What Biological & Social Systems Can Teach us About AI with Nora Ammann, Cofounder of PIBBSS Research

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
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**Nora Ammann** (0:46)
The question then arises, how can we at all make systematic progress towards understanding the future of AI systems, where we do not have empirical access? We still want to make progress somehow, and ideally, we want that progress to be systematic and not just getting lucky. You should always be suspicious of the analogies and proxies you use.
But if you use a bunch of them and they converge or agree on some aspects, you should be more confident about those aspects. The pluralistic perspective and seeking for epistemic robustness through plural perspectives is what I'm after.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:19)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Recently, I had the honor of being invited by Jan Tallin, leading AI investor and philanthropist, and former Cognitive Revolution guest, to serve as a recommender in the Survival and Flourishing Funds Fall 2023 grant-making process. Over the course of two months, five other recommenders and I worked our way through roughly 150 grant applications. And yes, I did read every single one, conducting in-depth research and interviews with the groups that we considered most promising. And ultimately, we used a formal deliberation known as the S-process to officially recommend grants to Jan and the funds other donors.
In the course of that project, I had the opportunity to meet the leaders of a number of AI safety-focused nonprofits. And now that the grant process is complete and the checks have been sent, I'm planning to invite a number of them on the show to talk about their various approaches to advancing our understanding of and preparedness for AI risks.
Contrary to some recent conspiracy theories you might have seen online, I have found this space to be remarkably transparent, with funders regularly publishing their grants, and this was the case for the Survival and Flourishing Fund grant process, and also the grantees themselves, often publishing their plans and status reports. So today, to kick off this series, and we will be weaving this in with other types of guests over the next month or two, my guest is Nora Ammann, co-founder and director of PIBBSS, a research initiative focused on the principles of intelligent behavior in biological and social systems.
Regular listeners to the show will know that I often worry that most of us, myself included at times, are still thinking too small about AI. Because not only are the AI systems fast becoming more powerful, but we're also deploying them at a faster pace than any previous technology has ever been deployed. What this will ultimately entail, I of course don't know, but I do expect all kinds of surprises. And so with that in mind, I was excited to meet Nora and learn more about her work. She really impressed me as one of few people who is thinking appropriately big about the future of AI, while also maintaining an impressive level of epistemic humility and rigor. Her work, as you'll hear, is an attempt to create an entirely new and highly interdisciplinary approach to understanding the future of AI. And while she's still early in that process, and the research is fundamentally challenged by the fact that the AI systems of greatest interest don't yet exist, I'm certainly among those who believe that timelines to some form of transformative AI could end up being quite short. And thus, I consider her work to be both important and urgent.
As always, if you're finding value in the show, I'd ask that you take a moment to share it with friends. This episode, in particular, I'd suggest sending to a brilliant friend currently working in a more mature field whose brain power might be more valuable if they applied it to the study of AI. And with that, I hope you're inspired by this conversation about new angles on AI safety research with Nora Ammann of PIBBSS. Nora Ammann, co-founder and director of PIBBSS and research associate at the Alignment of Complex Systems Research Group at Charles University, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.