New Discipline: Machine Behavior

Yes, behavior is important.   In biological behavior we don't claim to understand all of the mechanics involved.  So we accept the complexity being beyond simple tabulation.   In the case of machines, we build them and control their use.   So its been assumed we understand their behavior.  But no, as they have grown increasingly complex, its less and less so.  So how is studying machine behavior different?  How do we do it efficiently.  And most importantly whats the relevance of context?  So a nice idea.

The Anthropologist of Artificial Intelligence In Quantum by John Pavlus
The algorithms that underlie much of the modern world have grown so complex that we always can’t predict what they’ll do. Iyad Rahwan’s radical idea: The best way to understand them is to observe their behavior in the wild.

Sow do new scientific disciplines get started? For Iyad Rahwan, a computational social scientist with self-described “maverick” tendencies, it happened on a sunny afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in October 2017. Rahwan and Manuel Cebrian, a colleague from the MIT Media Lab, were sitting in Harvard Yard discussing how to best describe their preferred brand of multidisciplinary research. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence technology had generated new questions about the relationship between people and machines, which they had set out to explore. Rahwan, for example, had been exploring the question of ethical behavior for a self-driving car — should it swerve to avoid an oncoming SUV, even if it means hitting a cyclist? — in his Moral Machine experiment.

“I was good friends with Iain Couzin, one of the world’s foremost animal behaviorists,” Rahwan said, “and I thought, ‘Why isn’t he studying online bots? Why is it only computer scientists who are studying AI algorithms?’

“All of a sudden,” he continued, “it clicked: We’re studying behavior in a new ecosystem.”

Two years later, Rahwan, who now directs the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, has gathered 22 colleagues — from disciplines as diverse as robotics, computer science, sociology, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, anthropology and economics — to publish a paper in Nature calling for the inauguration of a new field of science called “machine behavior.”  .... ' 

Paper on Machine Behavior that relates to this.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1138-y