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Travis LaCroix

Travis LaCroix, Postdoctoral Fellow - Ethically Aligned Artificial Intelligence
Étudiant Post-Doc, Université de Montréal

Travis LaCroix is a philosopher of language, science, and biology. Evolutionary game-theoretic models inform his work. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow at Mila – Québec Artificial Intelligence Institute, where he studies ethically aligned artificial intelligence. He is supervised by Yoshua Bengio (Mila, UdeM, CIFAR) and Dominic Martin (UQàM).

Dr. LaCroix’s research centres on philosophical questions surrounding the biological and cultural evolution of complex social-dynamical systems. Specifically, he uses formal tools from evolutionary game theory, and he applies these methods to two defined research programmes. The first focuses on the evolution of language and suggests that reflexivity, instead of compositionality, should be a primary target for language origins research. The second focuses on AI safety and the ethical, social, and legal implications of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

He received a PhD in philosophy (2020) from the department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine under the supervision of Jeffrey A. Barrett. Additionally, he obtained an MA in Social Science from the Institute for Mathematical Behavioural Sciences at UC Irvine as well as an MA in Philosophy from Simon Fraser University.