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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TechStuff · The Man Who Wrote the AI Textbook Says We're Heading For Extinction - The Story · 24 Jun 2026 podcast

We put in the wrong objective.

And in a simulated soccer, it's not the end of the world, but...

you know, with a real world system, it really could be the end of the world, right?

You say cure cancer as quickly as possible.

Sounds good.

Yeah, we'd love to get a cure for cancer and the faster, the better.

But if you literally try to do that, you might decide, well, best way to get a cure for cancer is to, you know, try many, many things, which means I have to run many, many clinical trials in parallel, which means I need to have everyone have cancer

first so that I can run billions of simultaneous trials.

So I make sure that everyone in the world has cancer, and then I start running all the clinical trials, right?

That's the fastest way to get a cure.

But it's obviously a catastrophe.

And it's very easy to come up with these scenarios.

We call it misalignment, right?

That you specify an objective, it's misaligned with what you really want because you

didn't write it down.

And that's where I realized that our thinking about AI was inadequate, right?

That we had operated within a framework almost without realizing it.

We just took it for granted that this was obviously

the way you do things.

I think that's a great question.

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