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 over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett · The Man Who Wrote The Book On AI: 2030 Might Be The Point Of No Return! We've Been Lied To About AI! · 4 Dec 2025 podcast

What's that?

So King Midas is this legendary king who lived in modern day Turkey, but I think it's like Greek mythology.

He is said to have asked the gods to grant him a wish.

The wish being that everything I touch should turn to gold.

So he's incredibly greedy.

You know, we call this the Midas touch.

And we think of the Midas touch as being like, you know, that's a good thing, right?

Wouldn't that be cool?

But what happens?

So he, you know, he goes to drink some water and he finds that the water has turned to gold.

And he goes to eat an apple and the apple turns to gold.

And he goes to, you know, comfort his daughter and his daughter turns to gold.

And so he dies in misery and starvation.

So this applies to our current situation in two ways, actually.

So one is that I think greed is driving us to pursue a technology that will end up consuming us.

And we will perhaps die in misery and starvation instead.

What it shows is how difficult it is to correctly articulate what you want the future to be like.

For a long time, the way we built AI systems was we created these algorithms where we could specify the objective, and then the machine would figure out how to achieve the objective and then achieve it.

So we specify what it means to win at chess or to win at Go, and the algorithm figures out how to do it, and it does it really well.

So that was standard AI up until recently.

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