Max Tegmark

So these are a lot of hard, hard challenges we're up for, but I don't think any of them are insurmountable.

The fundamental reason why

Eliezer looked so depressed when I last saw him was because he felt there just wasn't enough time.

He was hoping that humanity was going to take this threat more seriously so we would have more time.

Yeah.

And now we don't have more time.

That's why the open letter is calling for more time.

Oh, yeah.

But it's also the most worthy problem, the most important problem for humanity to ever solve.

Because if we solve that one, Lex, that aligned AI can help us solve all the other problems.

Professor Stuart Russell at Berkeley, who's also one of the driving forces behind this letter, he has a whole research program about this.

I think of it as AI humility, exactly.

Although he calls it inverse reinforcement learning and other nerdy terms, but it's about exactly that.

Instead of telling the AI, here's this goal, go optimize the bejesus out of it.

You tell it, okay, do what I want you to do, but I'm not gonna tell you right now what it is I want you to do.

You need to figure it out.

So then you give the incentive to be very humble and keep asking you questions along the way.

Is this what you really meant?

Is this what you wanted?

And oh, this other thing I tried didn't work.