You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place

by Janelle Shane

“I’ve taken to imagining [AI] as a demon that’s deliberately misinterpreting your reward and actively searching for the laziest possible local optima. It’s a bit ridiculous, but I’ve found it’s actually a productive mindset to have,”

Sometimes I think the surest sign that we’re not living in a simulation is that if we were, some organism would have learned to exploit its glitches.

Treating a decision as impartial just because it came from an AI is known sometimes as mathwashing or bias laundering. The bias is still there, because the AI copied it from its training data, but now it’s wrapped in a layer of hard-to-interpret AI behavior.

Some neuroscientists believe that dreaming is a way of using our internal models for low-stakes training. Want to test out scenarios for escaping from an angry rhinoceros? It is far safer to test them out in a dream than by poking at a real rhino.

In 2019, 40 percent of European startups classified in the AI category didn’t use any AI at all.

People also need to be able to adjust algorithms to fix newly discovered problems. Maybe there’s a rare but catastrophic bug that develops, like the one that affected Siri for a brief period of time, causing her to respond to users saying “Call me an ambulance” with “Okay, I’ll call you ‘an ambulance’ from now on.”