Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

“Human Compatible is a humane book about the challenges and opportunities of AI. It’s also a very non-hype book. By which I mean, it talks about the trajectory of artificial intelligence, the enormous potentials of the pattern recognition on a vast scale that it offers, without indulging fantasies. AI has a great potential to do good and to help us solve problems, but the point is not that it or anybody will ever know best, but rather that we should ensure the values and tendencies encoded into powerful systems are compatible with human thriving, and the thriving of life on this planet. And that compatibility must in turn entail doubt, plurality, and an open interrogation of aims and purposes, not optimisation.” Read more...

The best books on The Ethics of Technology

Tom Chatfield, Journalist

“Stuart Russell is in a different grand tradition of worrying about AI, where a superintelligence takes us over and turns us all into fodder or whatever it wants…What I like about Stuart Russell’s book is that it’s terribly clear. I actually disagree with many of the philosophical suppositions that he makes, but he spells them out incredibly clearly. There’s also a really good reason for reading books that you might strongly disagree with, because it can help to further debate. You can work out why you disagree. One of the big dangers of AI—and you can see this with things like Chat GPT—is that it makes us lazy or controls us in too many ways. We really need to stress our human ability to think for ourselves…Stuart Russell is on the side of humans. He’s trying to work out how we can develop AI to make certain that it’s always going to be at least roughly aligned with human values, so that humans are going to be kept at least reasonably happy with whatever it is that the AI is doing. I’m with Stuart Russell, there, I’m afraid: I’m on the side of humans.” Read more...

Ethics for Artificial Intelligence Books

Paula Boddington

“There’s a whole clutch of AI books…People want to understand what’s going on. Human Compatible is a really clearly written one. It explains enough about how AI works, but also what some of the challenges are. The particular challenge the book focuses on is how to program AI systems so they do what we really want them to do, rather than just what we write down in the code that they then implement. It’s actually very difficult. Think about the effects of setting targets for public services, and how easily they got gamed. When you give a hospital a minimum amount of time before they admit people, they will do things like park patients in the waiting room or on trolleys so that the clock doesn’t start ticking too quickly. Or if you give an ambulance service a certain amount of time to get to patients, they will game it so they get there in time to meet their targets. It’s the same with AI. If you set them an explicit objective—which you have to do because how else are you going to get them to do something—how do you stop them gaming things in that way and delivering something that you don’t really want?” Read more...

The Best Economics Books of 2019

Diane Coyle, Economist