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The Rise of Thinking Machines | Munk Debates

SEASON TWO - EPISODE #11

The Rise of Thinking Machines

Be it resolved, the quest for true AI is one of the great existential risks of our time.

Guests
Stuart Russell
Melanie Mitchell

About this episode

A novel written by artificial intelligence is shortlisted for a literary prize. Google software beats a human opponent at Go, one of the most complex board games in the world. Self-driving cars recognize images and then make decisions.

These are just some of the extraordinary accomplishments based on artificial intelligence that we have witnessed in the past few years. But there are many scientists who are pushing for a more cautious approach to how we move forward on machine intelligence. They say that we are not far off from developing superintelligent machines whose IQ far surpasses that of humans and who don’t come with an off switch—with seriously negative consequences for humanity. These scientists argue that we can prevent this loss of control but we need to act now by making sure algorithms ensure that benevolence and human mastery are foundational pillars.

Critics say that this view of superintelligence highly overrates the abilities of machines today and in the future, and deeply underestimates the incredible powers of human thinking. They say that AI is nowhere close to matching the human talent for understanding and generalization, and may never come close. Unsubstantiated fears of a superintelligent future are getting in the way of resolving one of the riddles of human existence–human intelligence–which could unlock untold creativity and progress.

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Guests

Stuart Russell

Stuart Russell

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. He is a recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, and from 2012 to 2014 held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. He has developed a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty and is currently working to ban lethal autonomous weapons.

Melanie Mitchell

Melanie Mitchell

Melanie Mitchell is the Davis Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in artificial intelligence systems. 

She's the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award and was named by Amazon.com as one of the ten best science books of 2009. Her latest book is Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). 

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