Solving the alignment problem and handing off the future to AI | Paul Christiano
Channel: 80,000 Hours
Date: 2019-03-04

_Originally released October 2018._ Here's a situation we all regularly confront: you want to answer a difficult question, but aren't quite smart or informed enough to figure it out for yourself. The good news is you have access to experts who are smart enough to figure it out. The bad news is that they disagree.

If given plenty of time - and enough arguments, counterarguments and counter-counter-arguments between all the experts - should you eventually be able to figure out which is correct? What if one expert were deliberately trying to mislead you? And should the expert with the correct view just tell the whole truth, or will competition force them to throw in persuasive lies in order to have a chance of winning you over?

In other words: does 'debate', in principle, lead to truth?

According to Paul Christiano — OpenAI researcher and legendary thinker in the effective altruism and rationality communities — this question is of more than mere philosophical interest. That's because 'debate' is a promising method of keeping artificial intelligence aligned with human goals, even if it becomes much more intelligent and sophisticated than we are.

It's a method OpenAI is actively trying to develop (blog.openai.com/debate/), because in the long-term it wants to train AI systems to make decisions that are too complex for any human to grasp, but without the risks that arise from a complete loss of human oversight.

A few of the topics covered in this episode:
• Why Paul expects AI to transform the world gradually rather than explosively and what that would look like
• Several concrete methods OpenAI is trying to develop to ensure AI systems do what we want even if they become more competent than us
• Why AI systems will probably be granted legal and property rights
• How an advanced AI that doesn't share human goals could still have moral value
• Why machine learning might take over science research from humans before it can do most other tasks
• Which decade we should expect human labour to become obsolete, and how this should affect your savings plan.

----

The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.

Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/paul-christiano-ai-alignment-solutions/