and reciprocity alone. Cooperation is a group phenomenon and requires group infrastructure to maintain. This insight is critical for training AI agents that can cooperate with humans and, likely, other AI agents. Training environments need to be built with normative infrastructure that enables AI agents to learn and participate in cooperative activities—including the cooperative activity that undergirds all others: collective punishment of agents that violate community norms.