Max Tegmark

But my point was, if you play chess, have you looked at the AlphaZero games?

The actual games?

No.

Check it out.

Some of them are just mind blowing.

Really beautiful.

And if you ask, how did it do that?

You got to talk to them as others from DeepMind.

all they'll ultimately be able to give you is big tables of numbers, matrices that define the neural network.

And you can stare at these tables of numbers until your face turns blue.

And you're not going to understand much about why it made that move.

And even if you have natural language processing that can tell you in human language about, oh, 5, 7.28, still not going to really help.

So I think there's a whole spectrum of fun challenges there.

involved in taking a computation that does intelligent things and transforming it into something equally good, equally intelligent, but that's more understandable.

And I think that's really valuable because I think as we put machines in charge of ever more infrastructure in our world, the power grid, the trading on the stock market, weapon systems and so on, it's

absolutely crucial that we can trust these AIs that do all we want.

And trust really comes from understanding in a very fundamental way.

And that's why I'm working on this because I think the more, if we're going to have some hope of ensuring that machines have adopted our goals and that they're going to retain them, that kind of trust

I think needs to be based on things you can actually understand, preferably even improve theorems on, even with a self-driving car, right?

If someone just tells you it's been trained on tons of data and it never crashed, it's less reassuring than if someone actually has a proof.