Skip to main content

Pedro Domingos - Five Way Interview

Pedro Domingos (@pmddomingos) is a renowned AI researcher, tech industry insider, and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Hs most recent book is 2040: A Silicon Valley Satire.

Why AI? 

AI is the defining technology of our time. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, is not kidding when he says that AI could be bigger than fire or the wheel. Using and governing AI is going to be a central part of our lives, jobs, politics and culture from now on.

Why this book?

Every one of us needs to understand AI and the issues surrounding it. Not at the level of an expert, but enough to figure out what we can do with it, what we want from it, and how to get there. And after writing a non-fiction book and talking to people from all walks of life about it, I've come to the conclusion that the best way to communicate what AI really is is by writing a story that illustrates it. Also, so much in the tech world today, from the AI hype and fear to the political and cultural currents surrounding it, is so ripe for satire that I couldn't help writing it. It was some of the greatest fun I've ever had, and I hope readers enjoy it as well. 

Do you think we could ever see, if not a PresiBot, AI used to change the nature of democracy?

We will, and if we don't, we're in trouble. Today's democracy is based on 18th-century technology. Why are society's most important decisions made by a few hundred representatives of the people, with serious cognitive limitations and conflicts of interest, who only hear from us every few years via the ballot box? In 2040, PresiBot 2.0 is crowdsourced in real time from what voters say and want. Your model is your representative, and it has all the time for politics that you don't. AI combines our intelligences into a larger collective intelligence - that is its real promise. Just pray that autocrats don't make better use of it than democracies do and come out on top. So far it's not looking good.

What’s next?

Right now people are very worried about how AI is going to debase democracy, by flooding social media with disinformation, etc. The irony is that social media is already flooded with disinformation, and it's AI-based filtering that's keeping it at bay. So the first thing we need to do is become aware of this and start treating AI as democracy's defender, not its enemy. And then we need to make the most of it - not just in government, but in our cities, our jobs, and our daily life.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

We're at a critical juncture in the history of AI. We finally have the data and computing power to go all the way to human-level AI and beyond, but we don't have learning algorithms that are as good as the human brain's yet. Transformers and large language models are great, but they won't get us there - reliability and generalizability will continue to elude them. So I'm very excited about my current research, which tries to overcome these problems by combining ideas from neural networks and symbolic AI. 2040 gives a hint of this in its notion of 'intelligence propagation' - the new technology PresiBot is based on - but it's just a teaser. So stay tuned!

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Interview by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more