Demis Hassabis: belief

Transcript context

…You and Shane started DeepMind partly because you were concerned about safety. You saw AGI coming as a live possibility. Do you think the people who were formerly part of Brain, that half of Google DeepMind now, approach it in the same way? Have there been cultural differences there in terms of that question? This is one of the reasons we joined forces with Google back in 2014. I think the entirety of Google and Alphabet, not just Brain and DeepMind, takes these questions of responsibility very seriously. Our kind of mantra is to try and be bold and responsible with these systems. I’m obviously a huge techno-optimist but I want us to be cautious given the transformative power of what we’re bringing into the world collectively. I think it’s important. It’s going to be one of the most important technologies humanity will ever invent. So we’ve got to put all our efforts into getting this right and be thoughtful and also humble about what we know and don’t know about the systems that are coming and the uncertainties around that. In my view, the only sensible approach when you have huge uncertainty is to be cautiously optimistic and use the scientific method to try and have as much foresight and understanding about what’s coming down the line and the consequences of that before it happens. You don’t want to be live A/B testing out in the world with these very consequential systems because unintended consequences may be quite severe. So I want us to move away, as a field, from a sort of “move fast and break things attitude” which has maybe served the Valley very well in the past and obviously created important innovations. I think in this case we want to be bold with the positive things that it can do and make sure we advance things like medicine and science whilst being as responsible and thoughtful as possible with mitigating the risks. That’s why it seems like the responsible scaling policies are something that are a very good empirical way to pre-commit to these kinds of things.…

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