INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Stuart Russell new book, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, goes on sale Oct
I&ve written a review, Human Compatible& is a provocative prescription to re-think AI before it too late,& and the following in an interview
Russell in his UC Berkeley office on September 3, 2019.)
Human Compatible& is a provocative prescription to re-think AI before it too
late
Ned Desmond: Why did you write Human Compatible?
Dr
Russell: I&ve been thinking about this problem & what if we succeed with AI? & on and off since the early 90s
The more I thought about it, the more I saw that the path we were on doesn''t end well.
(AI Researchers) had mostly just doing toy stuff in
the lab, or games, none of which represented any threat to anyone
It a little like a physicist playing tiny bits of uranium
Nothing happens, right? So we&ll just make more of it, and everything will be fine
But it just doesn''t work that way
When you start crossing over to systems that are more intelligent, operating on a global scale, and having real-world impact, like trading
algorithms, for example, or social media content selection, then all of a sudden, you are having a big impact on real-world, and it hard to
And that just going to get worse and worse and worse.
Dean Society & October 23, 2006; Stuart Russell
Desmond: Who should read Human
Russell: I think everyone, because everyone is going to be affected by this
As progress occurs towards human level (AI), each big step is going to magnify the impact by another factor of 10, or another factor of 100
Everyone life is going to be radically affected by this
People need to understand it
More specifically, it would be policymakers, the people who run the large companies like Google and Amazon, and people in AI, related
disciplines, like control theory, cognitive science and so on.
My basic view was so much of this debate is going on without any
understanding of what AI is
It just this magic potion that will make things intelligent
And in these debates, people don''t understand the building blocks, how it fits together, how it works, how you make an intelligent system
So chapter two (of Human Compatible was) sort of mammoth and some people said, &Oh, this is too much to get through and others said, &No,
you absolutely have to keep it.& So I compromised and put the pedagogical stuff in the appendices.
Desmond: Why did computer scientists tend
to overlook the issue of uncertainty in the objective function for AI systems?
Dr
Russell: Funnily enough, in AI, we took uncertainty (in the decision-making function) to heart starting in the 80s
Before that, most AI people said let just work on cases where we have definite knowledge, and we can come up with guaranteed plans.
