Stuart Russell

In fact, reading the comment sections in newspapers, whenever there's an AI article, there'll be people who say, oh, you can just pull the plug out, right?

As if a super intelligent machine would never have thought of that one.

Don't forget, it's watched all those films where they did try to pull the plug out.

Another thing they say, well, you know, as long as it's not conscious...

then it doesn't matter, it won't ever do anything.

Which is...

Completely off the point, because, you know, I don't think the gorillas are sitting there saying, oh, yeah, you know, if only those humans hadn't been conscious, everything would be fine, right?

No, of course not.

What would make gorillas go extinct is the things that humans do, right?

How we behave, our ability to act successfully, right?

in the world so when i play chess against my iphone and i lose right i don't i don't think oh well i'm losing because it's conscious right now i'm just losing because it's better than i am at in that little world uh moving the bits around uh to get what it wants so

And so consciousness has nothing to do with it, right?

Competence is the thing we are concerned about.

So I think the only hope is, can we simultaneously build machines that are more intelligent than us, but guarantee that they will always act in our best interest?

That's the trick, right?

Can we make AI systems whose only purpose is to further human interests?

And I think the answer is yes.

And this is actually what I've been working on.

So I think one part of my career that I didn't mention is sort of having this epiphany while I was on sabbatical in Paris.

This was 2013 or so.