Despite our best efforts, sometimes what we say we want isn’t precisely what we mean. Nowhere is that felt more acutely than when we’re giving instructions to a machine, whether that’s coding or offering examples to machine learning systems. We unpack the alignment problem in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 

Brian Christian, University of Oxford researcher, and author of The Alignment Problem 

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.