Richard Sutton: commitment

Transcript context

…I guess this brings us to the topic of AI succession. You have a perspective that’s quite different from a lot of people that I’ve interviewed and a lot of people generally. I also think it’s a very interesting perspective. I want to hear about it. I do think succession to digital intelligence or augmented humans is inevitable. I have a four-part argument. Step one is, there’s no government or organization that gives humanity a unified point of view that dominates and that can arrange... There’s no consensus about how the world should be run. Number two, we will figure out how intelligence works. The researchers will figure it out eventually. Number three, we won’t stop just with human-level intelligence. We will reach superintelligence. Number four, it’s inevitable over time that the most intelligent things around would gain resources and power. Put all that together and it’s sort of inevitable. You’re going to have succession to AI or to AI-enabled, augmented humans. Those four things seem clear and sure to happen. But within that set of possibilities, there could be good outcomes as well as less good outcomes, bad outcomes. I’m just trying to be realistic about where we are and ask how we should feel about it. I agree with all four of those arguments and the implication. I also agree that succession contains a wide variety of possible futures. Curious to get more thoughts on that.…

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