We build the thing, and we test the thing, and we figure out ways to test the thing, we figure out do we like how the thing is working or not? The way you hack in a lot of these companies is you hire somebody on the contract janitorial service to stick a USB drive into something so there’s lots and lots of ways to do these penetrations. Nuclear is the classic case study of this, and there’s actually a new book that just came out that I’ve been recommending to everybody with a great title, When Reason Goes on Holiday, and it’s this sort of long form study of what happens when basically very smart people who are taken very seriously in one field decide to branch out and decide to become experts on society and politics and decide to weigh in on the future shape of society, and basically it turns out they’re just horribly bad, they just have catastrophic judgment once they’re outside of their core discipline. One of the root problems in the 1990s was that publishing companies literally didn’t understand what was happening around them.
Actually one more thing on that, there are actually two sides to the AI doomers. Do you see a tension between those two things? MA: Yeah. If the thing wakes up one day and starts to do incredibly devious things that it has decided to do. One of the motivations you put forth that essay is competition with China, at the same time in the essay you also argue for open source models. Work with your college’s academic advisors or perform independent research to find out which one can help you launch your career. Interestingly, a decade from now Artificial Intelligence will help create thousands of new jobs for Indians. Choosing the right resource can help you get off to a strong start with your AI learning. For those who missed it, he has excellent blog posts/papers “Deep learning: A critical appraisal” and “In defense of skepticism about deep learning”, where he very meticulously deconstructs the deep learning hype.
Many writing assignments, for example, are much more about learning how to think and to make arguments than about simply creating a block of text on a particular topic. There was just a report about you investing more in national defense sort of things. If you look at in totality relative to things like smog and pollution and waste from other power plants, the cost-benefit ratio is phenomenal, and you think about if we had not bought into the precautionary principle and had nuclear everywhere, we would have solved global warming, we would have abundant energy, we would actually be much further along on AI because we wouldn’t be power constrained. Then Ray Kurzweil picked up that idea and he produces those books with all those incredible charts and graphs showing exponential progress and everything, and then what the doomers, like Bostrom and his successors did, was they said, “Oh, yes, that idea, a totalizing transformation of society and humanity, but entirely to the negative”.
But you’re unconstrained as far as the potential upside of AI and its benefits on humanity, no? If you’re a beginner interested in understanding the basics of AI, there’s good news – you can now enroll in a free course designed specifically for beginners. This course is your gateway to understanding how AI works and how it’s transforming our world. In fact, it also is an odd thing in that people cite nuclear as an example of fear in terms of nuclear war, but the actual lived reality is we’ve gone through the safest seventy to eighty years in world history because nuclear weapons existed. Russia’s the more, it’s not as relevant to tech, but it’s kind of the interesting example of this, which is the official US method of engagement with Russia ten years ago was the reset, with the famous Secretary of State at the time, with the famous Red Reset button.