Stuart Russell

because they don't do three or four operations.

They manufacture three or four billion pills and they sell them.

And then they find out maybe six months or a year later that, oh, people are dying of heart attacks or getting cancer from this drug.

And so that's why we have the FDA, right?

Because of the scalability of pharmaceutical production.

And there have been some unbelievably bad episodes

in the history of pharmaceuticals and, and adulteration of, of products and so on that, that have killed tens of thousands or paralyzed hundreds of thousands of people.

Now, with computers, we have that same scalability problem that you can sit there and type for I equals one to five billion do, right?

And all of a sudden, you're having an impact on a global scale.

And yet we have no FDA, right?

There's absolutely no controls at all over what a bunch of undergraduates with too much caffeine can do to the world.

And, you know, we look at what happened with Facebook recently.

Well, social media in general and click through optimization.

So you have a simple feedback algorithm that's trying to just optimize click through.

That sounds reasonable, right?

Because you don't want to be feeding people ads that they don't care about or not interested in.

And you might even think of that process as simply adjusting the feeding of ads or news articles or whatever it might be to match people's preferences, right?

Which sounds like a good idea.

But in fact, that isn't how the algorithm works, right?

You make more money, the algorithm makes more money if...