Controlling Things Versus Controlling Agents: The Challenge of High-Level AI
Michael D. Bess · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022
Whereas today’s “narrow” AI machines can be easily controlled, the probable advent over the coming decades of machines endowed with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will pose a far more difficult control challenge – for such machines will function as agents endowed with many human-like capabilities. The AI expert Stuart Russell has proposed a radical new design for the motivational architecture of AI machines, which he calls “humble AI.” Rather than programming AI machines to pursue specific goals, he argues, it would be much safer to give them a single broad goal, namely, maximizing the realization of human preferences. The key innovation here lies in programming the machines so that they can never be 100 percent certain about what those human preferences are – a gambit that restores ultimate control over the machines’ behavior to their human overseers. Russell argues persuasively that fundamental safety research in the field of AI needs to be pursued as a much higher priority than it currently receives today.