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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 Russell: The Foundations of Artificial Intelligence