Stuart Russell

You know, I started out with the first program I wrote was for the Sinclair programmable calculator.

And I think you could write a 21 step algorithm.

That was the biggest program you could write something like that and do little arithmetic calculations.

So I think I implemented Newton's method for a square roots and a few other things like that.

But then, you know, I thought, okay, if I just had more space, I could make this thing intelligent.

And so I started thinking about AI.

And I think the thing that's scary is not the chess program itself.

Because chess programs, they're not in the taking over the world business.

But if you extrapolate, there are things about chess that don't resemble the real world.

We know the rules of chess.

The chessboard is completely visible to the program, where, of course, the real world is not.

Most of the real world is not visible from wherever you're sitting, so to speak.

And to overcome those kinds of problems, you need qualitatively different algorithms.

Another thing about the real world is that we regularly...

plan ahead on the timescales involving billions or trillions of steps now we don't plan those in detail but you know when you choose to do a phd at berkeley that's a five-year commitment and that amounts to about a trillion motor control steps that you will eventually be committed to

Yeah, I mean, every finger movement while you're typing, every character of every paper and the thesis and everything.

So you're not committing in advance to the specific motor control steps, but you're still reasoning on a timescale that will eventually reduce to trillions of motor control actions.

And so for all of these reasons...

AlphaGo and Deep Blue and so on don't represent any kind of threat to humanity, but they are a step towards it, right?

And progress in AI...