Meet the philosopher inside Google DeepMind

What does a company that builds game-playing AI need with a philosopher? That question sits at the heart of a Guardian long-read on Iason Gabriel, who has worked inside Google DeepMind since 2017.

For a time, the Guardian reports, Gabriel was the only philosopher at a frontier AI lab. His job was to anticipate the ethical fallout of a technology his engineer colleagues were racing to build.

Two camps

When Gabriel joined, the piece explains, thinking about AI risk split in two. One camp, “AI safety,” worried about a future superintelligence going rogue. The other, “AI ethics,” focused on present harms such as biased facial recognition.

Gabriel’s 2020 paper on values and alignment tried to bridge the two. Getting a machine to follow a set of values is hard, he argued. Choosing which values, in a world of deep disagreement, is harder still.

Alignment as a relationship

The Guardian details...

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