Richard Mallah Q&A

Richard is an honorary Foresight fellow working on advanced AI safety, advanced knowledge learning, training agents, and more for 20+ years.  He is concerned with general AI – there needs to be a much richer understanding of good and bad to mitigate AI behavioral risk. He has experience in knowledge representation and knowledge learning, and has seen these fields evolve over time.

Q&A Takeaways

• Time is short, we need to act fast as the future approaches
• We need a portfolio approach to AI safety
• The end goal is to have AI and AGI turn out well for life
• Stepwise explainability can be used to refine robust article-writing AI
• Ontology restructuring will give us useful info
• There are conflicting human values and we cannot wait for consensus when building AI
• We need a principled approach for combining top down and bottom up approaches to ethics
• We should have confidence in a broad landscape of accessible safety methods
  
  
  

Georgis Kaissis Q&A

Georgis is an assistant professor at the Technical University of Munich, a research associate at the Imperial College in London, leads the research team at OpenMind – a large open source collective – and works on developing open source software.  He is interested in privacy preserving machine learning, which is a trifecta of technology that allows us to derive information from data without seeing the data.

Q&A Takeaways

• There is a need for more data than ever before but this clashes with privacy
• Zero copy problem – data diminishes in value the more you copy it
• No data sharing system in existence will solve the problem of data misuse
• In medical AI, there are lots of tools which are trained on very small datasets with poor distribution due to privacy concerns
• We need a class of techniques that derive critical insights from data without seeing the entire datasets
• Language AI could expose social security numbers or other sensitive information when trained on extremely large datasets
• Private machine learning could allow AI to train on extremely large datasets without allowing for violations of privacy
• Differential privacy allows people to deny participation in a group while simultaneously being in the group.  It works by introducing a certain amount of noise into the results which does not modify the outcome but allows participants on an individual level to claim non-adherance.
• Data can also be split up and analyzed in pieces, then reconstituted later
• Complex valued weight models could be used to train AI in order to maintain privacy
• There are tradeoffs between generalization and memorization, and the nature of memorization and learning is being actively worked on
• Finding a universal ethical standard for privacy would be very challenging, its probably better to compartmentalize the ethics models based on jurisdiction