What should I read next? Any AGI safety related material that you can recommend? I've read the following books related (broadly) to AI:
- Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control,
by Stuart Russell - AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, by Kai-Fu Lee
- Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, by Cathy O'Neil
- Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, by Nick Bostrom
- The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World, by Pedro Domingos
- The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values, by Brian Christian
- Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
I find that much (maybe 50%) of what I've read in the above books simply reviews/re-hashes the same handful of concepts (a brief history of AI, what a neural network is, how big data requires a lot of data, what "garbage in garbage out" means, AlexNet was impressive, how impactful AI is and can be, etc.). Several years ago I did some reading/learning about machine learning[1], and I find that I generally don't learn much from reading about AI.[2]
- ^
I spent a few months learning python, read various blog posts, did a tiny tutorial to build a very simple toy project with Scikit-learn, and generally developed a decent lay-persons understanding of machine learning. I have a vague familiarity with multiple regression, K nearest neighbors, dimensionality reduction, but I don't have enough of an understanding to describe them for more than a sentence or two, and I definitely don't have enough of an understanding to describe them in a detailed and technical sense.
- ^
The analogy that I am thinking of is that I have of learned the equivalent of the freshmen 100-level course on AI for non-technical people, and all the books that I am reading are also at the 100-level. Are there any non-technical books at the 200-level, or would I have to do a few years of programming in order to be able to understand the 200-level content?
Not annoying at all. I'm always happy to share book recommendations. :)
Of all the books I've read related to AI, I think that The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values would be the best. I found it far easier to digest. It was written by a journalist rather than an academic, and that shows. The writing style is much smoother than some of the other books on the above list. While it certainly had less detail than Human Compatible or Superintelligence, I think that the increase in "digestibility" far outweighs the decrease in "rigor."
If you are... (read more)