Stuart Russell
speaker
1,902 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2018
last heard 24 Jun
Stuart Russell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Samuel Butler wrote a book that described...
society where there had been an enormous conflict between those who were in favor of the machines and those who predicted that the machines would be the ruin of the human race.
Yeah, it was specifically not my job to compare the safety records of different companies or their safety positions.
I think, if I understand it correctly, Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, which is one way of allowing considerations other than profit to affect the decisions made by management and the board.
Because for a regular for-profit company, there is a legal obligation to maximize shareholder return.
And what's happening here is that the risks imposed on the rest of humanity are externalities, as economists call it, which means that someone is making a decision and there's a bad consequence that is being loaded onto somebody else.
So you think about chemical companies who skimp on safety, and as it stands, according to the companies, these are all externalities, meaning they don't accept responsibility for these consequences.
Those are harms that don't figure into their balance sheet.
And so the same would be true, in a sense, for human extinction.
And even liability would not really be a deterrent for that, right?
Because obviously you wouldn't be around to pay the compensation.
So they just sort of factor that out of their decision-making.
And that's exactly what OpenAI was set up to avoid, but now it's
with the transition to a for-profit entity.
It's part of that calculus.
Yeah, so if we go back even further to the beginnings of the field of AI in the post-war period, so 1940s, 1950s, I think everyone agreed that AI is about creating intelligence in machines.
What wasn't clear was, well, what is intelligence?
How do we define this target and how do we go about doing it?
So there was an active debate.
Should we try to emulate human intelligence?
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