Overview

With recent rapid progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence, expert attention is increasingly turning to the impact of these fields on society. An awareness is growing of the potential for serious incidents to occur through, for example, design error, badly-specified objectives, or plain misapplication of AI.

Multiple institutions both public and private are therefore working on developing improvements to existing AI systems to make them more secure against such failure modes, or on foundational extensions of the field of AI to allow construction of agents which are secure by design. These institutions include OpenAI, DeepMind, the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

Bringing a taste of this research to Switzerland, the Workshop on Reliable Artificial Intelligence was held at ETH Zürich on the 28th of October, 2017. Featuring talks from

Max Daniel (Effective Altruism Foundation),

Victoria Krakovna (Google DeepMind),

Owain Evans (University of Oxford),

Felix Berkenkamp (ETH Zürich),

Will Sawin (ETH Zürich) and

Bas Steunebrunk (NNAISENSE),

the workshop brought together students and researchers for a day of discussion on technical aspects of building safe artificial intelligence.

See below for selected talks and slides.