AI Threats, Regulation, Potential and more as AI Expert Stuart Russell talks all things AI with BT Magazine
Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley, who has been an AI researcher for 45 years, in an interaction with Business Today magazine, said that while artificial intelligence can be hugely beneficial, it also has the potential to disrupt the world in a bad way if guard rails are not put in place
BT Magazine: Stuart
Russell on AI
In a conversation with Technology Editor Aayush Ailawadi, AI Expert Stuart Russell talked about the open letter he signed along with Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and over 500 top technologists calling on AI researchers to halt all training on any AI systems more powerful than Open AI’s GPT-4 for at least six months. Russell said, “We’re calling for a halt on the deployment of large language models (LLMs) that are more powerful than the ones that have already been released. And the reason is simple: we do not understand how these systems work.”
‘We don’t understand how
these AI systems work’
“What we’re asking for is [to] develop reasonable guidelines that a system has to satisfy. If you can’t build an airplane that doesn’t fall out of the sky, you don’t get to put passengers on it. This is common sense. We’re simply asking that common sense be applied in the case of these extremely powerful AI systems... I think AI’s potential to benefit the world is unlimited. But if we have a Chernobyl... Chernobyl destroyed the nuclear industry… We do not want to have that [for AI],” said AI Expert Stuart Russell
Will AI turn out to be another Chernobyl for humanity?
Stuart Russell told BT, “It’s quite likely that we’ll see a significant impact... One is in the area of computer programming. You might find it surprising that advances in technology are going to make computer programmers redundant. But the numbers I’ve seen suggest that using these tools, you can write software, 5-10 times faster than unaided. And in many cases, you simply say what you want the program to do. And the software just writes it for you. And that means, to me, it’s unlikely that the world needs five or 10 times as much software. So that means that we’re going to need somewhat fewer computer programmers.”
AI impact on jobs
Stuart Russell said, “I don’t think your whole job is immediately at risk. We can’t trust these systems to tell the truth because they hallucinate… they just want to sound plausible, and they have no idea what’s true and false. But there are thousands of companies which are working to fix those problems… so that they can be used in important applications. So, the next generation, I think, will have a much bigger impact on employment.”
AI to impact Next
Gen jobs more
Stuart Russell said, “Although they’ve tried to impose some kind of constraints… people have found it’s quite easy to ask the question in a different way. And eventually you can get it to give you the answers you want because that information is in the training set. So I think that the level of unpredictability of these systems is beyond anything we’ve ever seen with AI software and this is only a year or two into it. We need to get a handle on what’s going on. And I think, honestly, we need to start pursuing different avenues for designing AI systems.”
Stuart Russell on
AI Hallucination
“The European Union AI Act is expected to be passed by the end of this year. And I’ve been working with the drafters of the legislation and with the [European] parliament and the [European] Commission for several years now trying to make sure that it makes sense that it’s not going to be obsolete before it’s even passed. And as far as I can tell, systems like ChatGPT would probably not be legal to use in any high-stakes application,” Stuart Russell told BT
Stuart Russell on
AI regulation
Speaking on Elon Musk also raising alarm over the rapid way AI revolution is shaping up, Stuart Russell said, “The point Elon (Musk) is making is that until we figure out how to control systems that are more powerful than ourselves, we face a very serious risk that we will develop AI systems that are very powerful, and we won’t know how to control them. And it’s not as if this kind of thing has never happened.”