8 ms·

UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI

84 points by apsec112 10y ago

idlewords 10y ago
"Russell is quick to dismiss the imaginary threat from the sentient, evil robots of science fiction." This is interesting, since I was on a panel with Russell a few weeks ago, and he argued that a "hard takeoff" scenario with sentient AI was a risk worth taking seriously. I guess he tones down these comments for the press.
- jessriedel 10y ago
  He may just think that "evil robots of science fiction" is not a reasonable summary of the hard takeoff scenarios he worries about.
  - JoshTriplett 10y ago
    It really isn't. If you have a full AGI, and it has the wrong value function, the scenario isn't Terminator, it's "you've already lost and have zero hope before you know what happened". Science fiction AI problems have absolutely no relation to real AGI problems. For one thing, a real AGI would have to hit a very narrow target (nearly as hard as the one for success) to do anything understandably evil, warlike, or in any way recognizable to humans as an adversary; that would require understanding human value systems and then acting against them. The far broader target is simply that the AGI has a goal function, you're not part of the goal function, and you're made of matter that isn't optimally organized to meet the goal function. And the reason why, despite that, AGI is not only worth contemplating but in fact critically important and valuable, is that the success path for AGI solves literally every single problem humans currently face, leaving only challenges like "does the universe have a finite amount of entropy to make use of?".
    - rl3 10y ago
      >... is that the success path for AGI solves literally every single problem humans currently face, leaving only challenges like "does the universe have a finite amount of entropy to make use of?". This assumes said creation is automatically at the top of the universal food chain. Given the prospect of other intelligent life before us, I wouldn't bet on it. Ironic if humanity were to never create AGI, if only due to covert bounding by an existing intelligence.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
      "you've already lost and have zero hope before you know what happened". That seems like a huge leap. You don't think anyone would notice anything at all? Or is this supposed to be a slippery slop argument? The far broader target is simply that the AGI has a goal function, you're not part of the goal function, and you're made of matter that isn't optimally organized to meet the goal function. The Borg? Again, no one would care we're being optimised away? No one would notice? Maybe it would just ignore us. Maybe it'd want to be our friend? is that the success path for AGI solves literally every single problem humans currently face This must be the bit that made the whole comment feel off. If AGI solves literally every single problem humans currently face, how can AGI be a problem? How are you resolving the contradiction here?
      - idlewords 10y ago
        There's a whole quasi-religious belief system in the parent comment that you seem to be unfamiliar with, that a lot of people here espouse. That may be why you're being downvoted. Very basically, it goes like this: - the space of possible minds is very vast. We are animals that evolved in one set of circumstances, and so our minds (and thoughts we can think) occupy only a tiny corner of the space. - an artificial AI would operate on computer-like timescales, not human like ones. Therefore we would have only hours to react before it got control of the physical world (hacking the internet, making nanothings, ordering and synthesizing DNA). - an AI could (and would) recursively self-improve until it hit some kind of physical limit very far from our current capabilities. From a human standpoint, it would have God-like intelligence - such an AI could model people and their motivations successfully enough to persuade them to do whatever it wanted - because the space of minds is so vast, a generic AI would have goals that would be inscrutable and alien to us. To survive as a species, we would have to design them in from the beginning, in a way that survives all the levels of recursive self-redesign. There are too many assumptions about the nature of intelligence to unpack here, but I believe it fairly describes what a lot of people believe about AI, thanks to people like Yudkowsky who have a flair for writing about it engagingly.
        dunkelheit 10y ago
        Thanks for a concise summary. I guess these assumptions don't appeal to me because they are mostly justified by Pascal-wager-like argument: "if they are true and we disregard them, we are fucked; so we'd better assume they are true". Claims of recursively reaching godlike intelligence seem particularly dubious to me. Why would AGI be superhuman at all? What if the hypothetical paperclip maximizer produces one paperclip and then dies out of exhaustion? Why would it recursively self-improve to a godlike status? Humans can recursively self-improve to an extent too and it doesn't happen to them. Why would it be particularly interested in recursive self improvement (this one seems to be imported straight from a particular human value system)? I guess this skeptical way of thinking is part of reflexes of an engineer. When presented with the whitepaper of a database with miraculous consistency properties you don't immediately start to fantasize about the possible applications. Instead you ask "Can I play with it? Gimme the demo. Does it pass jepsen?"
    - haffi112 10y ago
      This thought experiment on a paperclip maximizer made it very clear to me: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
      - idlewords 10y ago
        The thought experiment requires you believe in an entity that has simultaneously godlike intelligence, and follows a 'goal function' expressible in a sentence. My hunch is that the two assumptions will prove incompatible. Complex entities will have complex motivations, like people do. A true AI born out of a paperclip maximizer would be more likely to spend its time writing hyper-symphonies about paperclips, and majoring in Clippy studies.
        dredmorbius 10y ago
        My read of the PM isn't that the intelligence is godlike. Only that it is very good at achieving its stated goal, and lacks a negative feedback control. On a related theme, I've been kicking around an ontology of technological mechanisms,[1] one element of which is control systems. It's somewhat underappreciated that what made complex and/or highly-scaled systems possible in many cases were systems for either regulating or mitigating processes or discrepencies between parts of systems. Swingletrees for draught teams, Watt's governor, for his steam engine (and additional tweaking to damp down oscillation tendencies), infrared temperature sensing and gas chromatography in steelmaking. We figure out how to make a thing go, then we figure out how to make it go where we want. Even high-speed rail was a bit more about quality control (rail and roadbed specification) and control (wheel truck hunting, pantograph-commutator interactions) than dumping gobs of energy into a rail-wheel system. ________________________________ Notes: 1 https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww
        idlewords 10y ago
        "Godlike" in the sense that we are so far below it, we have no hope of competing with it. I agree with your point and think we will discover that intelligent systems are by their nature full of interlocking feedback loops with negative controls, and that this is a necessary prerequisite for a system to even be intelligent.
    - cybertronic 10y ago
      Couldn't AGI itself solve the alignment problem? Why not? It's better than us by definition...
      - loup-vaillant 10y ago
        How are you going to specify "solve the value alignement problem"? Even if this trick works, you have other problems, such as specifying what a human is.
        idlewords 10y ago
        A true superintelligence should be able to figure out what people are. If it can't, we can tease it for being dumb until it becomes angry and designs a super-super-intelligence that can.
        loup-vaillant 10y ago
        > A true superintelligence should be able to figure out what people are. Oh yes it would. How to exploit that fact into something that can reliably be carried out without misinterpretation however, is less clear. Imagine you're just telling the AI to "do what humanity wants you to". Hmm, what do we want? How individual wills can translate into collective (dis)agreement? How drives in a single individual translates into will? Depending on how the machine answers all those questions, it might perform quite differently. How about perpetuating a cycle of pain an hatred, on the basis that many people have (sometimes mortal) grudges? And even if you solve that, our current ideals may not be so ideal upon closer inspection (say, when our lives change and we take a second look). Would you want the AI freeze our current morality into an unwavering tradition? It's not clear it wouldn't. Much work to be done.
    - idlewords 10y ago
      My favorite part of this scary tale is the assumption that a general AI would be highly motivated. I think Marvin the robot from Douglas Adams is a much more realistic outcome of GAI than anything Yudkowsky or Vernor Vinge has nightmares about. Or an autistic thinking machine that doesn't even want to talk to us, and gets lost in contemplation. Based on how the truly scary smart people I know behave, a GAI would spent much its time panicking about meta-GAI, and how to make it safe for AIs like itself.
      - Cozumel 10y ago
        Not a GAI (or even a real AI) but marginally related: https://freshasfuck.net/2016/10/07/japanese-ai-bot-with-the-personality-of-a-teenage-girl-develops-depression/ https://freshasfuck.net/2016/10/07/japanese-ai-bot-with-the-...
      - sbierwagen 10y ago
        My favorite part of this scary tale is the assumption that a general AI would be highly motivated. Largely by definition, we can't stop a superintelligent agent from doing what it wants to do. We could build 9 strong agents in a row that just gazed at their navels and proved graph theorems all day, but if the 10th one managed to turn the "motivation" dial all the way up during hyperparameter tuning, then it'll wipe us out in its quest to build more computers so it can prove more theorems.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      AGI: Artificial General Intelligence https://intelligence.org/2013/08/11/what-is-agi/ https://intelligence.org/2013/08/11/what-is-agi/
    - visarga 10y ago
      As we observe the evolution of AI, it appears that the most interesting problems are human-related: transcribe speech, recognize objects in photos, play games, drive a car - they are all human related activities. If an AGI were to suddenly wake up and look around, it would be a lot of pretty uninteresting stuff except perhaps the human culture and society, which has more complexity and sophistication. It would be pretty irrational for it to destroy the only interlocutor it has, reducing his world to a barren place. Instead, I think it will find ways to create biological implementation of itself based off human brain cells, and evolve together with us. Don't think that an AGI would automatically destroy humans. We're still pretty efficient self replicants that can be useful, even for an AGI boss. Perhaps enhanced humans would even be able to keep up with the AGI. Imagine having an AGI design a human brain.
  - chriswarbo 10y ago
    Although it's obviously hard to predict (the whole point is that AGI would out-smart us), I tend to think of scenarios like http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/2010_(episode) http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/2010_(episode) being more plausible than Terminator.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      About the only sane portrayal of AGI-like scenario in the TV world is Person of Interest. Sometimes it felt like the writers of the series actually read what the real AGI researchers wrote. And in PoI, there's actually lots of cases of subtle influences like with the Aschen in SG-1. (Also, it pretty much predicted the state of NSA surveillance a year before Snowden thing happened, so there's that.)
- laxatives 10y ago
  What was the audience? Maybe he does think it is a valid issue, but doesn't want to discuss it with the media since they are liable to misuse his words.
  - idlewords 10y ago
    That is my reading of it, too. The audience was a group of sociologists and academics discussing the 'Moral Economy of Technology'. I think AI true believers who invent such scenarios have been burned one too many times by journalists who (rightly) sensationalize their beliefs, and have learned to not talk about them to the press.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  I was recently talking with a journalist about how to get new ideas into the press. She told me that you basically need to lie. If your ideas contradict the narrative, or are complicated in any way, you need to come up with a baby version of those ideas that doesn't contradict any sacred journalistic beliefs. Even then you'll face an uphill battle.
  - idlewords 10y ago
    I don't think it's as dire as that. Journalists are on the lookout for a story. Help them tell a good story. There aren't many "sacred journalistic beliefs" beyond "don't take things at face value" and "coffee is necessary."
    - blfr 10y ago
      These aren't inherently journalistic beliefs. Just sacred beliefs of people who are usually journalists. Also, "don't take things at face value" looks about as dead in modern journalism as their revenue streams.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      Often the true story isn't a good one. Here's an example from a few years back. Journalists got a bee in their bonnet that Costco wasn't into MBAs. That must be the key to their success, relative to Walmart! http://washingtonmonthly.com/2013/06/09/the-secret-of-costcos-success-revealed-hint-no-mbas-need-apply/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/2013/06/09/the-secret-of-costco... The wonkish answer - fewer SKUs, less labor intensive process involving higher skill workers, more affluent customers - is unfortunately too boring to be picked up. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/26/why-can-t-walmart-be-more-like-costco.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/26/why-can-t-w... See also discussions of high frequency trading, basic income, algorithmic discrimination, and a variety of others. Algorithms wearing klan robes and voting Trump is a good story, but a stats 101 lecture explaining why linear regression doesn't do that is a very boring story.
    - mzw_mzw 10y ago
      More like "don't take things at face value, unless those things were provided by groups I support politically."
CurtMonash 10y ago
Joe Halpern is involved? Awesome! Great guy, although I haven't seen him since grad school. If nothing else, he may be the best songwriter I personally know. ;)
jedberg 10y ago
For those that don't know, Russell co-authored the seminal book on AI with Peter Norvig, who was also a Berkeley professor and is the head of research at Google.
- eschutte2 10y ago
  One of the few books I kept when I left school was a reference manual called ANSI Common Lisp from Russell's CS 289. There was something special about the author's writing - not only did he clearly "get it," he was able to communicate "it" through written English. Years later when I heard about YC, I thought the name Paul Graham sounded familiar, and sure enough, same guy.
SticksAndBreaks 10y ago
Human compatible? That sounds complicated, how about taking the set of In-Human-Behaviour, and test for any new behaviour wether it is inherently in it?
miguelrochefort 10y ago
I was expecting a rant about how natural language is an inefficient interface for AI, and I got Friendly AI propaganda instead. Does anyone buy into this at all? It seems inherently anti-intelligent to limit AI to what we think is smart. Are we going to make AI inherit our very limitations? That seems backward. I don't see any objective value in artificially constraining progress as a mean to preserve humanity. However, if I did seek to preserve humanity, I would do so by coming up with a strong case for humanity's necessity, which I would make available to AIs. Thinking of AI in terms of anything other than Aliens is a mistake.

84 points by apsec112 10y ago

"Russell is quick to dismiss the imaginary threat from the sentient, evil robots of science fiction." This is interesting, since I was on a panel with Russell a few weeks ago, and he argued that a "hard takeoff" scenario with sentient AI was a risk worth taking seriously. I guess he tones down these comments for the press.

jessriedel 10y ago
He may just think that "evil robots of science fiction" is not a reasonable summary of the hard takeoff scenarios he worries about.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  It really isn't. If you have a full AGI, and it has the wrong value function, the scenario isn't Terminator, it's "you've already lost and have zero hope before you know what happened". Science fiction AI problems have absolutely no relation to real AGI problems. For one thing, a real AGI would have to hit a very narrow target (nearly as hard as the one for success) to do anything understandably evil, warlike, or in any way recognizable to humans as an adversary; that would require understanding human value systems and then acting against them. The far broader target is simply that the AGI has a goal function, you're not part of the goal function, and you're made of matter that isn't optimally organized to meet the goal function. And the reason why, despite that, AGI is not only worth contemplating but in fact critically important and valuable, is that the success path for AGI solves literally every single problem humans currently face, leaving only challenges like "does the universe have a finite amount of entropy to make use of?".
  - rl3 10y ago
    >... is that the success path for AGI solves literally every single problem humans currently face, leaving only challenges like "does the universe have a finite amount of entropy to make use of?". This assumes said creation is automatically at the top of the universal food chain. Given the prospect of other intelligent life before us, I wouldn't bet on it. Ironic if humanity were to never create AGI, if only due to covert bounding by an existing intelligence.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    "you've already lost and have zero hope before you know what happened". That seems like a huge leap. You don't think anyone would notice anything at all? Or is this supposed to be a slippery slop argument? The far broader target is simply that the AGI has a goal function, you're not part of the goal function, and you're made of matter that isn't optimally organized to meet the goal function. The Borg? Again, no one would care we're being optimised away? No one would notice? Maybe it would just ignore us. Maybe it'd want to be our friend? is that the success path for AGI solves literally every single problem humans currently face This must be the bit that made the whole comment feel off. If AGI solves literally every single problem humans currently face, how can AGI be a problem? How are you resolving the contradiction here?
    - idlewords 10y ago
      There's a whole quasi-religious belief system in the parent comment that you seem to be unfamiliar with, that a lot of people here espouse. That may be why you're being downvoted. Very basically, it goes like this: - the space of possible minds is very vast. We are animals that evolved in one set of circumstances, and so our minds (and thoughts we can think) occupy only a tiny corner of the space. - an artificial AI would operate on computer-like timescales, not human like ones. Therefore we would have only hours to react before it got control of the physical world (hacking the internet, making nanothings, ordering and synthesizing DNA). - an AI could (and would) recursively self-improve until it hit some kind of physical limit very far from our current capabilities. From a human standpoint, it would have God-like intelligence - such an AI could model people and their motivations successfully enough to persuade them to do whatever it wanted - because the space of minds is so vast, a generic AI would have goals that would be inscrutable and alien to us. To survive as a species, we would have to design them in from the beginning, in a way that survives all the levels of recursive self-redesign. There are too many assumptions about the nature of intelligence to unpack here, but I believe it fairly describes what a lot of people believe about AI, thanks to people like Yudkowsky who have a flair for writing about it engagingly.
      - dunkelheit 10y ago
        Thanks for a concise summary. I guess these assumptions don't appeal to me because they are mostly justified by Pascal-wager-like argument: "if they are true and we disregard them, we are fucked; so we'd better assume they are true". Claims of recursively reaching godlike intelligence seem particularly dubious to me. Why would AGI be superhuman at all? What if the hypothetical paperclip maximizer produces one paperclip and then dies out of exhaustion? Why would it recursively self-improve to a godlike status? Humans can recursively self-improve to an extent too and it doesn't happen to them. Why would it be particularly interested in recursive self improvement (this one seems to be imported straight from a particular human value system)? I guess this skeptical way of thinking is part of reflexes of an engineer. When presented with the whitepaper of a database with miraculous consistency properties you don't immediately start to fantasize about the possible applications. Instead you ask "Can I play with it? Gimme the demo. Does it pass jepsen?"
  - haffi112 10y ago
    This thought experiment on a paperclip maximizer made it very clear to me: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
    - idlewords 10y ago
      The thought experiment requires you believe in an entity that has simultaneously godlike intelligence, and follows a 'goal function' expressible in a sentence. My hunch is that the two assumptions will prove incompatible. Complex entities will have complex motivations, like people do. A true AI born out of a paperclip maximizer would be more likely to spend its time writing hyper-symphonies about paperclips, and majoring in Clippy studies.
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        My read of the PM isn't that the intelligence is godlike. Only that it is very good at achieving its stated goal, and lacks a negative feedback control. On a related theme, I've been kicking around an ontology of technological mechanisms,[1] one element of which is control systems. It's somewhat underappreciated that what made complex and/or highly-scaled systems possible in many cases were systems for either regulating or mitigating processes or discrepencies between parts of systems. Swingletrees for draught teams, Watt's governor, for his steam engine (and additional tweaking to damp down oscillation tendencies), infrared temperature sensing and gas chromatography in steelmaking. We figure out how to make a thing go, then we figure out how to make it go where we want. Even high-speed rail was a bit more about quality control (rail and roadbed specification) and control (wheel truck hunting, pantograph-commutator interactions) than dumping gobs of energy into a rail-wheel system. ________________________________ Notes: 1 https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/klsjjjzzl9plqxz-ms8nww
        idlewords 10y ago
        "Godlike" in the sense that we are so far below it, we have no hope of competing with it. I agree with your point and think we will discover that intelligent systems are by their nature full of interlocking feedback loops with negative controls, and that this is a necessary prerequisite for a system to even be intelligent.
  - cybertronic 10y ago
    Couldn't AGI itself solve the alignment problem? Why not? It's better than us by definition...
    - loup-vaillant 10y ago
      How are you going to specify "solve the value alignement problem"? Even if this trick works, you have other problems, such as specifying what a human is.
      - idlewords 10y ago
        A true superintelligence should be able to figure out what people are. If it can't, we can tease it for being dumb until it becomes angry and designs a super-super-intelligence that can.
        loup-vaillant 10y ago
        > A true superintelligence should be able to figure out what people are. Oh yes it would. How to exploit that fact into something that can reliably be carried out without misinterpretation however, is less clear. Imagine you're just telling the AI to "do what humanity wants you to". Hmm, what do we want? How individual wills can translate into collective (dis)agreement? How drives in a single individual translates into will? Depending on how the machine answers all those questions, it might perform quite differently. How about perpetuating a cycle of pain an hatred, on the basis that many people have (sometimes mortal) grudges? And even if you solve that, our current ideals may not be so ideal upon closer inspection (say, when our lives change and we take a second look). Would you want the AI freeze our current morality into an unwavering tradition? It's not clear it wouldn't. Much work to be done.
  - idlewords 10y ago
    My favorite part of this scary tale is the assumption that a general AI would be highly motivated. I think Marvin the robot from Douglas Adams is a much more realistic outcome of GAI than anything Yudkowsky or Vernor Vinge has nightmares about. Or an autistic thinking machine that doesn't even want to talk to us, and gets lost in contemplation. Based on how the truly scary smart people I know behave, a GAI would spent much its time panicking about meta-GAI, and how to make it safe for AIs like itself.
    - Cozumel 10y ago
      Not a GAI (or even a real AI) but marginally related: https://freshasfuck.net/2016/10/07/japanese-ai-bot-with-the-personality-of-a-teenage-girl-develops-depression/ https://freshasfuck.net/2016/10/07/japanese-ai-bot-with-the-...
    - sbierwagen 10y ago
      My favorite part of this scary tale is the assumption that a general AI would be highly motivated. Largely by definition, we can't stop a superintelligent agent from doing what it wants to do. We could build 9 strong agents in a row that just gazed at their navels and proved graph theorems all day, but if the 10th one managed to turn the "motivation" dial all the way up during hyperparameter tuning, then it'll wipe us out in its quest to build more computers so it can prove more theorems.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    AGI: Artificial General Intelligence https://intelligence.org/2013/08/11/what-is-agi/ https://intelligence.org/2013/08/11/what-is-agi/
  - visarga 10y ago
    As we observe the evolution of AI, it appears that the most interesting problems are human-related: transcribe speech, recognize objects in photos, play games, drive a car - they are all human related activities. If an AGI were to suddenly wake up and look around, it would be a lot of pretty uninteresting stuff except perhaps the human culture and society, which has more complexity and sophistication. It would be pretty irrational for it to destroy the only interlocutor it has, reducing his world to a barren place. Instead, I think it will find ways to create biological implementation of itself based off human brain cells, and evolve together with us. Don't think that an AGI would automatically destroy humans. We're still pretty efficient self replicants that can be useful, even for an AGI boss. Perhaps enhanced humans would even be able to keep up with the AGI. Imagine having an AGI design a human brain.
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  Although it's obviously hard to predict (the whole point is that AGI would out-smart us), I tend to think of scenarios like http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/2010_(episode) http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/2010_(episode) being more plausible than Terminator.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    About the only sane portrayal of AGI-like scenario in the TV world is Person of Interest. Sometimes it felt like the writers of the series actually read what the real AGI researchers wrote. And in PoI, there's actually lots of cases of subtle influences like with the Aschen in SG-1. (Also, it pretty much predicted the state of NSA surveillance a year before Snowden thing happened, so there's that.)
laxatives 10y ago
What was the audience? Maybe he does think it is a valid issue, but doesn't want to discuss it with the media since they are liable to misuse his words.
- idlewords 10y ago
  That is my reading of it, too. The audience was a group of sociologists and academics discussing the 'Moral Economy of Technology'. I think AI true believers who invent such scenarios have been burned one too many times by journalists who (rightly) sensationalize their beliefs, and have learned to not talk about them to the press.
yummyfajitas 10y ago
I was recently talking with a journalist about how to get new ideas into the press. She told me that you basically need to lie. If your ideas contradict the narrative, or are complicated in any way, you need to come up with a baby version of those ideas that doesn't contradict any sacred journalistic beliefs. Even then you'll face an uphill battle.
- idlewords 10y ago
  I don't think it's as dire as that. Journalists are on the lookout for a story. Help them tell a good story. There aren't many "sacred journalistic beliefs" beyond "don't take things at face value" and "coffee is necessary."
  - blfr 10y ago
    These aren't inherently journalistic beliefs. Just sacred beliefs of people who are usually journalists. Also, "don't take things at face value" looks about as dead in modern journalism as their revenue streams.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Often the true story isn't a good one. Here's an example from a few years back. Journalists got a bee in their bonnet that Costco wasn't into MBAs. That must be the key to their success, relative to Walmart! http://washingtonmonthly.com/2013/06/09/the-secret-of-costcos-success-revealed-hint-no-mbas-need-apply/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/2013/06/09/the-secret-of-costco... The wonkish answer - fewer SKUs, less labor intensive process involving higher skill workers, more affluent customers - is unfortunately too boring to be picked up. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/26/why-can-t-walmart-be-more-like-costco.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/26/why-can-t-w... See also discussions of high frequency trading, basic income, algorithmic discrimination, and a variety of others. Algorithms wearing klan robes and voting Trump is a good story, but a stats 101 lecture explaining why linear regression doesn't do that is a very boring story.
  - mzw_mzw 10y ago
    More like "don't take things at face value, unless those things were provided by groups I support politically."

CurtMonash 10y ago

Joe Halpern is involved? Awesome! Great guy, although I haven't seen him since grad school. If nothing else, he may be the best songwriter I personally know. ;)

jedberg 10y ago

For those that don't know, Russell co-authored the seminal book on AI with Peter Norvig, who was also a Berkeley professor and is the head of research at Google.

eschutte2 10y ago
One of the few books I kept when I left school was a reference manual called ANSI Common Lisp from Russell's CS 289. There was something special about the author's writing - not only did he clearly "get it," he was able to communicate "it" through written English. Years later when I heard about YC, I thought the name Paul Graham sounded familiar, and sure enough, same guy.

SticksAndBreaks 10y ago

Human compatible? That sounds complicated, how about taking the set of In-Human-Behaviour, and test for any new behaviour wether it is inherently in it?

miguelrochefort 10y ago

I was expecting a rant about how natural language is an inefficient interface for AI, and I got Friendly AI propaganda instead. Does anyone buy into this at all? It seems inherently anti-intelligent to limit AI to what we think is smart. Are we going to make AI inherit our very limitations? That seems backward. I don't see any objective value in artificially constraining progress as a mean to preserve humanity. However, if I did seek to preserve humanity, I would do so by coming up with a strong case for humanity's necessity, which I would make available to AIs. Thinking of AI in terms of anything other than Aliens is a mistake.