YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Christian

lines on the record: 64
first: 2019-07-30
most recent: 2019-07-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The kindest thing that anyone has ever done for me. I want to offer some very concrete thing, but I would have to think pretty seriously about that. What comes to my mind is just the idea of being loved unconditionally by my parents. I think most of most of the difficult things that I've faced in my life in one form or other took the form of not being totally comfortable with who I was, whether it was in school, feeling self-conscious about being a nerd and not answering a question in class even though I knew the answer because I sort of wanted to fit in or didn't want to seem like I was enthusiastic about school because it wasn't cool to act like that. Throughout my life, I think some of the most meaningful things to me have been ways that I've come to just accept who I am. And so I think one of the kindest things that you can do for someone is to see them exactly as they are and accept.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or try to reconstruct our entire thought process and say where did I go wrong? I think it's some comfort that computer science and mathematics more broadly can in effect certify that you were just up against a hard problem. And I think broadly that for me is some measure of comfort that if you have the kind of the vocabulary to understand the type of problem that you're facing and you have some intuitions about the general shape of what optimal solutions look like, then even when you don't get the outcome that you wanted, you can in some sense rest easy because you knew that you followed the appropriate procedure or the appropriate process for dealing with that situation.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, many people would find that unacceptable. And so, of course, we can go down the rabbit hole of how do you modify this, and the solutions get less and less clean as you wiggle the assumptions around. But I think there's broadly just this intuition that one of the highest level takeaways for me from working on the book and just thinking in computational terms about decisions in my own life is some decisions are just hard, that the classical optimal stopping problem, it turns out due to a weird mathematical symmetry that if you follow the 37% rule, you will only succeed 37% of the time. The other 63% of the time you'll fail. And that is the best possible strategy you could enact in that situation. There's no better that you could possibly do than failing 63% of the time. In a weird way, that's some measure of consolation because often in real life, when we find ourselves not getting the outcome we wanted, we can rake ourselves over the coals or”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This rule presumes that your entire goal is to maximize the chance that you get the very best thing in the entire pool, but it comes with a 37% chance, of course, that you have nothing at all because you've passed results. Passers by. Yeah, and you'll never find something as good.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then after that 37%, whether it's 37% of the time that you've given yourself to make the decision or 37% of the way through the pool of options, be prepared to immediately commit to the very first thing you see that's better than what you saw in that first 37%. This is not just an intuitively satisfying balance between looking and leaping. This is the mathematically optimal result. There are strategies like that that I think are wonderfully crisp in the recommendation that you give, but they, of course, rest on this bed of many different assumptions about exactly how the problem is structured and exactly what your goals are.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is that let's say you're looking for an apartment and it's a really competitive marketplace? I'm from San Francisco, so it's this kind of hellishly competitive situation where you have to just force the check into the landlord's hands. If you're in a situation like that, where you encounter a series of options one by one and at each point in time, you must either immediately commit and then never know what else might have been out there or decide to walk away and keep exploring your options, but lose that opportunity forever. What do you do to try to end up with the best thing possible, even though you won't necessarily know at the time whether you've found the best option that might be out there? There's this beautifully elegant result that says that you should spend the first 37% of your search, or one over E, non-committally exploring your options. Don't bring your checkbook. Don't commit to anything no matter how good it seems. You're just purely setting a baseline.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing that comes to my mind is the idea of what's called optimal stopping. The multi-arm bandit problem and the Explore exploit trade-off presumes a framing that's highly iterative. You can pull the handles again and again and again. You can kind of fluidly go from one machine to another and back. There are many decisions in life where you are forced to make a single binding commitment. That could be anything as banal as pulling into a parking space. It could be something like purchasing a house or signing a lease. It could be something like marrying your spouse. And there's kind of a separate mathematics of cases where you need to find the right moment in time to go all in and commit to an option and no longer gather any further information. And I think that mathematics is very kind of instructive both in a specific way but also as a broader set of principles. There's this very famous result called the 37% rule which”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where it's not for lack of technology. We had a coin sorting machine, but there was kind of a political process that was directing the actual level of implementation. So I often encourage people to remember that people will Fight to use licensing requirements and regulation to maintain those things despite the actual technological capability having radically changed. So it's very hard for me to know which areas will look shockingly different. But as to what exactly that looks like, I'd say my guess is as good as anyone's.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there is already a restlessness in the labor force that a lot of the careers that employed some of the most numbers of people are the most vulnerable. So people who drive cars or trucks, people who work in warehouses doing sort of pick and pack things. A lot of those jobs are just one innovation away. It's not clear to me. I mean, there's also going to be a political response as well as just a pure sort of economic response. So I grew up in New Jersey where there's at least in my childhood there was a really robust toll collector union and they had machines where you could toss your change in a bin and it would automatically sort your change and give you whatever you needed back from that. And there was an effective effort to unionize the toll collector so that you still had a human being in the booth counting out your quarters and so forth. And that's an example.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around how capital moves, how laws get made, how licensing and permitting happens. That's still done as sort of a human negotiation level. I know a guy I'll talk to Joe and we'll sort it out. I think humans will maintain oversight of these kind of flows of power and capital, even if the actual value is being created by software. So kind of that's my somewhat off the top of my head thought is position yourself closer to the flow of that value than the actual creation of the value, which is maybe somewhat counterintuitive. I don't know as far as the question of UBI, I don't have a great intuition for that. I am interested in Norway has this sovereign oil wealth fund. What would something like that look like? I don't know.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second avenue is sort of totally different from this way of thinking, which is just what will the impacts of something like AI or AGI be on the economy. And I'm reminded of McKinsey did a report on which jobs they thought would be the most robust. The big picture thing that was interesting to me is that it cuts across the traditional class lines. It's not a white collar versus blue collar thing. It's not an upper middle class versus lower middle class thing. It's very sector dependent. And I remember that what they identified as the most resilient or robust jobs at the top end it was gardener, legislator, and psychotherapist. I thought that was very fascinating. And it's sort of this eclectic mixture of things. I don't think of myself necessarily as a prognosticator about these sorts of things, but my way of thinking about it is that there is a lot of kind of human machinery.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's reasonable to infer that, for example, movie ticket sales are declining, which turns out to be the case, that Hollywood perhaps correctly perceives itself to be at the waning time of this kind of golden era of cinema going. And if that's true, then they really should invest all of their money into just squeezing everything they can out of the existing franchises. So that's an example that I think is applicable more broadly. So you can look at different industries, different corporations, and see, oh, they've really cut their R&D budget and they've given that money to marketing, let's say. Well, that'd be an indication that they feel that that area has matured or has plateaued or something.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Films were sequels by 1990 it was like six by the year 2000 it was eight and I think most recently was like all ten or something like this and we can infer from that that Hollywood has taken like a very hard turn towards an exploitative strategy that they are milking their existing franchises rather than investing money speculatively to try to develop new franchises that will last them into the next few decades so From that”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A case where the computer scientists and the mathematicians are asking the cognitive scientists what are your models for how humans are actually approaching this? Because there may be some insight that we can use from the theory side. One of the implications of thinking in this way that I think is particularly relevant in a business setting is if the interval of time you perceive yourself to be on determines the strategy that you should employ, then it should be the case that if you observe someone else's strategy, you can infer the interval that they're optimizing over. So we give the example in the book of Hollywood. So most people have noticed, it feels like we're living through this deluge of sequels. X-Men 12 and the Adventures seven and whatever. So I spent a while digging through the data and it turns out that this is objectively true. There's a sea change in Hollywood that I want to say in 1982 of the top 10 grossings.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a couple things here that I think are interesting in a business context. One is that implicitly the casino framing that I've described assumes that those probabilities are stable and fixed. And of course we know that the world is not stable and not fixed, that things change over time. And this is true in our personal lives as well. A restaurant that you love gets a new line cook and the burger's not as good. These things shift. And so this is known in the mathematical literature as the restless bandit problem. So how do you play this game when these probabilities are, let's say, on a random walk? So they're drifting. And this is a very interesting case where the theory has not yet consolidated, but humans seem to, in practice, have no problem. Like if you put people in a lab and give them a restless bandit problem, they have no trouble making choices within that environment, but we don't yet know what the mathematics of the optimal solution looks like.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, doing the optimal thing given where they are in that interval of time. And so you have psychologists like Stanford's Laura Carstenson appealing to the Explore exploit trade-off to make this argument that, no, older adults know exactly what they're doing and they're very rationally choosing a strategy that makes sense given where they are. They have a lifetime's exploration behind them. They know what they really like. They know the people in the connections that matter to them. And they have a finite amount of time left to reap the fruits of some new connection or a new discovery. So they're very deliberately enacting this strategy and the math should predict that on average older adults are happier than young people despite our preconceptions and her research bears out that that appears to be the case.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Competent at things. There's a huge literature that shows that they have what's called a novelty bias. They're just relentlessly interested in the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And rather than viewing that as just kind of low willpower or attentional control, you can view it as the optimal strategy. And if you've just burst through the doors of life's casino and you have 80 years ahead of you or whatever, it really does make a lot of sense to just run around wildly pulling handles at random. The same is true for being in the later years of one's life that we have a lot of stereotypes about older people that are very set in their ways, very habitual, resistant to change. There's a psychology literature that shows that older adults maintain fewer social connections than younger people. And it's tempting to view that kind of pessimistically as, oh, I guess it must be kind of sad getting older or lonely or something. In fact, if you build an argument from the mathematics, you can see that older adults are simply in the exploit phase of their life.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Opportunities to sort of crank away on that handle once you find it. So for a number of reasons, we should naturally segue or transition from being more exploratory at the beginning of a process to more exploitative at the end. And I think that's an intuition that makes sense, but the math bears that out very concretely. And it's been interesting to see this idea that emerges in computer science in the late 50s through the 70s is now getting picked up by psychologists and cognitive scientists who are interested in human decision making. So for example, Alison Gopnik at UC Berkeley, who studies infant cognition, has been thinking about the Explore-Exploit trade-off as a framework for how the infant mind works. That if you think about how children behave, we have all these stereotypes about children are just kind of random.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in many ways, to the field's own surprise, there came a series of breakthroughs on the multi arm bandit problem through the second half of the 20th century. And now we have a pretty good idea of what exact solutions look like given a number of constraints, but also what sort of more general flexible algorithms look like. So the critical, I would say, insight into thinking about this problem is that your strategy should depend in some ways entirely on how long you plan to be in the casino. So if you feel that you have a long time ahead of you, then it's worth it to invest in exploration. Because if you do find something great, it has a long horizon to pay out into the future. On the other hand, if you feel that you are about to leave, then the return that you would get on making a great new discovery is going to be much smaller because you have fewer.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To a computer scientist doesn't have the negative connotation that it has in regular English. Exploitation meaning just leveraging the information you've gained so far to crank away on those machines that do seem to be the best. Now intuitively, I think most of us would recognize that you need to do some amount of both, but it's not totally obvious what that balance should look like in practice. And indeed, for much of the 20th century, this was considered not only an unsolved problem, but an unsolvable problem and sort of career suicide to think about it. During World War II, the British mathematicians joked about dropping the multi-arm bandit problem over Germany as like the ultimate intellectual sabotage, just waste the brain power. NerdSnipe, all of the German mathematicians, essentially.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And indeed, the FDA has been increasingly interested in looking over the disciplinary fence at the computer scientists and saying maybe those algorithms that you're using to optimize ads could also be used to optimize human lives. So the way that a computer scientist approaches this question is through something that's called the multi-armed bandit problem. And it's a sort of a weird name. It comes from this slang for a slot machine as a one-armed bandit. So in the multi-armed bandit problem, you walk into a casino that has all these different slot machines. Some of them pay out with a higher probability than others, but you don't know which are which. And so quite simply, what strategy do you employ to try to make as much money in the casino as you can? Well, it's going to necessarily involve some amount of exploration, trying out different machines to see which ones appear to pay out more than others, and exploitation.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's a number of decisions that we face throughout life that take the form of a tension or a balance between trying new things and committing to the things that seem to be the best. Whether that is where to go out to eat, do we go to our favorite restaurant? Do we try new restaurant? Who do we spend time with? Do we reach out to a new acquaintance we'd like to get to know better? Do we spend time with our close family or our best friend? And I think the same thing is true in investing. The same thing is true in managing your time and your career. So I think the structure of this problem, kind of this iterated decision that you get to make over and over again about do you continue to put energy into the things that have seemed promising or do you spend your energy trying new things is applicable across a wide range of areas in human life you can even think of for example a clinical trial as having that same structure”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are sort of two ways that I can approach this question. So my second book, which we haven't really touched on at all. It's called Algorithms to Live By, and it looks at things like career decisions from an explicitly algorithmic perspective. So we can get into this more later if you're interested, but there's this paradigm. called the Explore Exploit Trade Off, which is how much of your energy do you spend gathering information? How much do you spend just sort of committing based on the information?”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of doing that. I think whatever's the opposite of the skeptic, the booster, their response would be with a big enough neural net and enough time and enough compute, the net will just figure out how to do hierarchical planning if that is important. And maybe it's not that important you just think it is. That's the gauntlet that's been thrown down is how much can you do with a big net, a lot of examples, and a lot of electricity. Is it just a matter of pumping more electricity into enough GPUs to train the net? I think that's a pretty sharp dividing line between research communities right now in AI. There are some that think, yeah, it's just a matter of enough compute. Other groups saying you're just going to get the wrong answer faster, but we need to like totally rethink the actual structure of how we are building these.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In forming words and so forth, that we plan in this hierarchical way. Okay, first I need to make coffee, then I need to get the subway, then I need to, you know, whatever. We don't really have good systems for doing this kind of hierarchical planning. We have systems that are pretty good for the equivalent of muscle memory. So anything that you can do sort of instinctively, we're pretty good at. And AI had an earlier history of working on these sorts of more deductive planning-based systems. A lot of that work has kind of fallen by the wayside in favor of the deep learning stuff, which has its own strengths and weaknesses. I think a lot of people are saying there needs to be some grand synthesis of these two research programs that have until now basically existed in two different silos. The skeptic, I think, would say there's a hell of a lot of work to be done at reconciling those two things, and we're only at the very beginning.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“no sense if you're living a normal life where most critical junctions only come around once or you have a nearly infinite number of things that you could do in any situation so the idea of just try everything an infinite number of times and see what happens that just doesn't make sense as a strategy so that's kind of a non-starter so i think that's part of the skeptics argument is like these sorts of things are really cute in the context of atari or even go, but they quickly disintegrate when faced with the real world. I think there's some truth to that. Humans are really good at what's called hierarchical planning. So when we think about what we want to do, we think about it in this very abstract level, not at the motor command level. So it's like when I woke up today, I wasn't planning like the motor actions that I needed to achieve in order to come here and talk to you. And even now I'm not thinking about the motor actions that I'm taking.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we've now got methods that are impressively capable of dealing with that kind of complexity. But you compare that to something like just existing as a human being having a conversation. How do you even cap the number of possible things that could be said next? I mean, there's a nearly unlimited amount of actions that you have to choose from. I think there's a reason to feel skeptical about that, that we don't really have great methods for dealing with infinite action spaces. Some of the classical algorithms that are useful in game playing scenarios, like there's one called Q learning, which basically says try every possible action in every possible situation nearly infinite number of times and just build up a memory of which actions tend to lead to high expected rewards. Well, that algorithm makes absolutely”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of comes back to this question Are we zero to two or more significant breakthroughs away? There are many obvious criticisms that can be made of the current state of AI in terms of the things that it can't do. Humans are really good at operating in situations where the number of actions you could possibly take is almost infinite. So one of the great achievements of the last 20 years was going from a system deep blue that was superhuman at chest to a system alpha go that was superhuman at Go. One of the biggest differences between those two games, not the only difference, but one of the major differences is what's called the branching factor. So in chess, you have at any one point in time about 30 moves available to you and then your opponent has about 30 replies. In Go, you have on average 200 or more possible moves. And then your opponent has 200 or more possible replies. And so the exponential just blows up way faster.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be treated as exterior to its own environment. What does it mean to reimagine what a system could be like if we relax some of those?”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To reason about itself as part of the environment in which it's behaving. And that's the kind of thing which will become increasingly relevant as AI systems become increasingly powerful. They will take up more space in the environment that they're operating in, and they will need to pay more attention to themselves in that way. And so this is, I think, very nascent. There's not a lot that we know at this point. I would say the folks at Miri have been working on this for a handful of years at this point. I think they're starting to build some track record of work in this area, but it's really early. And so, I mean, this is part of what's so exciting for me about the point that we find ourselves at in the history of AI is we've made enough progress in doing things the classical way that we're starting to see the weaknesses in the classical paradigm, and we're saying, okay, does it need to have an objective function? Does it need...”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That has been another one of these long-held assumptions within the field of machine learning that people are just now starting to poke at. So typically the framework that's used in machine learning treats the learning agent itself as kind of outside of the environment. The environment can't do things to it. It can't be changed in dramatic ways by the things that it encounters. But that's not true of real life. You can do things that kill you. You can do things that change what you believe or what you value. And when you're in a situation, it's important to understand the role that you yourself play in that situation. You're not just confronting it as if from the outside. And so there's been a research agenda. I know people at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute have an entire vein of research now into what they call embedded agency, which is what does it mean for a system?”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for me, I don't know where to even begin to get traction on that argument, but it's fascinating. The other side of what you're talking about with self awareness is this idea of how setting consciousness aside take its own existence and its own behavior into account when it thinks about how it interacts.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of not knowing whether these systems do any sort of moral respect. So in ethics, this is known as being a moral patient. So we may have to live with a lot of kind of cognitive dissonance around the question of do we owe these systems anything and do we need to treat them well? I think that's a very interesting question. And in some ways, I would be just as surprised if we got the answer to that question as if we didn't. It would be very weird to live in a world in which these systems were everywhere and we didn't know if they were conscious or not. They maybe claimed to be, but we had no way of knowing. It would also be very weird if science just told us consciousness is this, this process or this pattern is consciousness we figured it out. That would be very strange also. So one of two very strange things will happen and we'll have to find out which of those it is.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About ethical behavior. If that's true, then I've heard people make the argument. I'm not necessarily sympathetic to it myself, but I've heard people make the argument that let's just let AGI do its thing because it will be smarter than us. And so it will inevitably discover these moral truths that we don't know about and we should just let it rip. I don't find that persuasive for a number of reasons, but that's a position that people take. The self-awareness question is interesting to me. So there's two threads that I would kind of identify within that. So one is the question of consciousness. And I don't even know where to begin on that. It may well be the case that we, by the end of this century, have systems that are without any argument as cognitively flexible as we are, and then some. But we have no idea if anyone's home, if there's any light on, so to speak. It may well be that we have to live in a very weird limbo.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a lot of different threads that intersect in what you're saying. So, I mean, there's one thing is this question of what's called moral realism, which is, are moral truths objective facts that exist in the world the way that physical and mathematical truths exist. Some philosophers are moral realists, some are not.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some uncertainty over exactly what I want or what I appear to be doing. And as I said, that uncertainty turns out to be very critical. So there's some promising work that's now happening on these things.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Degree of uncertainty is increasingly becoming, I think, pretty widely accepted. Certainly in the technical AI safety community, which is a subset of AI more generally, but people are, I think motivated by thought experiments like this paperclip maximizer to rethink some of the fundamental premises of the field. The field has this premise that you have this objective function which you maximize as aggressively as you can and it's up to the human engineers to be wise about crafting that objective function just so that they've eliminated all of these possible loopholes. Increasingly the field is moving towards rethinking some of these fundamental assumptions and saying what does it mean to build a system that doesn't have an objective function as such, but observes the way that I behave and tries to make inferences about the things that I'm trying to accomplish based on what it sees me doing and tries to be helpful.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's one idea, and there are a number of ideas. So, the idea that there should be some sort of off switch, there's a lot of technical literature that's being written starting around kind of 2015 through 2017 that were a flurry of papers on if the AI has off switch, but it has a way of preventing you from hitting it, what do you do to incentivize this robot to allow you to switch it off? And one of the critical ideas there is that the AI needs to be uncertain about what it is that you want such that if you try to turn it off, it can interpret that as evidence that it has the wrong idea about what you wanted it to do. Otherwise, if it's totally confident that it knows what you want it to do, then any attempt of yours to switch it off, it will be like, no, no, no, no, I'm helping you. Let me help you. So this idea that the objective function that you give the system needs to encode some”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clip and there's no sentient life anywhere. It's all just paperclips. And Eliaser Yudkowskowski has this famous quote, the AI does not hate you, nor does it love you. You're simply made out of atoms that it can use for something else. And I think this sort of concern of how are we going to get the objective function right went from being perceived as sort of a fringe idea to increasingly becoming a standard part of the way that machine learning engineers are being trained.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meters ahead horizontally. And the organism that developed was like this giant column that just tipped over. And so it hadn't learned anything about land travel, but it had learned a very quick way of getting 20 meters in front of you, which is just B20 meters high and fall on your face. And there is just this catalog of these sorts of things where a programmer says, okay, that's not what I meant. You did what I asked, but not what I meant. And so there's a fear among people that as these programs get increasingly competent, the stakes for making that kind of mistake will go up to a potentially catastrophic level. So there's this famous thought experiment of the paperclip maximizer, which the humble paperclip factory develops this super powerful maximizer, and they say we'd like you to boost our paperclip output this quarter. And one thing leads to another, and now every atom in the visible universe has been turned into a paper.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it's circular, they might seem like they're ahead of you, but you're actually about to lap them. So there's a lot of nuance that goes into actually defining that, what it means to win. So instead they use the proxy of score. So they said, well, just try to maximize the points that you win in this game. And their program found this little weird cul-de-sac where it could just spin around doing donuts forever, collecting these power-ups while everyone just passed by and you tune in hours later and it's just doing these donuts collecting these power-up points infinitely. So there are a lot of cautionary tales of things like that. I mean, earlier in the 90s there was a group that was working on sort of evolutionary artificial life where they would create these kind of rudimentary organisms that would do various things, kind of simple geometric environments. And one of them was they wanted to evolve an organism for fast land travel. So they would reward it for how quickly it could reach some predefined goal point that was like 20.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way that the great worry has been framed by people like Nick Bostrom, people like Eliaser Yudkowski is through this idea that you have this all-powerful maximizer that will maximize whatever objective function you want to give it. However, you're keeping score, it will find some way to maximize that score. And the field of AI has a long and colorful history of totally demented ways of finding some loophole that maximizes the score while nonetheless doing nothing like the behavior that you originally intended. There are examples where OpenAI published an example where they were trying to train a program to play this boat racing game. And the objective of the boat racing game is to win the race, but it's very hard to encode what it means to be winning the race. You have to somehow get the program to recognize I'm on a lap, what is a lap, where are the other people?”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Written by a bot who has hijacked that person's account, or what's happening? I think we're kind of past that point now. But the broader idea of the Turing test that language is this nearly universal channel for tapping into all of these different types of intelligence, I think that's as true now as it was then. And I think that will continue to be kind of one of the main ways that we will demonstrate something like AGI in the future”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About whether it has ever made sense as a benchmark or still makes sense as a benchmark. But I think Turing saw pretty clearly that language is a medium for accessing all different kinds of intelligence. You can ask someone verbally to do a math problem. You can ask someone verbally to produce some kind of art and that they can produce verbal art. That it doesn't necessarily capture the entirety of the human experience. There are certain things arguably that can only be expressed through dance or whatever. But it sure seems to capture a lot. And so I think that from a practical perspective, I think the Turing test has been passed when you are using Twitter or Reddit. It really isn't clear whether the speech that you're reading was written by the person that the account is claiming to be, or was it written by that person's publicist, or was it?”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I found Eerie about the result that OpenAI published with this system, GPT2, was that with a single generic model that they trained, they were able to get world-class state-of-the-art results in something like 18 out of 20 of the leading computational linguistics tests. So things like I described, things like you read a short story and then it asks you which of four sentences is a better summary of that story. Things that almost look like an SAT type of a question. There are 20 different benchmarks out there in the linguistics community and a single model was able to get record breaking performance on 18 out of those 20 benchmarks. So that is the kind of thing that gives me some evidence that we're inching towards something like AGI. And I think I've stood up for the Turing test as a valuable benchmark. I know many people within computer science and beyond are due.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not quite as sketchy, but these things often have the form of brain teasers. So it'll be like, what is bigger the moon or a pizza? Things that are obvious, but if you've spent your entire life living on the internet, never experiencing anything firsthand, it might be trickier than it would seem. There are questions that involve resolution of ambiguous pronouns. So if I say I opened the oven that had the pizza in it and I put it on the table, what did I put on the table? The oven or the pizza? There's all sorts of questions like this or like the police arrested the protesters because they were being violent. Do I mean the police were being violent? Do I mean the protesters were being violent? There's a lot of these interesting questions that come up even in machine translation around ambiguous grammar that turn out to be surprisingly deep questions that require world knowledge, actual experience of the world, or at least that's the idea.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Turing test as a threshold is very controversial, and many people have argued over the last few decades that it needs replacing with one of any other various proposals. There's one alternative test that's called the Winograd schema.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did not publish their code because they were worried about misuse. So this is a significant milestone for the publication norms of the AI field as we start to inch closer to something like AGI. There are now these ethical questions around doing science where the Open AI team felt the potential for bad actors to get a hold of this system which can generate infinite amounts of very plausibly human seeming text on any subject and further destabilizing online discourse and so forth. And I think that risk is totally real.”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made sense as part of this single life history. Now I think we are starting to. Move into what I would think of as kind of a recognizable third era of text systems where you have, particularly with the rise of deep learning and neural networks, you can feed huge amounts of text into a system in a much more nuanced and sophisticated way than simply cataloging it as a database. So in this case, you can have a text system that is perfectly capable of saying things that it had never explicitly seen before just by using this neural network model that had been trained on this corpus of text. And if you train it on a reasonably coherent corpus, then it's going to appear reasonably coherent. In the significant milestone on my mind when I'm thinking about this is a system that just a couple months ago was published by OpenAI called the GPT2. And famously they...”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give you the next line. You'd say Thunderbolt and Lightning. It would say very, very friendly. And this was just kind of dazzling at the time, just the breath. But the tell in this case was that you got the sense that you were not talking to the same person over time. Because indeed, you weren't. It was kind of this mosaic of the entire internet. And so sometimes you would see it spell the word flavor with the British U, sometimes with the American spelling. Sometimes it would claim to be female, sometimes male, and so forth. And so the maxim here is that you get the sense not that you aren't talking to a person, but that you aren't talking to a person. And this was something when I was taking the Turing test that I was hyper conscious of trying to come across not only to give good answers to the questions that I was posed, but to give answers that fit together and presented a picture of a single coherent individual where the things I knew or didn't know”
2019-07-30 · Invest Like the Best · Brian Christian – How to Live with Computers - [Invest Like the Best, EP.140] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source