Stuart Russell is one of AI's true pioneers and has been at the forefront of the field for decades. His expertise and forward thinking have culminated in his newest work, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. The book is a cornerstone piece, alongside Superintelligence and Life 3.0, that articulates the civilization-scale problem we face of aligning machine intelligence with human goals and values. Not only is this a further articulation and development of the AI alignment problem, but Stuart also proposes a novel solution which bring us to a better understanding of what it will take to create beneficial machine intelligence.

 Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Stuart's intentions in writing the book

-The history of intellectual thought leading up to the control problem

-The problem of control

-Why tool AI won't work

-Messages for different audiences

-Stuart's proposed solution to the control problem

You can find the page for this podcast here: https://futureoflife.org/2019/10/08/ai-alignment-podcast-human-compatible-artificial-intelligence-and-the-problem-of-control-with-stuart-russell/

Important timestamps: 

0:00 Intro

2:10 Intentions and background on the book

4:30 Human intellectual tradition leading up to the problem of control

7:41 Summary of the structure of the book

8:28 The issue with the current formulation of building intelligent machine systems

10:57 Beginnings of a solution

12:54 Might tool AI be of any help here?

16:30 Core message of the book

20:36 How the book is useful for different audiences

26:30 Inferring the preferences of irrational agents

36:30 Why does this all matter?

39:50 What is really at stake?

45:10 Risks and challenges on the path to beneficial AI

54:55 We should consider laws and regulations around AI

01:03:54 How is this book differentiated from those like it?