You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today is one of the world's leading experts on the technologies destined to define the next phase

of human development. Stuart Russell is a world-renowned computer scientist based at the University

of California in Berkeley, but often to be found advising governments and the UN on the potential

and the challenges inherent in the branch of technology

known as artificial intelligence. At its heart, this is a field driven by the capacity of computers

to store information, spot patterns and learn. It is already being put to use by states and

global tech corporations in fields as diverse,

as healthcare, defense, and politics. AI is going to radically change our lives, as workers,

citizens, consumers, social beings, everything. The question is, how far will machine intelligence go? It's tempting to dismiss such

thoughts of science fiction, but that is not the way AI is viewed by those who understand it

best, like my guest today. Stuart Russell, welcome to Hard Talk. Hi. You have spent a career

at the forefront of ideas on artificial intelligence. Can you give me a working definition?

Very straightforwardly, it means making machines intelligent. Traditionally, making machines that act so as they achieve their objectives.

And that's more or less the same definition we apply to human intelligence.

Well, it's more or less the same definition we apply to any machine.

I mean, we design a car to achieve the objective of traveling down the road in it.

So is there something more about the intelligence that these machines that you work with and on are providing?

A car is designed to travel down the road, but that objective is our objective. The car doesn't know that's what it's for.

But these machines in some sense do. They have an explicit internal model of what their objective is, and they can figure out how to

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