Gillian Hadfield 2023 Senior Fellow
Affiliation Professor, Johns Hopkins University Hard Problem Solved challenges of safety and control, human alignment and compatibility with increasingly powerful and capable AI and eventually AGI.

Gillian K. Hadfield is an economist and legal scholar turned AI researcher thinking about how humans build the normative world and how to make sure AI plays by rules that make us all better off. She is Professor of Government and Policy and Research Professor in Computer Science at the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She is on leave from the University of Toronto as Professor of Law and Professor of Strategic Management. Hadfield holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and is a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Senior Fellow. Hadfield’s research is focused on computational models of human normative systems; working with machine learning researchers to build ML systems that understand and respond to human norms; and innovative design for legal and regulatory systems for AI and other complex global technologies. She is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California Berkeley and she was previously the inaugural Director (2019-2023) and Chair (2019-2024) of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto, and a senior policy advisor at OpenAI. Her book Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy was published by Oxford University Press in 2017; a paperback edition with a new prologue on AI was published in 2020 and an audiobook version released in 2021.

AI2050 Project

Normativity–the practice of classifying behaviors as either “ok” or “not ok” and then getting people to choose “ok” behaviors–is a defining feature of the human. As we build ever-more powerful AI systems, it becomes critical to understand the deep structure of human normative systems in order to build AI that is normatively competent: able to understand, respect, and participate in the complex process by which human rules, values, and norms are constituted, maintained, and adapted. The goal of Hadfield’s AI2050 project is to determine how to build such systems and ensure that this is how AI systems are in fact built.

Publications

AI2050 Community Perspective — Gillian Hadfield (2024)