Sign up to receive our twice-weekly News & Politics newsletter. The American public's increasing fascination with artificial intelligence--its rapid advancement and ability to reshape the future--has put the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton in an awkward position. He is known as the godfather of A.I. because of his groundbreaking work in neural networks, a branch of computer science that most researchers had given up on, while Hinton's advances eventually led to a revolution. But he is now fearful of what it could unleash. I'm a kind of latecomer to worrying about the risks, " Hinton tells The New Yorker's Joshua Rothman. "Because very recently I came to the conclusion that these digital intelligences might already be as good as us.

Mike is a 40-something crop farmer from southern Queensland. With a chestnut tan, crushing handshake and a strong outback accent, he's the third generation of his family to grow sorghum, a cereal mostly used for animal fodder. But, like most farmers, Mike faces more challenges than his forbears. Climate change has eroded Australian farms' profitability by an average of 23% over the past 20 years. It's a constant challenge to improve productivity by producing more with less.

After the devastating 2019 bushfire season, Mike began exploring "smart" farming techniques enabled by artificial intelligence (AI).

Is it important that this art was created by humans? With music, you could argue that we only want something to entertain us. There is certainly room for music-as-product; you need something to listen to in elevators. And you could even argue that when you're listening to or performing Beethoven, you don't care where the music came from. But there are art forms for which that isn't true.

That's just one of "five practical research problems" proposed by scientists at Google, OpenAI, Stanford and Berkeley in a paper called "Concrete Problems in AI Safety" (pdf). Others included "safe exploration" issues, or how to stop a curious cleaning robot from sticking a wet mop in an electrical socket, and "avoiding negative side effects" such as a robot breaking granny's vase when cleaning in a rush. The problems may seem a bit silly, when compared to an AI-induced doomsday, but Google researcher Chris Olah wrote, "These are all forward thinking, long-term research questions – minor issues today, but important to address for future systems." A particularly interesting portion of the paper was devoted to avoiding reward hacking, or how to stop AI from gaming its reward function. "Imagine that an agent discovers a buffer overflow in its reward function: it may then use this to get extremely high reward in an unintended way."