Find the podcast on: In the 1984 book Reasons and Persons, philosopher Derek Parfit asks the reader to consider the following scenario: You step into a teleportation machine that scans your complete atomic structure, annihilates you, and then relays that atomic information to Mars at the speed of light. There, a similar machine recreates […]
Find the podcast on: Neither Yuval Noah Harari nor Max Tegmark need much in the way of introduction. Both are avant-garde thinkers at the forefront of 21st century discourse around science, technology, society and humanity’s future. This conversation represents a rare opportunity for two intellectual leaders to apply their combined expertise — in physics, artificial […]
Find the podcast on: As 2019 is coming to an end and the opportunities of 2020 begin to emerge, it’s a great time to reflect on the past year and our reasons for hope in the year to come. We spend much of our time on this podcast discussing risks that will possibly lead to […]
Find the podcast on: Jan Leike is a senior research scientist who leads the agent alignment team at DeepMind. His is one of three teams within their technical AGI group; each team focuses on different aspects of ensuring advanced AI systems are aligned and beneficial. Jan’s journey in the field of AI has taken […]
Find the podcast on: We could all be more altruistic and effective in our service of others, but what exactly is it that’s stopping us? What are the biases and cognitive failures that prevent us from properly acting in service of existential risks, statistically large numbers of people, and long-term future considerations? How can we […]
Wendell Wallach has been at the forefront of contemporary emerging technology issues for decades now. As an interdisciplinary thinker, he has engaged at the intersections of ethics, governance, AI, bioethics, robotics, and philosophy since the beginning formulations of what we now know as AI alignment were being codified. Wendell began with a broad interest […]
There exist many facts about the nature of reality which stand at odds with our commonly held intuitions and experiences of the world. Ultimately, there is a relativity of the simultaneity of events and there is no universal “now.” Are these facts baked into our experience of the world? Or are our experiences and intuitions […]
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 […]
In his Research Agenda v0.9: Synthesizing a human’s preferences into a utility function, Stuart Armstrong develops an approach for generating friendly artificial intelligence. His alignment proposal can broadly be understood as a kind of inverse reinforcement learning where most of the task of inferring human preferences is left to the AI itself. It’s up to […]
“In July 2017, The State Council of China released the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan. This policy outlines China’s strategy to build a domestic AI industry worth nearly US$150 billion in the next few years and to become the leading AI power by 2030. This officially marked the development of the AI sector as […]
In this podcast, Lucas spoke with Jade Leung from the Center for the Governance of AI (GovAI). GovAI strives to help humanity capture the benefits and mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence. The center focuses on the political challenges arising from transformative AI, and they seek to guide the development of such technology for the […]
Consciousness is a concept which is at the forefront of much scientific and philosophical thinking. At the same time, there is large disagreement over what consciousness exactly is and whether it can be fully captured by science or is best explained away by a reductionist understanding. Some believe consciousness to be the source of all […]
The space of AI alignment research is highly dynamic, and it’s often difficult to get a bird’s eye view of the landscape. This podcast is the second of two parts attempting to partially remedy this by providing an overview of technical AI alignment efforts. In particular, this episode seeks to continue the discussion from Part […]
The space of AI alignment research is highly dynamic, and it’s often difficult to get a bird’s eye view of the landscape. This podcast is the first of two parts attempting to partially remedy this by providing an overview of the organizations participating in technical AI research, their specific research directions, and how these approaches […]
“To make AI systems broadly useful for challenging real-world tasks, we need them to learn complex human goals and preferences. One approach to specifying complex goals asks humans to judge during training which agent behaviors are safe and useful, but this approach can fail if the task is too complicated for a human to directly judge. To […]
“How do we combine concepts to form thoughts? How can the same thought be represented in terms of words versus things that you can see or hear in your mind’s eyes and ears? How does your brain distinguish what it’s thinking about from what it actually believes? If I tell you a made up story, yesterday […]
Three generals are voting on whether to attack or retreat from their siege of a castle. One of the generals is corrupt and two of them are not. What happens when the corrupted general sends different answers to the other two generals? A Byzantine fault is “a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components […]
What motivates cooperative inverse reinforcement learning? What can we gain from recontextualizing our safety efforts from the CIRL point of view? What possible role can pre-AGI systems play in amplifying normative processes? Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Dylan Hadfield-Menell is the eighth podcast in the AI Alignment Podcast series, hosted by Lucas Perry and […]
What role does inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) have to play in AI alignment? What issues complicate IRL and how does this affect the usefulness of this preference learning methodology? What sort of paradigm of AI alignment ought we to take up given such concerns? Inverse Reinforcement Learning and the State of AI Alignment with Rohin […]
Are there such things as moral facts? If so, how might we be able to access them? Peter Singer started his career as a preference utilitarian and a moral anti-realist, and then over time became a hedonic utilitarian and a moral realist. How does such a transition occur, and which positions are more defensible? […]