Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control

“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