Michael I. Jordan: preference

Transcript context

…Amazing stuff. Well, Michael, you've just published a paper called A Collectivist Economic Perspective on AI. Give us the elevator pitch. I was never an AI person. So in some ways, it's easy for me to come in and look at people who are self professed AI researchers and sort of say, what are you doing? What what is your what's your what's your point? What's your goal? I think, sadly, they often don't have a very clear goal. It's it's that humans are intelligent. Humans are a computer. The brain is a computer. And if we mimic that and take aspects of it and and, paralyze it and, power make it more powerful, It'll just do great things. And and it kinda stops there. It's not that there's a goal in, you know, society that we're gonna we're gonna try to do this or that. It'll just solve problems for us, and then we're we'll be happy. And it it you know, I got away from Silicon Valley partly because that's just the way that people talk and I got tired of it. And there's not a lot of intellectual, know, let's call it deeper, long term thought going on. And now it became a rat race and a money race and all that. So so, yeah, my my perspective, I mean, it comes from a long tradition of other people having sort of social science perspectives on intelligence. We are social animals, and a lot of our intelligence comes by the fact that we aggregate. We aggregate opinions and thoughts, we have cultures and so on that retain them. Moreover, the society provides a context for our intelligence. Smart action in 1 context is not in another context, and it's all very fleeting and contextual in the moment. And so social science ideas are needed to appreciate what that means. When I say social science, I include economics, so game theoretic. The context is somebody else out there is trying to take advantage of me or maybe to collaborate with me and I don't really know. And so I've got to put off feelers and do signals and create mechanisms where we can interact effectively and economics studies that in a mathematical way. That attracts me because I am a mathematically inclined person. I'm not a critiquer of AI. I want to make it right and I want to make it better and understand what it means to be intelligent in this world and safe interesting, think about long term issues. And so to me, you have to do that formally or mathematically at some level. It's not enough just to build things and put them out there. So when I say a collectivist, just mean that most of this technology is based on inputs from billions of people, so there's already a collective putting input in. And it's meant to serve billions, so there's a collective serving. So there's really a big network that's kind of late in there. And then economic is critical, so I don't want to just sort of, you know, say words. I want to say I want to write down actionable mathematical ideas. 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…

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