Jeff Dean: belief

Transcript context

…As these systems do get more powerful, you have to be more and more careful. One thing I would say is, there are extreme views on either end. There's, "Oh my goodness, these systems are going to be so much better than humans at all things, and we're going to be kind of overwhelmed." And then there's, "These systems are going to be amazing, and we don't have to worry about them at all." I think I'm somewhere in the middle. I've been a co-author on a paper called "Shaping AI," which is, you know, those two extreme views often kind of view our role as kind of laissez-faire, like we're just going to have the AI develop in the path that it takes. And I think there's actually a really good argument to be made that what we're going to do is try to shape and steer the way in which AI is deployed in the world so that it is, you know, maximally beneficial in the areas that we want to capture and benefit from, in education, some of the areas I mentioned, healthcare. And steer it as much as we can away- maybe with policy-related things, maybe with technical measures and safeguards- away from, you know, the computer will take over and have unlimited control of what it can do. So I think that's an engineering problem: how do you engineer safe systems? I think it's kind of the modern equivalent of what we've done in older-style software development. Like if you look at, you know, airplane software development, that has a pretty good record of how do you rigorously develop safe and secure systems for doing a pretty risky task? The difficulty there is that there's not some feedback loop where the 737, you put it in a box with a bunch of compute for a couple of years, and it comes out with the version 1000.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.