Our weekly SRI Seminar Series welcomes Christopher Summerfield, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology, whose research focuses on human learning and decision-making.
Summerfield’s work with his research group, Human Information Processing, is concerned with understanding how humans learn and make decisions, exploring the computational mechanisms by which humans make decisions and how these processes are implemented in the brain. In his most recent work, Summerfield and his collaborators have developed a large language model called the “Habermas Machine” to act as an AI mediator, helping groups with differing views find consensus by synthesizing opinions into clear and fair summaries.
Moderator: Sheila McIlraith
Talk title:
“The Habermas Machine: Using AI to help people find common ground”
Abstract:
Language models allow us to treat text as data. This opens up new opportunities for human communication, deliberation, and debate. In this talk, I will describe a project in which we use a large language model (LLM) to help people find agreement, by training it to produce statements about political issues that a group with diverse views will endorse. We find that the statements it produces help people find common ground, and shift their views towards a shared stance on the issue. By analysing embeddings, we show that the group statements respect the majority view but prominently include dissenting voices. We use the tool to mount a virtual citizens’ assembly and show that independent groups debating political issues relevant to the UK move in a common direction. We call this AI system the “Habermas Machine,” after the theorist Jurgen Habermas, who proposed that when rational people debate under idealised conditions, agreement will emerge in the public sphere.
Suggested readings:
M.H. Tessler, M.A. Bakker, D. Jarrett, H. Sheahan, M.J. Chadwick, R. Koster, G. Evans, L. Campbell-Gillingham, T. Collins, D.C. Parkes, M. Botvinick, C. Summerfield, “AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation,” Science 386 (2024).
C. Summerfield, L. Argyle, M. Bakker, T. Collins, E. Durmus, T. Eloundou, I. Gabriel, D. Ganguli, K. Hackenburg, G. Hadfield, L. Hewitt, S. Huang, H. Landemore, N. Marchal, A. Ovadya, A. Procaccia, M. Risse, B. Schneier, E. Seger, D. Siddarth, H.S. Sætra, M.H. Tessler, M. Botvinick, “How will advanced AI systems impact democracy?” arXiv pre-print, 2024.
About Christopher Summerfield
Christopher Summerfield is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oxford and a research director at the UK AI Safety Institute. His research spans human cognition and neural function, the nature of machine intelligence, and the impact of technology on society. His book Natural General Intelligence (Oxford University Press) was published in 2022, and his new book These Strange New Minds (Penguin) is due in March 2025.
About the SRI Seminar Series
The SRI Seminar Series brings together the Schwartz Reisman community and beyond for a robust exchange of ideas that advance scholarship at the intersection of technology and society. Seminars are led by a leading or emerging scholar and feature extensive discussion.
Each week, a featured speaker will present for 45 minutes, followed by an open discussion. Registered attendees will be emailed a Zoom link before the event begins. The event will be recorded and posted online.
Christopher Summerfield