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

And so during that time, 2013, 2014, I came up with the following very simple idea, which is, look, if there's a possibility that humans might tell you the wrong objective or forget to tell you about something that's important to them, then you, the AI system, should never assume that you actually know the correct objective.

you should be explicitly uncertain about what true human objectives, what humans really want the future to be like.

So nonetheless, your objective as an AI system is only make the best possible future for humans.

But you don't know what future humans think is best.

Now, that's actually a perfectly well-defined mathematical problem.

And I found it helpful to actually give an example that people are very familiar with, which is you want to buy a birthday present for your significant other.

So your only interest here is how happy is my, in this case, my wife going to be with the birthday present?

That's my only thing that I care about.

But I don't know.

I'm uncertain about which present would actually make her the happiest.

So I could choose a present just based on sort of averaging over the possibilities.

Maybe I would probably do something safe, maybe something that she's liked in the past.

Or I could ask some questions.

I could ask her friends, has she said anything about what she might like for her birthday?

I could

I could drop some hints and see how she responds.

I could leave open magazines around the house with pictures of cruise ships or pictures of jewelry or whatever and see if she picks them up and says, oh, this looks like fun.

I could try to get more information.

And so it's a very familiar situation.

The AI system would, if it's good at playing this game,

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