Researcher and software engineer interested in applying economics to AI safety

The core focus of my research is using agent-based modelling to understand real-world complex-adaptive systems which are composed of interacting autonomous agents. The key research question that I am interested in is how, and if, these systems maintain macroscopic homeostatic behaviour despite the fact that their constituent agents often face an incentive to disrupt the rest of the system for their own gain. This question pervades the biological and social sciences, as well as many areas of engineering and computing. Accordingly, I work with a diverse range of collaborators in different disciplines. I am particularly interested in whether models of learning and cooperation can be validated against empirical studies, and I have had the opportunity to apply many different modelling techniques to a diverse range of data.  
 

https://sphelps.net/
https://sphelps.substack.com/
https://github.com/phelps-sg