Skip to main content

John Zerilli - Four Way Interview

John Zerilli was a Research Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in the University of Cambridge, and is now a Leverhulme Trust Fellow at the University of Oxford. He co-authored A Citizen's Guide to Artificial Intelligence.

Why AI? 

In a way, I fell into the field. My PhD was in cognitive science and philosophy, so I’d been familiar with some of the history of AI, and always understood these disciplines as complementary. (It’s sometimes said that cognitive science takes the mind to be a kind of computer, while AI takes the computer to be a kind of mind.) But I originally trained as a lawyer, and it just so happened that when I entered the academic job market in my mid-thirties, deep learning was getting lots of attention, including among legal scholars, social scientists and others concerned with the wider implications of advanced machine learning and big data. Almost overnight, postdoctoral fellowships began appearing for which suitable applicants had to demonstrate a background in either computer science, machine learning, cognitive science or data science, on the one hand, and public policy, law, philosophy or bioethics on the other. I seemed to fit the bill. A postdoc opened up in New Zealand (I was in Australia). I applied and was offered the job. From there I took up a fellowship at Cambridge, and now find myself in Oxford. 

Why this book? 

It became clear to me that while there’d been no shortage of books on specific social issues in AI, like discrimination and privacy, many of them excellent (Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, and Virginia Eubank’s Automating Inequality all spring to mind), there was no all-round user-friendly guide to all the big issues: privacy and bias for sure, but also transparency, control, accuracy, safety, liability, employment, and regulation. Some of the earlier books also had the feel of investigative and even literary journalism. This style makes for an interesting read, but it doesn’t always make for the sort of precise, targeted, issue-by-issue dissection likely to be of use to people who just want to get up to speed quickly. 

Beyond that, my co-authors and I were keen for people to get a better grip on the technology than most trade books allow for. There’s definitely something to be said for keeping technicalities to a minimum. But big tech is about tech, and we thought citizens deserve more than a superficial acquaintance with it. Hence the idea for A Citizen’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence was born. 

What’s next? 

I love the field I work in, and that it draws so extensively on my philosophical, legal and cognitive science backgrounds. I’d like to contribute further to making AI a mainstream concern in moral and political philosophy. Developments in AI are posing questions that traditional philosophical answers in these areas aren’t always adequate to resolve. 

What’s exciting you at the moment? 

I’m particularly excited at the prospect of machine learning assisting our best scientists in the discovery of new medicines tackling everything from cancer to mental illness—and, of course, in tackling global warming.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

How to Keep a Plane in the Sky - Alex Davies ****

If there's one big gap in the science writing sphere, it's popular engineering (you can quibble over whether engineering is science, but where else would you put popular engineering?). Alex Davies does the field a real service with this insightful introduction to the world of test engineering. The concept is simple. If we build something and sell it, we need to test it to make sure that it won't fail in a way that's dangerous to the consumer. The most obvious example is airliners, which feature at some length, but this applies to everything from cuddly toys to hair straighteners: someone needs to predict what could go wrong and to put the product through its paces to see if it will survive under any reasonable circumstances. When Davies is telling a story of test engineering in action, the book is a delight. He opens with the way that real bears are used to test if bears can get into coolers and trash cans - and the impressive ways these animals can  circumvent human in...
Post a Comment
Read more

On the Equality of All Things - Carlo Rovelli ****

There is a wide gulf between the worldviews of physicists and philosophers. Many physicists present a rather sweetly naive, child-like view of the world, where philosophers bring a distinctly more adult, cynical tone. This being the case, it can be a little worrying when a physicist dips a toe into the philosophical mire. Infamously, in The Grand Design , Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow told us that philosophy was now dead because science could deal with anything it had previously been needed for. Thankfully, Carlo Rovelli is not trying to do away with philosophy, though it has to be said that when he veers into the topic that physicist's naivety can make it feel like the philosophising of an earnest eighteen-year-old. Take the opening paragraph, which tells us 'electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another. They are notions that illuminate each other'. I almost expected a Pink Floyd soundtr...
Post a Comment
Read more