Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedMichael I. Jordan: belief
21 May 2026 Machine Learning Street Talk Intelligence is collective, not artificial — Prof. Michael I. Jordan (UC Berkeley / Inria)
“You know, markets arose thousands of years ago and we learned about some of the principles, but we can improve them.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Michael I. Jordan
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 21 May 2026
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
Transcript context
…This is interesting, isn't it? Because I think in the 19 seventies, Dreyfus came up with this idea of the first step fallacy. And, you know, so we we create something and it is related to, you know, the McCordack effect as well. We create something so amazing and we just think we're only 1 step away from being able to do anything. So, these systems, they're incredible. Right? They they they produce beautiful text, they can solve problems, they can do programming, and isn't it weird that they don't actually help us that much? We thought it was gonna revolutionize It's not weird at all because the the the the model there is the old AI model. Let's just build something intelligent and and it's only got upgraded a little bit. It's gonna be a better search engine. That's fine. I do think the search engine was made major progress for humanity. But now it became more of the search engine. It's like a secretary sitting on your shoulder helping you, whispering things to you. And it's just a dumb business model. I don't think many people really will want that. They'll turn the damn thing off. They they wanna think for themselves. They want, you know, maybe at the end of the day, a summary or something, but they don't want this all the time, you know, they're interacting with this entity thing. It's not a very good business model. And in the meantime, we have huge healthcare systems and transportation systems and finance systems that are all based on data flows among many billions of agents and, you know, ripe. They already have a lot of machine learning in them and they're ripe for thinking in a more economic way. What are the agents and what are they trying to get out of it and what kind of cooperation and competition is latent there that you could, you know, make improve. You know, markets arose thousands of years ago and we learned about some of the principles, but we can improve them. And thinking arose, you know, billions of years ago or whatever. But we're not perfect, not just in terms of thinking, but we're also not perfect in terms of narrowly following our own agenda and hurting other people, even though we don't want to. Humans are wonderful. We want to prize human life and creativity and emotion and love and so on and so forth. It's fundamental. But humans are also bad or do bad things. And that's where technology should be able to aid you. And so you need to think about the system, the old set of these systems. Not really systems. They're big statistical boxes that do inputs and outputs. That's not a system's way of thinking. There's a lower level system, of course, the computer system. But I want to be above that. I want to say what ecosystem does this belong to? Who's it interacting with? What rate? And what kind of quality? And what kind of values are being created? And when I say value, I mean, often mean money. I want jobs out of this thing. I don't want just it to answer and do things for us. I want it to create opportunities for work and creativity and so on. Rich Sutton is quoted quite a lot in respect of design versus evolve. And I watched a wonderful talk by David Deutsch the other day, he was kind of talking about explanations. And he said that, you know, physicists obviously go for these principled low level explanations. But sometimes you get these high level course screenings that are just really good, and maybe economics is 1 of those. But what do you say to folks from Silicon Valley like Ilya Sutzkevar, and they're they're just talking about human value functions and and they're saying, okay, you've these LLMs and we just turn them into multi agent systems and we get all of the economic stuff that you're talking about for free. What would you say to those people?…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.