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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-brian-christian.html>
"So, there’s always an expanding frontier over which, well, that is true
intelligence and this is just machine learning. But broadly, we’re talking
about machines that can learn and act more autonomously. And this is not a
far-off thing. We’re using them now for all kinds of things, from what ads
Facebook serves you to where your bail is set after getting arrested for a
crime. It is affecting your life, my life, now. It is reshaping our economy and
society now.
And it’s moving really, really fast. And even a lot of the people running these
systems, they don’t fully understand what they’re doing. And that’s to say
nothing of the politicians and regulators who are supposed to be governing
them.
So, let’s get started. They’re going to be a few episodes around this theme in
the coming months. But Brian Christian is where I wanted to begin. He’s the
author of the book, “The Alignment Problem.” There are a lot of good books out
there on AI right now, a couple of them from colleagues of mine at The New York
Times.
But Christian’s, in my view, is the best book on the technical questions of
machine learning written for a general audience. It’s a very, very, very deep
work on how machine learning works. And it also ends up being a pretty deep
look into how human learning works and the very fraught relationship between
the two. Because that’s the fear at the core of all this.
The problems and the possibilities of AI are in a very deep way the problems
and possibilities of humanity. They are generated by us. The fear is that it
will learn the worst of us. And it will take our mistakes and our dark impulses
and reorder society around them. And it will do so for the profits of a few.
That’s a really important part of this conversation that often gets missed. The
business models of AI, the political economy of AI, it really, really matters.
So, I asked Christian to join me for the first of our AI episodes to talk about
it."
Via Bill Daul.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
