Alex Turner

Alex is a fourth-year PhD student at Oregon State University interested in making significant progress on AI alignment; in particular, better understanding and quantifying when, why, and how people would be affected by deployment of proposed AI systems.
Last summer, he introduced an approach that aims implicitly to account for the difficulty of specifying a formal goal for an AI: have the agent complete its task without overly changing its ability to complete other tasks. The ability to complete one task is often tightly correlated with the ability to complete another. The key insight is that we can have the agent remain equally able to complete tasks in general, hopefully thereby remaining able to do the right thing – even without specifying what that right thing is.