December 27, 2023

Don't try to make AI safe; instead, make safe AI, with Stuart Russell

50 minutes

We are honoured to have as our guest in this episode Professor Stuart Russell. Stuart is professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the traditional way to introduce him is to say that he literally wrote the book on AI. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which he co-wrote with Peter Norvig, was first published in 1995, and the fourth edition came out in 2020.

Stuart has been urging us all to take seriously the dramatic implications of advanced AI for longer than perhaps any other prominent AI researcher. He also proposes practical solutions, as in his 2019 book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control.

In 2021 Stuart gave the Reith Lectures, and was awarded an OBE. But the greatest of his many accolades was surely in 2014 when a character with a background remarkably like his was played in the movie Transcendence by Johnny Depp.

The conversation covers a wide range of questions about future scenarios involving AI, and reflects on changes in the public conversation following the FLI's letter calling for a moratorium on more powerful AI systems, and following the global AI Safety Summit held at Bletchley Park in the UK at the beginning of November.

Selected follow-ups:
Stuart Russell's page at Berkeley
Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI)
The 2021 Reith Lectures: Living With Artificial Intelligence
The book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration