Christian B. The Alignment Problem 2020 PDF torrent

Textbook in PDF format

Brian Christian gives an intimate view of the people making AI technology — their aims, expectations, hopes, challenges and desolations. Starting with Walter Pitts’s work on a logical representation of neuron activity in the early twentieth century, he recounts the ideas, aims, successes and failures of researchers and practitioners in fields from cognitive science to engineering.
Christian shows researchers’ growing realization that AI developments are affected by societal values — and, more importantly, affect them. They come with a cost and can have profound impacts on communities. At its core, The Alignment Problem asks how we can ensure that AI systems capture our norms and values, understand what we mean and do what we want. We all have different conceptions of and requirements for what such systems should do. As mathematician Norbert Wiener put it in 1960: “We had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.”