77. Josh Fairfield - AI advances, but can the law keep up?
Towards Data Science
03/31/21
•57m
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Powered by Moore’s law, and a cluster of related trends, technology has been improving at an exponential pace across many sectors. AI capabilities in particular have been growing at a dizzying pace, and it seems like every year brings us new breakthroughs that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. GPT-3, AlphaFold and DALL-E were developed in the last 12 months — and all of this in a context where the leading machine learning model has been increasing in size tenfold every year for the last decade.
To many, there’s a sharp contrast between the breakneck pace of these advances and the rate at which the laws that govern technologies like AI evolves. Our legal systems are chock full of outdated laws, and politicians and regulators often seem almost comically behind the technological curve. But while there’s no question that regulators face an uphill battle in trying to keep up with a rapidly changing tech landscape, my guest today thinks they have a good shot of doing so — as long as they start to think about the law a bit differently.
His name is Josh Fairfield, and he’s a law and technology scholar and former director of R&D at pioneering edtech company Rosetta Stone. Josh has consulted with U.S. government agencies, including the White House Office of Technology and the Homeland Security Privacy Office, and literally wrote a book about the strategies policymakers can use to keep up with tech like AI.
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76. Stuart Armstrong - AI: Humanity's Endgame?
March 24, 2021
•71m
Paradoxically, it may be easier to predict the far future of humanity than to predict our near future.
The next fad, the next Netflix special, the next President — all are nearly impossible to anticipate. That’s because they depend on so many trivial factors: the next fad could be triggered by a viral video someone filmed on a whim, and well, the same could be true of the next Netflix special or President for that matter.
But when it comes to predicting the far future of humanity, we might oddly be on more solid ground. That’s not to say predictions can be made with confidence, but at least they can be made based on economic analysis and first principles reasoning. And most of that analysis and reasoning points to one of two scenarios: we either attain heights we’ve never imagined as a species, or everything we care about gets wiped out in a cosmic scale catastrophe.
Few people have spent more time thinking about the possible endgame of human civilization as my guest for this episode of the podcast, Stuart Armstrong. Stuart is a Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, where he studies the various existential risks that face our species, focusing most of his work specifically on risks from AI. Stuart is a fascinating and well-rounded thinker with a fresh perspective to share on just about everything you could imagine, and I highly recommend giving the episode a listen.
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As AI systems have become more powerful, an increasing number of people have been raising the alarm about its potential long-term risks. As we’ve covered on the podcast before, many now argue that those risks could even extend to the annihilation of our species by superhuman AI systems that are slightly misaligned with human values.
There’s no shortage of authors, researchers and technologists who take this risk seriously — and they include prominent figures like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stuart Russell and Nick Bostrom. And while I think the arguments for existential risk from AI are sound, and aren’t widely enough understood, I also think that it’s important to explore more skeptical perspectives.
Melanie Mitchell is a prominent and important voice on the skeptical side of this argument, and she was kind enough to join me for this episode of the podcast. Melanie is the Davis Professor of complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, a Professor of computer science at Portland State University, and the author of Artificial Intelligence: a Guide for Thinking Humans — a book in which she explores arguments for AI existential risk through a critical lens. She’s an active player in the existential risk conversation, and recently participated in a high-profile debate with Stuart Russell, arguing against his AI risk position.
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