Some of the greatest scientists and inventors of the future are sitting in high school classrooms right now, breezing through calculus and eagerly awaiting freshman year at the world’s top universities. They may have already won Math Olympiads or invented clever, new internet applications. We know these students are smart, but are they prepared to responsibly guide the future of technology?

Developing safe and beneficial technology requires more than technical expertise — it requires a well-rounded education and the ability to understand other perspectives. But since math and science students must spend so much time doing technical work, they often lack the skills and experience necessary to understand how their inventions will impact society.

These educational gaps could prove problematic as artificial intelligence assumes a greater role in our lives. AI research is booming among young computer scientists, and these students need to understand the complex ethical, governance, and safety challenges posed by their innovations.

In 2012, a group of AI researchers and safety advocates – Paul Christiano, Jacob Steinhardt, Andrew Critch, Anna Salamon, and Yan Zhang – created the Summer Program in Applied Rationality and Cognition (SPARC) to address the many issues that face quantitatively strong teenagers, including the issue of educational gaps in AI. As with all technologies, they explain, the more the AI community consists of thoughtful, intelligent, broad-minded reasoners, the more likely AI is to be developed in a safe and beneficial manner.

Each summer, the SPARC founders invite 30-35 mathematically gifted high school students to participate in their two-week program. Zhang, SPARC’s director, explains: “Our goals are to generate a strong community, expose these students to ideas that they’re not going to get in class – blind spots of being a quantitatively strong teenager in today’s world, like empathy and social dynamics. Overall we want to make them more powerful individuals who can bring positive change to the world.”

To help students make a positive impact, SPARC instructors teach core ideas in effective altruism (EA). “We have a lot of conversations about EA, but we don’t push the students to become EA,” Zhang says. “We expose them to good ideas, and I think that’s a healthier way to do mentorship.”

SPARC also exposes students to machine learning, AI safety, and existential risks. In 2016 and 2017, they held over 10 classes on these topics, including: “Machine Learning” and “Tensorflow” taught by Jacob Steinhardt, “Irresponsible Futurism” and “Effective Do-Gooding” taught by Paul Christiano, “Optimization” taught by John Schulman, and “Long-Term Thinking on AI and Automization” taught by Michael Webb.

But SPARC instructors don’t push students down the AI path either. Instead, they encourage students to apply SPARC’s holistic training to make a more positive impact in any field.

Making the most positive impact requires thinking on the margin, and asking: What one additional unit of knowledge will be most helpful for creating positive impact? For these students, most of whom have won Math and Computing Olympiads, it’s usually not more math.

“A weakness of a lot of mathematically-minded students are things like social skills or having productive arguments with people,” Zhang says. “Because to be impactful you need your quantitative skills, but you need to also be able to relate with people.”

To counter this weakness, he teaches classes on social skills and signaling, and occasionally leads improvisational games. SPARC still teaches a lot of math, but Zhang is more interested in addressing these students’ educational blind spots – the same blind spots that the instructors themselves had as students. “What would have made us more impactful individuals, and also more complete and more human in many ways?” he asks.

Working with non-math students can help, so Zhang and his colleagues have experimented with bringing excellent writers and original thinkers into the program. “We’ve consistently had really good successes with those students, because they bring something that the Math Olympiad kids don’t have,” Zhang says.

SPARC also broadens students’ horizons with guest speakers from academia and organizations such as the Open Philanthropy Project, OpenAI, Dropbox and Quora. In one talk, Dropbox engineer Albert Ni spoke to SPARC students about “common mistakes that math people make when they try to do things later in life.”

In another successful experiment suggested by Ofer Grossman, a SPARC alum who is now a staff member, SPARC made half of all classes optional in 2017. The classes were still packed because students appreciated the culture. The founders also agreed that conversations after class are often more impactful than classes, and therefore engineered one-on-one time and group discussions into the curriculum. Thinking on the margin, they ask: “What are the things that were memorable about school? What are the good parts? Can we do more of those and less of the others?”

Above all, SPARC fosters a culture of openness, curiosity and accountability. Inherent in this project is “cognitive debiasing” – learning about common biases like selection bias and confirmation bias, and correcting for them. “We do a lot of de-biasing in our interactions with each other, very explicitly,” Zhang says. “We also have classes on cognitive biases, but the culture is the more important part.”

Designing safe and beneficial technology requires technical expertise, but in SPARC’s view, cultivating a holistic research culture is equally important. Today’s top students may make some of the most consequential AI breakthroughs in the future, and their values, education and temperament will play a critical role in ensuring that advanced AI is deployed safely and for the common good.

“This is also important outside of AI,” Zhang explains. “The official SPARC stance is to make these students future leaders in their communities, whether it’s AI, academia, medicine, or law. These leaders could then talk to each other and become allies instead of having a bunch of splintered, narrow disciplines.”

As SPARC approaches its 7th year, some alumni have already begun to make an impact. A few AI-oriented alumni recently founded AlphaSheets – a collaborative, programmable spreadsheet for finance that is less prone to error – while other students are leading a “hacker house” with people in Silicon Valley. Additionally, SPARC inspired the creation of ESPR, a similar European program explicitly focused on AI risk.

But most impacts will be less tangible. “Different pockets of people interested in different things have been working with SPARC’s resources, and they’re forming a lot of social groups,” Zhang explains. “It’s like a bunch of little sparks and we don’t quite know what they’ll become, but I’m pretty excited about next five years.”

This article is part of a Future of Life series on the AI safety research grants, which were funded by generous donations from Elon Musk and the Open Philanthropy Project.

Artificial intelligence poses a myriad of risks to humanity. From privacy concerns, to algorithmic bias and “black box” decision making, to broader questions of value alignment, recursive self-improvement, and existential risk from superintelligence — there’s no shortage of AI safety issues.  

AI safety research aims to address all of these concerns. But with limited funding and too few researchers, trade-offs in research are inevitable. In order to ensure that the AI safety community tackles the most important questions, researchers must prioritize their causes.

Owen Cotton-Barratt, along with his colleagues at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) and the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), looks at this ‘cause prioritization’ for the AI safety community. They analyze which projects are more likely to help mitigate catastrophic or existential risks from highly-advanced AI systems, especially artificial general intelligence (AGI). By modeling trade-offs between different types of research, Cotton-Barratt hopes to guide scientists toward more effective AI safety research projects.

The first step of cause prioritization is understanding the work already being done. Broadly speaking, AI safety research happens in two domains: technical work and strategic work.

AI’s technical safety challenge is to keep machines safe and secure as they become more capable and creative. By making AI systems more predictable, more transparent, and more robustly aligned with our goals and values, we can significantly reduce the risk of harm. Technical safety work includes Stuart Russell’s research on reinforcement learning and Dan Weld’s work on explainable machine learning, since they’re improving the actual programming in AI systems.

In addition, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) recently released a technical safety agenda aimed at aligning machine intelligence with human interests in the long term, while OpenAI, another non-profit AI research company, is investigating the “many research problems around ensuring that modern machine learning systems operate as intended,” following suggestions from the seminal paper Concrete Problems in AI Safety.

Strategic safety work is broader, and asks how society can best prepare for and mitigate the risks of powerful AI. This research includes analyzing the political environment surrounding AI development, facilitating open dialogue between research areas, disincentivizing arms races, and learning from game theory and neuroscience about probable outcomes for AI. Yale professor Allan Dafoe has recently focused on strategic work, researching the international politics of artificial intelligence and consulting for governments, AI labs and nonprofits about AI risks. And Yale bioethicist Wendell Wallach, apart from his work on “silo busting,” is researching forms of global governance for AI.

Cause prioritization is strategy work, as well. Cotton-Barratt explains, “Strategy work includes analyzing the safety landscape itself and considering what kind of work do we think we’re going to have lots of, what are we going to have less of, and therefore helping us steer resources and be more targeted in our work.”

As the graph above illustrates, AI safety spending has grown significantly since 2015. And while more money doesn’t always translate into improved results, funding patterns are easy to assess and can say a lot about research priorities. Seb Farquhar, Cotton-Barratt’s colleague at CEA, wrote a post earlier this year analyzing AI safety funding and suggesting ways to better allocate future investments.

To start, he suggests that the technical research community acquire more personal investigators to take the research agenda, detailed in Concrete Problems in AI Safety, forward. OpenAI is already taking a lead on this. Additionally, the community should go out of its way to ensure that emerging AI safety centers hire the best candidates, since these researchers will shape each center’s success for years to come.

In general, Farquhar notes that strategy, outreach and policy work haven’t kept up with the overall growth of AI safety research. He suggests that more people focus on improving communication about long-run strategies between AI safety research teams, between the AI safety community and the broader AI community, and between policymakers and researchers. Building more PhD and Masters courses on AI strategy and policy could establish a pipeline to fill this void, he adds.

To complement Farquhar’s data, Cotton-Barratt’s colleague Max Dalton created a mathematical model to track how more funding and more people working on a safety problem translate into useful progress or solutions. The model tries to answer such questions as: if we want to reduce AI’s existential risks, how much of an effect do we get by investing money in strategy research versus technical research?

In general, technical research is easier to track than strategic work in mathematical models. For example, spending more on strategic ethics research may be vital for AI safety, but it’s difficult to quantify that impact. Improving models of reinforcement learning, however, can produce safer and more robustly-aligned machines. With clearer feedback loops, these technical projects fit best with Dalton’s models.

But these models also confront major uncertainty. No one really knows when AGI will be developed, and this makes it difficult to determine the most important research. If AGI will be developed in five years, perhaps researchers should focus only on the most essential safety work, such as improving transparency in AI systems. But if we have thirty years, researchers can probably afford to dive into more theoretical work.

Moreover, no one really knows how AGI will function. Machine learning and deep neural networks have ushered in a new AI revolution, but AGI will likely be developed on architectures far different from AlphaGo and Watson.

This makes some long-term safety research a risky investment, even if, as many argue, it is the most important research we can do. For example, researchers could spend years making deep neural nets safe and transparent, only to find their work wasted when AGI develops on an entirely different programming architecture.

Cotton-Barratt attributes this issue to ‘nearsightedness,’ and discussed it in a recent talk at Effective Altruism Global this summer. Humans often can’t anticipate disruptive change, and AI researchers are no exception.

“Work that we might do for long-term scenarios might turn out to be completely confused because we weren’t thinking of the right type of things,” he explains. “We have more leverage over the near-term scenarios because we’re more able to assess what they’re going to look like.”

Any additional AI safety research is better than none, but given the unknown timelines and the potential gravity of AI’s threats to humanity, we’re better off pursuing — to the extent possible — the most effective AI safety research.

By helping the AI research portfolio advance in a more efficient and comprehensive direction, Cotton-Barratt and his colleagues hope to ensure that when machines eventually outsmart us, we will have asked — and hopefully answered — the right questions.

This article is part of a Future of Life series on the AI safety research grants, which were funded by generous donations from Elon Musk and the Open Philanthropy Project. If you’re interested in applying for our 2018 grants competition, please see this link.

At the end of 2017, the United States House of Representatives passed a bill called the SELF DRIVE Act, laying out an initial federal framework for autonomous vehicle regulation. Autonomous cars have been undergoing testing on public roads for almost two decades. With the passing of this bill, along with the increasing safety benefits of autonomous vehicles, it is likely that they will become even more prevalent in our daily lives. This is true for numerous autonomous technologies including those in the medical, legal, and safety fields – just to name a few.

To that end, researchers, developers, and users alike must be able to have confidence in these types of technologies that rely heavily on artificial intelligence (AI). This extends beyond autonomous vehicles, applying to everything from security devices in your smart home to the personal assistant in your phone.

Percy Liang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, explains that humans rely on some degree of predictability in their day-to-day interactions — both with other humans and automated systems (including, but not limited to, their cars). One way to create this predictability is by taking advantage of machine learning.

Machine learning deals with algorithms that allow an AI to “learn” based on data gathered from previous experiences. Developers do not need to write code that dictates each and every action or intention for the AI. Instead, the system recognizes patterns from its experiences and assumes the appropriate action based on that data. It is akin to the process of trial and error.

A key question often asked of machine learning systems in the research and testing environment is, “Why did the system make this prediction?” About this search for intention, Liang explains:

“If you’re crossing the road and a car comes toward you, you have a model of what the other human driver is going to do. But if the car is controlled by an AI, how should humans know how to behave?”

It is important to see that a system is performing well, but perhaps even more important is its ability to explain in easily understandable terms why it acted the way it did. Even if the system is not accurate, it must be explainable and predictable. For AI to be safely deployed, systems must rely on well-understood, realistic, and testable assumptions.

Current theories that explore the idea of reliable AI focus on fitting the observable outputs in the training data. However, as Liang explains, this could lead “to an autonomous driving system that performs well on validation tests but does not understand the human values underlying the desired outputs.”

Running multiple tests is important, of course. These types of simulations, explains Liang, “are good for debugging techniques — they allow us to more easily perform controlled experiments, and they allow for faster iteration.”

However, to really know whether a technique is effective, “there is no substitute for applying it to real life,” says Liang, “ this goes for language, vision, and robotics.” An autonomous vehicle may perform well in all testing conditions, but there is no way to accurately predict how it could perform in an unpredictable natural disaster.

The best-performing models in many domains — e.g., deep neural networks for image and speech recognition — are obviously quite complex. These are considered “blackbox models,” and their predictions can be difficult, if not impossible, for them to explain.

Liang and his team are working to interpret these models by researching how a particular training situation leads to a prediction. As Liang explains, “Machine learning algorithms take training data and produce a model, which is used to predict on new inputs.”

This type of observation becomes increasingly important as AIs take on more complex tasks – think life or death situations, such as interpreting medical diagnoses. “If the training data has outliers or adversarially generated data,” says Liang, “this will affect (corrupt) the model, which will in turn cause predictions on new inputs to be possibly wrong.  Influence functions allow you to track precisely the way that a single training point would affect the prediction on a particular new input.”

Essentially, by understanding why a model makes the decisions it makes, Liang’s team hopes to improve how models function, discover new science, and provide end users with explanations of actions that impact them.

Another aspect of Liang’s research is ensuring that an AI understands, and is able to communicate, its limits to humans. The conventional metric for success, he explains, is average accuracy, “which is not a good interface for AI safety.” He posits, “what is one to do with an 80 percent reliable system?”

Liang is not looking for the system to have an accurate answer 100 percent of the time. Instead, he wants the system to be able to admit when it does not know an answer. If a user asks a system “How many painkillers should I take?” it is better for the system to say, “I don’t know” rather than making a costly or dangerous incorrect prediction.

Liang’s team is working on this challenge by tracking a model’s predictions through its learning algorithm — all the way back to the training data where the model parameters originated.

Liang’s team hopes that this approach — of looking at the model through the lens of the training data — will become a standard part of the toolkit of developing, understanding, and diagnosing machine learning. He explains that researchers could relate this to many applications: medical, computer, natural language understanding systems, and various business analytics applications.

“I think,” Liang concludes, “there is some confusion about the role of simulations — some eschew it entirely and some are happy doing everything in simulation. Perhaps we need to change culturally to have a place for both.”

In this way, Liang and his team plan to lay a framework for a new generation of machine learning algorithms that work reliably, fail gracefully, and reduce risks.

This article is part of a Future of Life series on the AI safety research grants, which were funded by generous donations from Elon Musk and the Open Philanthropy Project. If you’re interested in applying for our 2018 grants competition, please see this link.