56 | New Scientist | 10 August 2019
Computer scientist Anca Dragan devotes
her life to helping robots work out just how
weird and unpredictable humans really areAs a child, what did you want
to do when you grew up?
I got interested in computer science at
an early age, but before then, it mostly
depended on which movie last inspired me.Explain what you do in one
easy paragraph.
I get robots to account for humans when deciding
on their actions. On the one hand, this means
giving them the ability to make predictions about
what we will do next and make sure they can
coordinate with us, like when autonomous cars
negotiate for their turn during a merge in traffic.
On the other hand, this means giving them the
ability to infer what it is that we want them to do.
How do I want my car to drive? What help do I
need from my personal home robot?What do you love most about what you do?
I love that I get to focus on problems that I believe
will be relevant to us in the long term, like how to
define what we want machines to do or how to get
machines to better understand us.What’s the most exciting thing you’re
working on right now?
We’re working on making machines more
adaptable to the wrong model of human
behaviour. For instance, we can get robots to
figure out where you’re heading by assuming
your actions are relatively rational. But what if
you’re avoiding something the robot doesn’t
know about? Or what if the robot assumes
you’re thinking many more steps ahead than
you actually are? Or maybe the robot assumes
you’re trying to teach it something, but you’re
really just doing your own thing. Can robots
be more robust to such misspecification of
human behaviour?Were you good at science at school?
I was OK at physics and pretty terrible at the rest.
Let me put it this way: I don’t think you would
have looked at me in school and anticipated
that I’d become a professor at one of the top
universities worldwide. In the end, I clicked
very well with research, I took as much
initiative as I could and I got very lucky.If you could send a message back to
yourself as a kid, what would you say?
I definitely wouldn’t say, “Don’t worry,
everything will be great”, because I think the
worrying is what made me ambitious. Growing
up in Romania, my dad told me that if I didn’t
do exceptionally well in school, I’d have to go
work on the farm – and I believed him!If you could have a long conversation
with any scientist, living or dead,
who would it be?
I’d really love to talk to Alan Turing.How useful will your skills be after
the apocalypse?
Not at all useful. Unless our problem is
that AI systems don’t know what we want,
I’ve got nothing.Do you have an unexpected
hobby, and if so, please will
you tell us about it?
I love sailing because I get to take advantage
of living by the water, despite the fact
that the San Francisco Bay is so cold.
I really need to focus to make sure I don’t
do anything bad to the boat, so it’s almost
like a way of meditating.OK, one last thing: tell us something
that will blow our minds...
Imagine you are learning to do a task and a
robot is trying to help you. You would think
that the better you are at the task, the better
the outcome for you and the robot. It turns
out that isn’t true: success relies a lot on
whether what you do and what the robot
does gel together. This is one aspect that
makes assisting people hard. ❚Anca Dragan is a professor in computer science at
the University of California, Berkeley, where she runs
the InterACT lab and is a co-principal investigator in
the Center for Human-Compatible AI.“ My dad told me
that if I didn’t do
exceptionally
well in school, I’d
have to work on
the farm – and
I believed him!”
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