Strachey Lecture: Use or Be Used - Regaining Control of AI
From Strachey Lectures by Oxford University
September 4, 2023 · 50 min
About this episode
Neil Lawrence discusses the importance of understanding both artificial intelligence and ourselves to regain control over AI.
It’s said that Henry Ford’s customers wanted “a faster horse”. If Henry Ford was selling us artificial intelligence today, what would the customer call for, “a smarter human”? That’s certainly the picture of machine intelligence we find in science fiction narratives, but the reality of what we’ve developed is far more mundane. Car engines produce prodigious power from petrol. Machine intelligences deliver decisions derived from data. In both cases the scale of consumption enables a speed of operation that is far beyond the capabilities of their natural counterparts. Unfettered energy consumption has consequences in the form of climate change. Does unbridled data consumption also have consequences for us? If we devolve decision making to machines, we depend on those machines to accommodate our needs. If we don’t understand how those machines operate, we lose control over our destiny. Much of the debate around AI makes the mistake of seeing machine intelligence as a reflection of our intelligence. In this talk we argue that to control the machine we need to understand the machine, but to understand the machine we first need to understand ourselves. Neil Lawrence is the inaugural…
People in this episode
Host: Oxford University
Guest: Neil Lawrence
Topics covered
- artificial intelligence
- machine learning
- data consumption
- decision making
- self-understanding
Keywords
- AI
- machine intelligence
- data
- decision making
- climate change
- self-understanding
- machine learning
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: DeepMind, University of Cambridge, Amazon
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