Quality (338) Webinar: Global Health Compassion Rounds (2) Living with artificial intelligence

8 June, 2022

Stuart Russell referred to compassion in his first BBC Reith lecture in December 2021 BBC Radio 4 - The Reith Lectures, Stuart Russell - Living With Artificial Intelligence https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001216k

"I was really shocked going back to read Adam Smith, who’s widely reviled as “The Apostle of Greed,” and so on and so forth, but actually what Adam Smith says at the beginning of his first book is that: “It’s so obvious to everyone that each of us cares deeply about other people that it hardly merits saying it, but I’m going to say it anyway,” and then he says it.

"That’s the beginning of his first book. So, I’ve learned a great deal from economists, from philosophers, trying to understand a question that AI is now going to have to answer. If AI systems are going to be making decisions on behalf of the human race, what does that mean? How do you tell whether a decision is a good or a bad decision when it’s being made on behalf of the human race, and that’s something that philosophers have grappled with for thousands of years."

"Suppose, for example, that COP36 asks for help in deacidifying the oceans; they know the pitfalls of specifying objectives incorrectly, so they insist that all the by-products must be non-toxic, and no fish can be harmed. The AI system comes up with a new self-multiplying catalyst that will do the trick with a very rapid chemical reaction. Great! But the reaction uses up a quarter of all the oxygen in the atmosphere and we all die slowly and painfully.

"From the AI system’s point of view, eliminating humans is a feature, not a bug, because it ensures that the oceans stay in their now-pristine state. So, there’s little chance that we can completely and correctly specify the full objective, the one that matters - that is, humanity’s ranking of all possible futures. We need a different way of thinking.

"Now, early in 2013, I was on sabbatical in Paris, and I spent a good part of that time thinking about this problem. I also joined the chorus of an orchestra, L’Orchestre Lamoureux, as a very amateur tenor, and one evening I was on the Métro heading to rehearsal and listening on my headphones to the piece I was learning, Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei. “This is so sublime,” I was thinking to myself, and, as one sometimes does in Paris, thinking “Live for this moment,” even if the rest of the time in Paris one is thinking, “This moment is frustrating and humiliating.”

"But then, as often happens, my day job spoiled the moment, and I wondered how on Earth an AI system could ever know what constituted such moments - whether sublime or frustrating or humiliating - for a human being. And then it occurred to me. We have to build AI systems that know they don’t know the true objective, even though it’s what they must pursue. And all the other consequences came rushing in, including the fact that this would solve the control problem."

HIFA Profile: Richard Fitton is a retired family doctor - GP, British Medical Association. Professional interests: Health literacy, patient partnership of trust and implementation of healthcare with professionals, family and public involvement in the prevention of modern lifestyle diseases, patients using access to professional records to overcome confidentiality barriers to care, patients as part of the policing of the use of their patient data

Email address: richardpeterfitton7 AT gmail.com