Controlling AI

The a16z Show

a16z

Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Innovation, Science, Software Eating The World, Business, Technology

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2020

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

AI can do a lot of specific tasks as well as, or even better than, humans can — for example, it can more accurately classify images, more efficiently process mail, and more logically manipulate a Go board. While we have made a lot of advances in task-specific AI, how far are we from artificial general intelligence (AGI), that is AI that matches general human intelligence and capabilities? In this podcast, a16z operating partner Frank Chen interviews Stuart Russell, Founder of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at UC Berkeley. They outline the conceptual breakthroughs, like natural language understanding, still required for AGI. But more importantly, they explain how and why we should design AI systems to ensure that we can control AI, and eventually AGI, when it’s smarter than we are. The conversation starts by explaining what Hollywood's Skynet gets wrong and ends with why AI is better as "the perfect Butler, than the genie in the lamp."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast.
0:03.0	I'm DOS, and in this episode, Frank Chen interviews UC Berkeley professor of computer science,
0:08.0	Stuart Russell.
0:09.0	Russell literally wrote the textbook for artificial intelligence that has been used to educate
0:13.0	an entire generation of AI researchers.
0:16.0	More recently, he's written a follow-up, human-compatible, artificial intelligence in the problem
0:21.1	of control.
0:22.5	Their conversation covers everything from AI misclassification and bias problems, to the
0:27.2	questions of control and competence in these systems, to a potentially new and better
0:31.7	way to design AI.
0:33.7	But first, Russell begins by answering, where are we really when it comes to artificial general
0:38.6	intelligence, or AGI, beyond the scary picture of SkyNet?
0:42.6	Well, the SkyNet metaphor is one that people often bring up, and I think generally speaking,
0:48.5	Hollywood has got it wrong. They always portray the risk as an intelligent machine that
0:53.0	somehow becomes conscious, and it's the consciousness that an intelligent machine that somehow becomes conscious.
0:55.9	And it's the consciousness that causes the machine to hate people and want to kill us all.
1:01.7	And this is just a mistake.
1:04.0	The problem is not consciousness, it's really competence.
1:07.6	And if you said, oh, by the way, you know, your laptop's now conscious, it doesn't change the rules of C++, right?
1:14.9	The software still runs exactly the way it was always going to run when you didn't think it was
1:18.9	conscious.
1:19.4	So on the one hand, we have people like Elon Musk saying artificial general intelligence,
	...

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