Why are we so concerned about lethal autonomous weapons? Ariel spoke to four experts –– one physician, one lawyer, and two human rights specialists –– all of whom offered their most powerful arguments on why the world needs to ensure that algorithms are never allowed to make the decision to take a life. It was even recorded from the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons, where a ban on lethal autonomous weapons was under discussion. We've compiled their arguments, along with many of ...
Apr 03, 2019•49 min
See full article here: https://futureoflife.org/2019/03/06/ai-alignment-through-debate-with-geoffrey-irving/ "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 help address this concern, we propose training age...
Mar 07, 2019•1 hr 10 min
In this special two-part podcast Ariel Conn is joined by Max Tegmark for a conversation with Dr. Matthew Meselson, biologist and Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University. Part Two focuses on three major incidents in the history of biological weapons: the 1979 anthrax outbreak in Russia, the use of Agent Orange and other herbicides in Vietnam, and the Yellow Rain controversy in the early 80s. Dr. Meselson led the investigations into all three and solved some per...
Feb 28, 2019•52 min
In this special two-part podcast Ariel Conn is joined by Max Tegmark for a conversation with Dr. Matthew Meselson, biologist and Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University. Dr. Meselson began his career with an experiment that helped prove Watson and Crick’s hypothesis on the structure and replication of DNA. He then got involved in disarmament, working with the US government to halt the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and developing the Biological Weapons Convent...
Feb 28, 2019•57 min
See the full article here: https://futureoflife.org/2019/02/21/human-cognition-and-the-nature-of-intelligence-with-joshua-greene/ "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 I played basketball with LeBron James, maybe you'd believe me, and ...
Feb 21, 2019•38 min
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 may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. The term takes its name from an allegory, the "Byzantine Generals' Pr...
Feb 07, 2019•50 min
Every January, we like to look back over the past 12 months at the progress that’s been made in the world of artificial intelligence. Welcome to our annual “AI breakthroughs” podcast, 2018 edition. Ariel was joined for this retrospective by researchers Roman Yampolskiy and David Krueger. Roman is an AI Safety researcher and professor at the University of Louisville. He also recently published the book, Artificial Intelligence Safety & Security. David is a PhD candidate in the Mila lab at the Uni...
Jan 31, 2019•1 hr 3 min
Our phones, our cars, our televisions, our homes: they’re all getting smarter. Artificial intelligence is already inextricably woven into everyday life, and its impact will only grow in the coming years. But while this development inspires much discussion among members of the scientific community, public opinion on artificial intelligence has remained relatively unknown. Artificial Intelligence: American Attitudes and Trends, a report published earlier in January by the Center for the Governance...
Jan 25, 2019•32 min
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 was recorded at the Beneficial AGI 2019 conference in Puerto Rico. For those of you that are new, this series covers and...
Jan 17, 2019•52 min
Humanity is at a turning point. For the first time in history, we have the technology to completely obliterate ourselves. But we’ve also created boundless possibilities for all life that could enable just about any brilliant future we can imagine. Humanity could erase itself with a nuclear war or a poorly designed AI, or we could colonize space and expand life throughout the universe: As a species, our future has never been more open-ended. The potential for disaster is often more visible than t...
Dec 21, 2018•2 hr 6 min
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 Shah is the seventh podcast in the AI Alignment Podcast series, hosted by Lucas Perry. For those of you that are new, this series is covering and exploring the...
Dec 18, 2018•1 hr 8 min
A Chinese researcher recently made international news with claims that he had edited the first human babies using CRISPR. In doing so, he violated international ethics standards, and he appears to have acted without his funders or his university knowing. But this is only the latest example of biological research triggering ethical concerns. Gain-of-function research a few years ago, which made avian flu more virulent, also sparked controversy when scientists tried to publish their work. And ther...
Nov 30, 2018•33 min
“There are basically two choices. We're going to massively change everything we are doing on this planet, the way we work together, the actions we take, the way we run our economy, and the way we behave towards each other and towards the planet and towards everything that lives on this planet. Or we sit back and relax and we just let the whole thing crash. The choice is so easy to make, even if you don't care at all about nature or the lives of other people. Even if you just look at your own int...
Oct 31, 2018•1 hr 21 min
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? How might objectivism in ethics affect AI alignment? What does this all mean for the future of AI? On Becoming a Moral Realist with Peter Singer is the sixth podcast in the AI Alignment se...
Oct 18, 2018•51 min
How can humanity survive the next century of climate change, a growing population, and emerging technological threats? Where do we stand now, and what steps can we take to cooperate and address our greatest existential risks? In this special podcast episode, Ariel speaks with cosmologist Martin Rees about his new book, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, which discusses humanity’s existential risks and the role that technology plays in determining our collective future. Topics discussed in th...
Oct 11, 2018•53 min
On this month’s podcast, Ariel spoke with Paul Scharre and Mike Horowitz from the Center for a New American Security about the role of automation in the nuclear sphere, and how the proliferation of AI technologies could change nuclear posturing and the effectiveness of deterrence. Paul is a former Pentagon policy official, and the author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons in the Future of War. Mike Horowitz is professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of T...
Sep 28, 2018•51 min
How are we to make progress on AI alignment given moral uncertainty? What are the ideal ways of resolving conflicting value systems and views of morality among persons? How ought we to go about AI alignment given that we are unsure about our normative and metaethical theories? How should preferences be aggregated and persons idealized in the context of our uncertainty? Moral Uncertainty and the Path to AI Alignment with William MacAskill is the fifth podcast in the new AI Alignment series, hoste...
Sep 18, 2018•57 min
Experts predict that artificial intelligence could become the most transformative innovation in history, eclipsing both the development of agriculture and the industrial revolution. And the technology is developing far faster than the average bureaucracy can keep up with. How can local, national, and international governments prepare for such dramatic changes and help steer AI research and use in a more beneficial direction? On this month’s podcast, Ariel spoke with Allan Dafoe and Jessica Cussi...
Aug 31, 2018•44 min
What role does metaethics play in AI alignment and safety? How might paths to AI alignment change given different metaethical views? How do issues in moral epistemology, motivation, and justification affect value alignment? What might be the metaphysical status of suffering and pleasure? What's the difference between moral realism and anti-realism and how is each view grounded? And just what does any of this really have to do with AI? The Metaethics of Joy, Suffering, and AI Alignment is the fou...
Aug 16, 2018•2 hr 46 min
Why are so many AI researchers so worried about lethal autonomous weapons? What makes autonomous weapons so much worse than any other weapons we have today? And why is it so hard for countries to come to a consensus about autonomous weapons? Not surprisingly, the short answer is: it’s complicated. In this month’s podcast, Ariel spoke with experts from a variety of perspectives on the current status of LAWS, where we are headed, and the feasibility of banning these weapons. Guests include ex-Pent...
Jul 31, 2018•2 hr
What role does cyber security play in alignment and safety? What is AI completeness? What is the space of mind design and what does it tell us about AI safety? How does the possibility of machine qualia fit into this space? Can we leak proof the singularity to ensure we are able to test AGI? And what is computational complexity theory anyway? AI Safety, Possible Minds, and Simulated Worlds is the third podcast in the new AI Alignment series, hosted by Lucas Perry. For those of you that are new, ...
Jul 16, 2018•1 hr 23 min
How are emerging technologies like artificial intelligence shaping our world and how we interact with one another? What do different demographics think about AI risk and a robot-filled future? And how can the average citizen contribute not only to the AI discussion, but AI's development? On this month's podcast, Ariel spoke with Charlie Oliver and Randi Williams about how technology is reshaping our world, and how their new project, Mission AI, aims to broaden the conversation and include everyo...
Jun 29, 2018•53 min
In the classic taxonomy of risks developed by Nick Bostrom, existential risks are characterized as risks which are both terminal in severity and transgenerational in scope. If we were to maintain the scope of a risk as transgenerational and increase its severity past terminal, what would such a risk look like? What would it mean for a risk to be transgenerational in scope and hellish in severity? In this podcast, Lucas spoke with Kaj Sotala, an associate researcher at the Foundational Research I...
Jun 14, 2018•1 hr 15 min
With the U.S. pulling out of the Iran deal and canceling (and potentially un-canceling) the summit with North Korea, nuclear weapons have been front and center in the news this month. But will these disagreements lead to a world with even more nuclear weapons? And how did the recent nuclear situations with North Korea and Iran get so tense? To learn more about the geopolitical issues surrounding North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear situations, as well as to learn how nuclear programs in these countr...
May 31, 2018•42 min
What are the odds of a nuclear war happening this century? And how close have we been to nuclear war in the past? Few academics focus on the probability of nuclear war, but many leading voices like former US Secretary of Defense, William Perry, argue that the threat of nuclear conflict is growing. On this month's podcast, Ariel spoke with Seth Baum and Robert de Neufville from the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI), who recently coauthored a report titled A Model for the Probability of Nu...
Apr 30, 2018•58 min
Inverse Reinforcement Learning and Inferring Human Preferences is the first podcast in the new AI Alignment series, hosted by Lucas Perry. This series will be covering and exploring the AI alignment problem across a large variety of domains, reflecting the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of AI alignment. Broadly, we will be having discussions with technical and non-technical researchers across a variety of areas, such as machine learning, AI safety, governance, coordination, ethics, philo...
Apr 25, 2018•1 hr 25 min
Is the malicious use of artificial intelligence inevitable? If the history of technological progress has taught us anything, it's that every "beneficial" technological breakthrough can be used to cause harm. How can we keep bad actors from using otherwise beneficial AI technology to hurt others? How can we ensure that AI technology is designed thoughtfully to prevent accidental harm or misuse? On this month's podcast, Ariel spoke with FLI co-founder Victoria Krakovna and Shahar Avin from the Cen...
Mar 30, 2018•58 min
What does it mean to create beneficial artificial intelligence? How can we expect to align AIs with human values if humans can't even agree on what we value? Building safe and beneficial AI involves tricky technical research problems, but it also requires input from philosophers, ethicists, and psychologists on these fundamental questions. How can we ensure the most effective collaboration? Ariel spoke with FLI's Meia Chita-Tegmark and Lucas Perry on this month's podcast about the value alignmen...
Feb 28, 2018•50 min
AlphaZero, progress in meta-learning, the role of AI in fake news, the difficulty of developing fair machine learning -- 2017 was another year of big breakthroughs and big challenges for AI researchers! To discuss this more, we invited FLI's Richard Mallah and Chelsea Finn from UC Berkeley to join Ariel for this month's podcast. They talked about some of the progress they were most excited to see last year and what they're looking forward to in the coming year.
Jan 31, 2018•31 min
For most of us, 2017 has been a roller coaster, from increased nuclear threats to incredible advancements in AI to crazy news cycles. But while it’s easy to be discouraged by various news stories, we at FLI find ourselves hopeful that we can still create a bright future. In this episode, the FLI team discusses the past year and the momentum we've built, including: the Asilomar Principles, our 2018 AI safety grants competition, the recent Long Beach workshop on Value Alignment, and how we've hono...
Dec 21, 2017•37 min
