Social Environment Design
It addresses the problem of enhancing policy-making for governments and economies, but is incremental as it builds on existing fields like Reinforcement Learning and Computational Social Choice.
The paper introduces Social Environment Design, a framework for using AI in automated policy-making to improve government and economic decisions, aiming to achieve social welfare objectives through AI simulation.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds promise as a technology that can be used to improve government and economic policy-making. This paper proposes a new research agenda towards this end by introducing Social Environment Design, a general framework for the use of AI for automated policy-making that connects with the Reinforcement Learning, EconCS, and Computational Social Choice communities. The framework seeks to capture general economic environments, includes voting on policy objectives, and gives a direction for the systematic analysis of government and economic policy through AI simulation. We highlight key open problems for future research in AI-based policy-making. By solving these challenges, we hope to achieve various social welfare objectives, thereby promoting more ethical and responsible decision making.