Computer scientist Stuart J. Russell discusses how artificial intelligence is shaping both the future of innovation and the future of work and his views on how society can adapt to those changes.
On how AI is shaping society: “I suppose the reason why this is such a topical issue right now is because we’ve seen in the last few years significant progress on problems that had been pretty recalcitrant for the previous 60 years of AI. We’ve seen speech recognition, visual object recognition, machine translation go from fairly rudimentary to near human level performance in just a few years, so that’s raised the prospect. Then if you start knocking over major, longstanding open problems in the field, it raises the prospect that we might knock over the remaining problems in the field and have what has always been the goal, which is superhuman machine intelligence.”
On how to adapt to the future of AI: “So how do you navigate this issue of tradeoff between people? Obviously, and this is what all social sciences are about, there’s more than one person on the earth so there are tradeoffs, there are potential conflicts and you have to resolve those. We can’t all be ruler of the universe even if we want to. So, there are answers from moral philosophy and from economics and so on, and unfortunately there’s no one answer, there are many.”
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