Postdoctoral Associate (Levine/Muthukrishna Lab)

Job description

Description Dr. Sydney Levine and Dr. Michael Muthukrishna are jointly recruiting a Postdoctoral Associate working across their two labs at NYU starting this summer. You will be working at the intersection of cultural evolution, computational moral cognition, and AI safety. Human societies have solved an extraordinary version of the multi-agent alignment problem, getting millions to billions of individuals to cooperate, coordinate, and enforce shared moral norms. Cultural evolution built these solutions over generations, encoded and transmitted through connected beliefs, values, behaviors, norms, and institutions. The cognitive mechanisms that underpin moral judgment - rule-following, outcome evaluation, bargaining mechanisms - are themselves products of this evolutionary process, shaped to facilitate cooperation under human time, information, and cognitive constraints. Today, we’re building AI systems that navigate the same landscape of pluralistic and often competing human values and incentives, but with new constraints and lack of constraints. Our goal is to bring these three fields together, asking how insights from millennia of cultural evolution and the cognitive science of m...