Skip to main content

Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths - Four Way Interview

Brian Christian is the bestselling author of The Most Human Human, which was named a Wall Street Journal bestseller and a New Yorker favourite book of 2011. His writing has appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and The Paris Review, among others. Brian has been a featured guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Charlie Rose Show, NPR's Radiolab, and the BBC, and has lectured at Google, Microsoft, SETI, the Santa Fe Institute, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the London School of Economics.

 Tom Griffiths is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at UC Berkeley, where he directs the Computational Cognitive Science Lab. He has received widespread recognition for his scientific work, including awards from the American Psychological Association and the Sloan Foundation.

 Algorithms to Live By is reviewed here.

 Why science?

 BC: I think of my own orientation towards science in essentially religious terms. That anything exists at all (let alone life, let alone my own conscious experience) is wonderfully and sublimely mysterious. The most reverential attitude to adopt toward this grand mystery, in my view, is curiosity. One of the most powerful and profound frameworks we have for expressing that curiosity is science.

TG: When I went to university I deliberately chose not to do science, or at least to do a Bachelor of Arts rather than a Bachelor of Science degree. From my time in school I felt like science was about things that we already understand very well, and I wanted to learn about all the things that are still mysterious — minds, cultures, and thoughts. About half way through my degree I read a philosophy book that had a chapter at the very back about using mathematics to model the mind, and that was it! Suddenly I realized that it was possible to explore those mysterious things using rigorous, quantitative methods, and I was hooked.

Why this book?

BC: Since my teenage years if not even earlier, I have been fascinated by the correspondences and parallels, the homologies and isomorphisms, that exist between formal systems and natural ones. Sometimes drawing on real-world intuition enables us to solve a formal problem; sometimes it goes the other way, and a problem teaches us something that’s more broadly applicable. What we can learn about our own lives from the formal systems we’ve discovered in nature and designed in our own image? Algorithms to Live By explores and pursues this question, using computer science as a way of thinking about human decision-making.

TG: My academic research focuses on developing mathematical models of cognition, drawing on ideas from computer science — artificial intelligence and machine learning — to better understand how human minds work. As a result, I spend a lot of time thinking about the computational structure of everyday life, and out of that comes a vocabulary for describing the decision-making problems people face and a set of strategies for solving them. For me, this book is a way of sharing those insights.

What’s next?

BC: As a lover of both computer science and language, I’ve been fascinated for many years by their intersections in computational linguistics, and I’m excited to work more deeply on some projects at that particular conjunction.

TG: I’m currently working with my students and collaborators on the research questions that relate to topics we discuss in the book, specifically how thinking about human rationality in terms of using efficient algorithms (rather than always producing the right answer, regardless of the effort involved) changes the way we understand human cognition.

 What’s exciting you at the moment?

BC: Data visualization. We’re living in an open-data boom, and I see this as the other great literacy, as critical in a civic context as in a scientific one.

TG: The last couple of years have seen significant advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, and I’m excited about exploring what these advances can tell us about human minds.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more