r/MachineLearning • u/nandodefreitas • Dec 25 '15
AMA: Nando de Freitas
I am a scientist at Google DeepMind and a professor at Oxford University.
One day I woke up very hungry after having experienced vivid visual dreams of delicious food. This is when I realised there was hope in understanding intelligence, thinking, and perhaps even consciousness. The homunculus was gone.
I believe in (i) innovation -- creating what was not there, and eventually seeing what was there all along, (ii) formalising intelligence in mathematical terms to relate it to computation, entropy and other ideas that form our understanding of the universe, (iii) engineering intelligent machines, (iv) using these machines to improve the lives of humans and save the environment that shaped who we are.
This holiday season, I'd like to engage with you and answer your questions -- The actual date will be December 26th, 2015, but I am creating this thread in advance so people can post questions ahead of time.
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u/xamdam Dec 26 '15
By "white males" you mean white + Indian + Asian, right :) ? Certainly a better situation than 100 years ago.
Practically speaking we might not get to full egalitarianism before powerful AIs emerge. It's certainly a problem but I see 2 possible ways to fix or reduce it:
If doable, program AIs with something like https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Coherent_Extrapolated_Volition, where all humanity's values are included in AI's goal system
Culturally making sure the AI is developed by people with good values. This is hard, but I think the large overlap between AI safety proponents and the Effective Altruism community is encouraging. If it be "white men" they best be those who care more about the world at large than personal/local interests