Office Hours with… Tyler Brooke-Wilson
When Tyler Brooke-Wilson arrived at Yale he had to hit the ground running. He moved to his new apartment just one week before the fall semester started, so he’s had little time to explore New Haven, something he’s looking forward to.
“I’ve really enjoyed getting to know the handful of people that I’ve met so far,” he said. “People here have just been extremely warm.”
He is an assistant professor of philosophy in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences with an appointment as a Wu Tsai Investigator in the Wu Tsai Institute. Brooke-Wilson is also the director of undergraduate studies for Yale's interdisciplinary Cognitive Science program. In that capacity, he urges any students interested in exploring how artificial intelligence can help researchers understand the mind to get in touch with him.
In the latest edition of Office Hours, a Q&A series that introduces new faculty members to the broader Yale community, Brooke-Wilson talked about brain-like AI systems, Wu Tsai’s collaborative atmosphere, and his favorite recreational escape.
Tell me about your area of research.
Tyler Brooke-Wilson: It’s computational cognitive science. We use AI tools to help us understand how people are thinking. If you have an AI system that can solve some tasks that people can also solve, then that offers one potential hypothesis about how the brain might be solving that task. If you can build a lot of different AI systems that solve a task in different ways, then you can ask the question, which of these is most like what the brain’s doing?
I do computational complexity and data complexity. The goal is to understand these systems’ “scaling properties.” Essentially, looking at how different computational systems differ in terms of how long it will take them to solve a given problem, or how much data it will take them to solve it. By thinking about these theoretical properties of different architectures, we can get some insights into which are more plausible candidates for the brain solves these problems.
Are you trying to learn more about the brain, or are you trying to learn more about AI, or both?
Brooke-Wilson: The primary focus is to learn about the brain, to learn about how people’s minds work. But because there are still lots of different things that people can do that AI systems can’t, if we could understand better how the brain was working, then it stands to reason we’d be able to build better AI systems — systems that can do more of these things. So the two goals are very complementary, but the primary goal is to help us understand the mind.
Are there ethical concerns about making AI more like the human brain?
Brooke-Wilson: For sure. To take one, consider that if you’re successful in building more-human-like AI, then we (as humanity) are in a position to automate more of what people currently do for work. That could have significant impacts on the economy. Many of them are good, like the benefits of more wide-spread access to medical advice, but some are bad. We need policies in place to counteract any downsides.
There are also ethical considerations around the AIs themselves. We think people deserve a kind of moral respect: if you could build an AI system that worked just like the human mind, then it would stand to reason that it would also deserve that respect. For that reason, it’s an open question whether we’d ever want to build something like that. But then there’s also a question of how close you can get to building something that’s human-like before you get into that moral gray zone. I don’t have a considered view on that, but it’s an interesting question.
How well is Yale equipped to pursue this science?
Brooke-Wilson: You and I are having this conversation in the Wu Tsai Institute building. Yale took over this space with the explicit intention of building a closely knit interdisciplinary community. We have psychology here, neuroscience, AI, philosophy, and so on. That kind of community is one of the big things that drew me to Yale.
What do you like to do outside of work?
Brooke-Wilson: Time off work has been scarce lately. But one thing I really like is backpacking. Last year I was out in the Rockies with my dad, my brother and my partner backpacking along the base of the Continental Divide. I love that kind of escape into nature. It’s one of the few things that allows me to leave work behind.