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The Times Tech Podcast

Stuart Russell: “When machines become smarter than us, there will be no 'reset' button”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9654 Ratings

🗓️ 25 October 2019

⏱️ 66 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on artificial intelligence expert Stuart Russell to talk about AI’s King Midas problem (3:00), dismissiveness about general AI (8:00), and why we are not close to developing it (13:10), the future of work (16:20), happiness engineering (21:00), humanity’s last invention (25:30), slaughter-bots (31:05), whether he is an optimist (37:40), how we can control something more powerful than us (39:30), conscious machines (45:30), the social media experiment (48:30), writing minimally-invasive algorithms (53:40), the brain-computer interface (55:30), and how we can save ourselves (59:50)

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Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm Charlotte Ivers from the Sunday Times Wine Times podcast. This week we're sponsored by

0:05.2

Celebrity Cruises. Each week, myself and Will Lyons share three wines and one dish to discover

0:10.7

the remarkable ways wines can make any meal special, from picnics to pick me ups with the cheese

0:16.0

course. So pour yourself a glass, sit back for a grape-inspired podcast full of laughter, insights and interesting wine.

0:23.6

This podcast is in association with the Sunday Times Wine Club. Listen to Wine Times, wherever you get your podcasts.

0:32.4

Yo, technology. What is it all about?

0:36.9

So we did a bit of research to figure out you know what's this

0:40.0

kind of minimum uh what i call a minimum viable product MVP for killing people and it turns out

0:48.6

that something about three inches in diameter carrying about three grams of explosive, which produces an explosively formed

0:56.8

penetrator, which is enough to kill a person.

1:04.4

Welcome to your bonus episode of Danny in the Valley, where we have a very special guest.

1:14.2

Stuart Russell, the man who literally wrote the book on artificial intelligence, is with us. He is a Brit. He is a professor

1:21.1

at Berkeley in California. And 25 years ago, he wrote artificial intelligence a modern approach.

1:27.6

It is the most used textbook in the field.

1:30.4

It's been used to train literally millions of students around the world, but there is a problem.

1:36.9

Russell reckons that we are well on the way to having truly intelligent machines that will supersede all of us.

1:44.4

The only issue with that is, is that basically the way we are crafting them is wrong.

1:49.7

And it is leading to a potentially whole set of very terrible outcomes for humanity.

1:55.6

So he's written a book about what we are facing.

1:58.1

And also, how to avoid it.

2:00.6

He is very eloquent and in an understated way,

2:04.2

terrifyingly clear about the capabilities of AI. So if you care about the future of the human race,

...

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