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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more