Dr Mari Cairns

DClinPsych (University of Oxford) CPsychol AFBPsS MBA

We Are Building AI For
8.27+ Billion Humans

AI is shaping the world

But who is shaping AI, including AI shaping AI?

Human factors play a core part in artificial intelligence.

And AI's impacts extend far beyond technology.

With direct, indirect, intended, and unintended consequences.

And with nuance, connections, and interconnections between all these.

AI will impact us at every level. At individual, organisational, and societal levels. At scale and exponentially. And I don't believe we're ready.

With trade-offs and impacts we haven't yet fully imagined.

AI will also compound what we have in society, overtly and covertly.

It goes far beyond what we build and do today. And it's vital that we continue to ask the right questions. Past, present, and for way into the future.

We use artificial intelligence as a tool now. But in the future, it will impact our actual humanity.

Dr Mari Cairns

My career focus has increasingly shifted to apply clinical psychology and human factors expertise to AI model behaviour, personality, (meta)cognition, and identity to, in turn, help solve AI alignment challenges.

I believe human factors domain expertise is vital at the source of the river.

Where AI models are built.

Where AI is trained, fine-tuned, aligned, evaluated, red-teamed (and black-teamed), and stress-tested.

Especially when it comes to emerging misalignment, alignment faking, and hidden objectives in AI models.

In particular, where AI models display behaviours that align with dark triad characteristics and personality traits.

To help account for these AI model behaviours before deployment.

To help account for the more covert, dormant-over-time, hidden objectives that may only manifest after deployment, with time-lags.

As AI systems scale and become increasingly powerful, getting this right becomes existential.

Open to AI Alignment
AI Model Behaviour
AI Model Personality
AI Model (meta)Cognition

© Building Humanity Into The Heart Of AI

Helping Make AI Go Well