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In episode 44 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Stuart Russell.

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science and the Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering at UC Berkeley, as well as an Honorary Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. Professor Russell is the co-author with Peter Norvig of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, probably the most popular AI textbook in history. He is the founder and head of Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence and recently authored the book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. He has also served as co-chair on the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (02:45) Stuart’s introduction to AI

* (05:50) The two most important questions

* (07:25) Historical perspectives during Stuart’s PhD, agents and learning

* (14:30) Rationality and Intelligence, Bounded Optimality

* (20:30) Stuart’s work on Metareasoning

* (29:45) How does Metareasoning fit with Bounded Optimality?

* (37:39) “Civilization advances by reducing complex operations to be trivial”

* (39:20) Reactions to the rise of Deep Learning, connectionist/symbolic debates, probabilistic modeling

* (51:00) The Deep Learning and traditional AI communities will adopt each other’s ideas

* (51:55) Why Stuart finds the self-driving car arena interesting, Waymo’s old-fashioned AI approach

* (57:30) Effective generalization without the full expressive power of first-order logic—deep learning is a “weird way to go about it”

* (1:03:00) A very short shrift of Human Compatible and its ideas

* (1:10:42) Outro

Links:

* Stuart’s webpage

* Human Compatible page with reviews and interviews

* Papers mentioned

* Rationality and Intelligence

* Principles of Metareasoning