  Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds promise as a technology that can be used
to improve government and economic policy-making. This paper proposes a new
research agenda towards this end by introducing Social Environment Design, a
general framework for the use of AI for automated policy-making that connects
with the Reinforcement Learning, EconCS, and Computational Social Choice
communities. The framework seeks to capture general economic environments,
includes voting on policy objectives, and gives a direction for the systematic
analysis of government and economic policy through AI simulation. We highlight
key open problems for future research in AI-based policy-making. By solving
these challenges, we hope to achieve various social welfare objectives, thereby
promoting more ethical and responsible decision making.
