"the following is a conversation with michael littman a computer science professor at brown university doing research on and teaching machine learning reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence..."

"conversation with michael littman i saw a video of you talking to charles this bell about westworld the tv series you guys were doing a kind of thing where you're watching new things together but let'..."

"so when we bring our robots into it for yourself uh explains a lot about this apartment actually but no the idea that that people should have the ability to you know make this technology their own tha..."

"a little bit a little bit of dancing a little bit of dancing that's not quite my thing as a as a method of education or just in life you know in general so easy question what's the definitive objectiv..."

"because it's whatever i heard most recently yeah that's interesting people have told me that um there's an art to listening to music as well you can start to if you listen to a song just carefully lik..."

"that's very that's really interesting so maybe on that topic i've seen your um your celebrity multiple dimensions but one of them is you've done cameos in different places i've seen you in a turbo tax..."

"a little blurb about each one and why i thought it would make sense for them to to do it and they reached out to a handful of them but then they ultimately they youtube stalked me a little bit and the..."

"i mean the person who i was in the scene with um is a professional she's a you know uh she's an actor improv comedian okay in your community and when i got there they had given me a script as such as ..."

"every it's clear that there's a team behind it there's a commercial there's constant commercial breaks there's this kind of like rush of like uh okay i have to interrupt you now because we have to go ..."

"yeah exactly evian uh which charles uh isabel who i i talked to yesterday told me that evian is naive backwards which the fact that his mind thinks this way is just uh it's quite brilliant anyway ther..."

"so what uh what was the most challenging parody song to make was it the thriller one hmm no that was really fun i wrote the lyrics really quickly um and then i gave it over to the product production t..."

"one of the other things charles said is that you know everyone knows you as like a super nice guy super passionate about teaching and so on uh what he said i don't know if it's true that despite the f..."

"human life let's talk about that let's get you in trouble and record your video it's like bill gates uh i think he said like some quote about the internet that that's just gonna be a small thing it's ..."

"there's some i don't know very smart people who have signed on to that story and it's a it's a compelling story i once now i can really get myself in trouble i once wrote an op-ed about this specifica..."

"i find to actually argue against that yeah me too and not sound like not sound like you're just like rolling your eyes uh i'm like i have like science fiction we don't have to think about it but even ..."

"with it completely unprepared it's very possible that in the context of the long arc of human history it will in fact spring into existence but that springing might take like if you look at nuclear we..."

"which is interactive ai when they start like having at scale like tiny little interactions with human beings they can start controlling these human beings so a single algorithm can control the minds o..."

"next phase the next level of the game if they're not successful then yeah then we're going to wreck each other we're going to destroy society so you're going to in your old age sit on the porch and wa..."

"trolls oh it's kind of hilarious actually but it also doesn't feel good but it's a skill to learn to not look at that like to moderate actually how much you look at that the discussion i have with my ..."

"how i'd make a machine do that i i i generally speaking like if i train one of my reinforcement learning agents to play a video game and it works really hard on that first stage over and over and over..."

"i've had the privilege the pleasure of being of having almost a front row seat to a lot of this stuff and it's been really really fun and interesting so uh when i was in college in the 80s early 80s u..."

"i had i had a trs-80 model one before they were called model ones because there was nothing else uh i got my computer in 1979 uh instead so i was i was i would have been bar mitzvahed but instead of h..."

"my home computer and so i went to college and i was like oh i'm totally going to study computer science i opted the college i chose specifically had a computer science major the one that i really want..."

"yeah was it psychology or cognitive science or like do you remember like what context it was yeah yeah yeah so so i was a i've always been a bit of a cognitive psychology groupie so like i studied com..."

"it's kind of cool to see them work but yeah okay so you always you're always a group you have cognitive psychology yeah yeah and so uh so it was in a class by richard garrick he was kind of my my favo..."

"and so um so we have so i was in this seminar in college that was basically a close reading of the pinker prince paper which was like really thick there was a lot going on in there and um and and it t..."

"ackley and and i think there was other authors as well showed that no no with both machines we can actually learn non-linear concepts and so everything's back on the table again and that kind of start..."

"to dave and dave said oh well why don't we have him come and give a talk and i was like wait what you can do that like these are real people i thought they were just words i thought it was just like i..."

"yeah and the proof of that is kind of interesting i mean that's really surprising to me when i first read that and then enriched rich sutton's book on the matter it's it's kind of beautiful that a sin..."

"you could prove that it's optimal so like one part of computer science that it makes people feel warm and fuzzy inside is when you can prove something like that a sorting algorithm worst case runs and..."

"ah so you're so so you're saying you don't like machine learning but we have some positive theoretical results for these things you know you can come back at me with yeah but they're really weak and y..."

"is picking the most delicious reachable fruit yeah most delicious reachable fruit i don't know why that's not a saying and yeah okay so uh so you then this is the 80s and this kind of idea starts to p..."

"so what uh wasn't most of the excitement on reinforcement learning in the 90s era with what is it td gamma like what's the role of these kind of little like fun game playing things and breakthroughs a..."

"so i think as as humans often do as we've done in the recent past as well people extrapolate it's like oh well if you can do that which is obviously very hard then obviously you could do all these oth..."

"of people like jerry who who um who have just a particular particular set of skills on that topic by the way as a small side note i tweeted emacs is greater than vim yesterday and deleted deleted the ..."

"important concepts in artificial intelligence okay it depends how broadly you apply the term so i used the term in my 1996 phd dissertation wow the actual terms of yeah because because tessaro's paper..."

"by deep mind and open ai to learn games that are a little bit more complex that when i was learning artificial intelligence go was presented to me with artificial intelligence the modern approach i do..."

"player without any supervisors learning on expert games we're doing only through by playing itself so that is i don't know what to make of it i think it would be interesting to hear what your opinions..."

"that um these you know these these techniques that were so good at playing chess and they could beat the world champion in chess couldn't beat you know your typical go playing teenager and go so the f..."

"persist in the in the face of like long odds because it feels like for me i'll be one of the skeptical people in the room thinking that you can learn your way to to beat go like it sounded like especi..."

"yeah in some ways it's surprising maybe you can provide some intuition to it that not much more than td gammon was done for quite a long time on the reinforcement learning front yeah is that weird to ..."

"implemented in elevator controllers so that that was nice there was some work that satender singh it all did on uh handoffs with cell phones uh you know deciding when when should you hand off from thi..."

"more impressed with uh alphago zero which is didn't didn't get a kind of a bootstrap in the beginning with human trained games yes just was purely self-play though the first one alpha go was also a tr..."

"knowledge okay so now maybe it makes three like okay but that first one is the doozy right getting it to to to work reliably and and for the networks to to hold on to the value well enough like that w..."

"in go like you can start to get a feel really quickly for the idea that um you know certain parts of the being in certain parts of the board seems to be more associated with winning right because it's..."

"mind like to learn to become a better chess player yeah and so like that's a very interesting thing because we're not static creatures we're learning together i mean just like we're talking about soci..."

"but the the thing about self-play is if you if you put it although i don't like doing that in the broader category of self-supervised learning is that it doesn't require too much or any human human la..."

"performance so what's your intuition like trying to stitch all of it together about our discussion of agi the limits of self-play and your thoughts about maybe the limits of neural networks in the con..."

"actually get we get by right we we do come up with new ideas sometimes and we do manage to talk each other into things sometimes and we do sometimes vote for reasonable people sometimes but um but it'..."

"could actually become on this route they have to they have to get you know shut down like we like we have to have an argument that they have to have an argument with us and lose a couple times before ..."

"i'd love to hear what your thoughts are i don't know if you got a chance to see a blog post called bitter lesson oh yes but rich sutton that makes an argument hopefully i can summarize it perhaps perh..."

"what i believe is that you know compositionality and what's the right way to say it the complexity grows rapidly as you consider more and more possibilities like explosively and so far moore's law has..."

"and it's so i mean it's so hard to disagree with elon musk on this because it it like i i've you know i used to be one of those folks i'm still one of those folks i've studied autonomous vehicles that..."

"that uh so people really love it when i ask what three books technical philosophical fiction had a big impact in your life maybe you couldn't recommend we went with movies we went uh with uh billy joe..."

"computer scientist who really loves to hang out with cognitive scientists and he said he studied language acquisition in particular he said you know humans have about this number of words of vocabular..."

"now i've discovered books on tape like audiobooks um and so i'm i'm much better uh i'm more caught up i read a lot of books a small tangent on that it is a fascinating open question to me on the topic..."

"the ability to stay in lane at speed that happens relatively fast it's not zero shot learning but it's pretty fast the thing that's remarkably hard and this is i think partly why self-driving cars are..."

"the three books question is there something on audiobook that you can uh recommend oh i've yeah i mean um i yeah i've read a lot of really fun stuff uh in terms of books that i find myself thinking ba..."

"and that might be true that it didn't society didn't sort of play forward quite that way i still believe in the premise i still believe that at some point we have the relationship that we have to thes..."

"who can commune with machines in this way so i don't know so that book had a big big impact on me currently i'm i'm reading uh the alignment problem actually by brian christian so i don't know if you'..."

"yeah it's yeah it's it's an interesting problem to talk about i find it to be the most interesting just like thinking about whether we live in a simulation or not as a as a thought experiment to think..."

"so i'm not sure if you're familiar i seem to mention this every other word uh is i'm from the soviet union and i'm russian uh read way too much my roots are russian too but a couple generations back w..."

"not too much of anything because too much of anything is iffy that feels like uh rolling stone song i feel like they must be you can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes you can strike ..."