Brian Christian: AI’s ethical alignment problem

This week Elon Musk and Apple's co founder Steve Wosniak were among signatories to an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the training of systems more powerful than GPT-4. They're part of a growing chorus worried that the unchecked speed of AI development could result in unintended harm.

Computer scientist and author Brian Christian writes about one of the fundamental problems of AI development in his book The Alignment Problem: how do we ensure machine learning systems represent the best human values rather than magnify the worst?

Christian is also the bestselling author of Algorithms to Live By (with Tom Griffiths), and The Most Human Human. He holds degrees in philosophy, computer science, and poetry and is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.