The Alignment Problem

'Vital reading. This is the book on artificial intelligence we need right now.' Mike Krieger, cofounder of Instagram Artificial intelligence is rapidly dominating every aspect of our modern lives influencing the news we consume, whether we get a mortgage, and even which friends wish us happy birthday. But as algorithms make ever more decisions on our behalf, how do we ensure they do what we want? And fairly? This conundrum - dubbed 'The Alignment Problem' by experts - is the subject of this timely and important book. From the AI program which cheats at computer games to the sexist algorithm behind Google Translate, bestselling author Brian Christian explains how, as AI develops, we rapidly approach a collision between artificial intelligence and ethics. If we stand by, we face a future with unregulated algorithms that propagate our biases - and worse - violate our most sacred values. Urgent and fascinating, this is an accessible primer to the most important issue facing AI researchers today.

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A jaw-dropping exploration of everything that goes wrong when we build AI systems and the movement to fix them. Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective that we’ve invited them to see and hear for us—and to make decisions on our behalf. But alarm bells are ringing. Recent years have seen an eruption of concern as the field of machine learning advances. When the systems we attempt to teach will not, in the end, do what we want or what we expect, ethical and potentially existential risks emerge. Researchers call this the alignment problem. Systems cull résumés until, years later, we discover that they have inherent gender biases. Algorithms decide bail and parole—and appear to assess Black and White defendants differently. We can no longer assume that our mortgage application, or even our medical tests, will be seen by human eyes. And as autonomous vehicles share our streets, we are increasingly putting our lives in their hands. The mathematical and computational models driving these changes range in complexity from something that can fit on a spreadsheet to a complex system that might credibly be called “artificial intelligence.” They are steadily replacing both human judgment and explicitly programmed software. In best-selling author Brian Christian’s riveting account, we meet the alignment problem’s “first-responders,” and learn their ambitious plan to solve it before our hands are completely off the wheel. In a masterful blend of history and on-the ground reporting, Christian traces the explosive growth in the field of machine learning and surveys its current, sprawling frontier. Readers encounter a discipline finding its legs amid exhilarating and sometimes terrifying progress. Whether they—and we—succeed or fail in solving the alignment problem will be a defining human story. The Alignment Problem offers an unflinching reckoning with humanity’s biases and blind spots, our own unstated assumptions and often contradictory goals. A dazzlingly interdisciplinary work, it takes a hard look not only at our technology but at our culture—and finds a story by turns harrowing and hopeful.

Buy now to get the main key ideas from Brian Christian’s The Alignment Problem As machine-learning systems grow not only more prevalent, but also more powerful, humans want to ensure that they understand us and do what we want, eliminating the possibility of catastrophic divergence. In the field of computer science, this question is known as the alignment problem. In The Alignment Problem (2020), Brian Christian raises questions of safety and ethics in a world where humans are turning into machines and machines are turning into humans. He discusses tools that, through imitation, curiosity, inference, and shaping, exhibit human skills without being programmed to do so. The future of machine learning holds risks, but also great promise.

From reengineering to e-business, one factor stands out as the key differentiator between success and failure: clear alignment between business requirements and technology. This book presents a comprehensive roadmap and methodology for achieving that alignment--and maximizing ROI on any IT project.

It is investigated how biologically-inspired optimisation methods can be used to compute alignments between ontologies. Independent of particular similarity metrics, the developed techniques demonstrate anytime behaviour and high scalability. Due to the inherent parallelisability of these population-based algorithms it is possible to exploit dynamically scalable cloud infrastructures - a step towards the provisioning of Alignment-as-a-Service solutions for future semantic applications.

This book provides an overview of various techniques for the alignment of bitexts. It describes general concepts and strategies that can be applied to map corresponding parts in parallel documents on various levels of granularity. Bitexts are valuable linguistic resources for many different research fields and practical applications. The most predominant application is machine translation, in particular, statistical machine translation. However, there are various other threads that can be followed which may be supported by the rich linguistic knowledge implicitly stored in parallel resources. Bitexts have been explored in lexicography, word sense disambiguation, terminology extraction, computer-aided language learning and translation studies to name just a few. The book covers the essential tasks that have to be carried out when building parallel corpora starting from the collection of translated documents up to sub-sentential alignments. In particular, it describes various approaches to document alignment, sentence alignment, word alignment and tree structure alignment. It also includes a list of resources and a comprehensive review of the literature on alignment techniques. Table of Contents: Introduction / Basic Concepts and Terminology / Building Parallel Corpora / Sentence Alignment / Word Alignment / Phrase and Tree Alignment / Concluding Remarks

Interference Alignment: A New Look at Signal Dimensions in a Communication Network provides both a tutorial and a survey of the state-of-art on the topic.