← The Knowledge Project

#13 Pedro Domingos: The Rise of The Machines

Aug 30, 2016 1h 4m 16 insights
In this interview with AI expert Pedro Domingos, you’ll learn about self-driving cars, where knowledge comes from, and the 5 schools of machine learning.   Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/   Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/   Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish
Actionable Insights

1. Adopt Human-AI ‘Centaur’ Teams

Combine human and machine intelligence for optimal performance, leveraging their complementary strengths (e.g., human intuition/common sense with machine consistency/data processing). This approach has been shown to outperform either humans or machines alone in complex tasks like chess and medical diagnosis.

2. Re-evaluate Job Automation Risks

Recognize that white-collar jobs (e.g., engineering, law, medicine) may be more susceptible to automation than often perceived, while some blue-collar jobs are harder to automate. This understanding should inform career planning and skill development strategies.

3. Leverage ML for Scale & Consistency

Employ machine learning for tasks requiring high consistency, accuracy, and the processing of vast quantities of data, such as medical diagnosis. Machines often outperform humans in these areas due to their unwavering consistency and ability to process more information.

4. Anticipate Adversarial ML Behavior

Plan for and adapt to adversarial behavior when deploying machine learning systems, as users or competitors will change their behavior to exploit weaknesses. This requires dynamic and adaptive ML strategies, as seen in spam filters, stock markets, and online advertising.

5. Seek Untapped ML Opportunities

Identify domains or ’low-hanging fruit’ where machine learning has not yet been widely applied. These areas offer significant opportunities for innovation and market leadership, even with less advanced algorithms initially, by simply being the first to apply ML.

6. Combine Diverse ML Paradigms

Integrate different machine learning approaches (e.g., classic AI search with deep learning, or connectionist with evolutionary) to develop more robust and adaptive systems. This allows for solving complex problems that single-paradigm approaches cannot tackle alone.

7. Expand ML Data Inputs

Broaden the scope of data inputs for machine learning algorithms beyond traditional sources to include diverse, real-time, and unconventional data (e.g., social media, traffic, satellite imagery). This provides richer insights and allows algorithms to learn from factors humans might overlook.

8. Prioritize ML Explainability & Interaction

When developing or deploying ML systems, prioritize explainability and allow for rich, natural language interaction. User trust is crucial for adoption, and opaque ‘black boxes’ hinder this, making it important for algorithms to explain their rationale and accept feedback.

9. Delegate ‘How’ Decisions to AI

Delegate ‘how’ decisions (execution, logistics, optimization) to algorithms while retaining human control over ‘what’ decisions (goals, ultimate objectives). This allows humans to set the vision while machines efficiently achieve it.

10. Drive Change as Early Adopter

Don’t wait for established gatekeepers (e.g., doctors, IT departments) to adopt new technologies. Instead, embrace and demonstrate the value of new tools like ML systems as an individual or early adopter to drive broader organizational and societal change.

11. Avoid Mixed-Control Autonomous Systems

Do not implement autonomous systems where humans are expected to take over instantly from machine control. This creates dangerous situations due to human inattention and lack of context, making fully autonomous or fully human-controlled systems safer.

12. Combine Supervised & Reinforcement Learning

For complex learning tasks, combine supervised learning from existing expert data (e.g., human master games) with reinforcement learning through self-play. This strategy, exemplified by AlphaGo, can achieve superior performance.

13. Design for Autonomous-Only Environments

Where possible, design infrastructure and systems to separate human and autonomous agents. Human unpredictability significantly complicates autonomous operation, and autonomous systems can coordinate much more efficiently with each other.

14. Acknowledge Knowledge Uncertainty

Be aware that any knowledge induced from data is inherently uncertain, as generalization may not always be correct. Additionally, recognize the human tendency to be overconfident in knowledge derived from evolution, experience, and culture.

15. Understand Tech Growth as S-Curves

Recognize that technological growth, including AI, follows S-curves (initial exponential growth followed by flattening) rather than infinite exponentials. This implies plateaus and phase transitions rather than continuous, unchecked growth, setting realistic expectations.

16. Employ Meta-Learning Approaches

Utilize meta-learning, where one algorithm learns to combine or optimize the outputs of multiple other learning algorithms. This approach, used by Netflix and IBM Watson, achieves more sophisticated and effective results.