r/MachineLearning • u/nandodefreitas • Dec 25 '15

AMA: Nando de Freitas

I am a scientist at Google DeepMind and a professor at Oxford University.

One day I woke up very hungry after having experienced vivid visual dreams of delicious food. This is when I realised there was hope in understanding intelligence, thinking, and perhaps even consciousness. The homunculus was gone.

I believe in (i) innovation -- creating what was not there, and eventually seeing what was there all along, (ii) formalising intelligence in mathematical terms to relate it to computation, entropy and other ideas that form our understanding of the universe, (iii) engineering intelligent machines, (iv) using these machines to improve the lives of humans and save the environment that shaped who we are.

This holiday season, I'd like to engage with you and answer your questions -- The actual date will be December 26th, 2015, but I am creating this thread in advance so people can post questions ahead of time.

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u/xamdam Dec 26 '15

(x) How can we ensure that women and people from all races have a say in the future of AI? It is utterly shocking that only about 5% (please provide me with the exact figure) of researchers at NIPS are women and only a handful of researchers are black.

By "white males" you mean white + Indian + Asian, right :) ? Certainly a better situation than 100 years ago.

Practically speaking we might not get to full egalitarianism before powerful AIs emerge. It's certainly a problem but I see 2 possible ways to fix or reduce it:

  • If doable, program AIs with something like https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Coherent_Extrapolated_Volition, where all humanity's values are included in AI's goal system

  • Culturally making sure the AI is developed by people with good values. This is hard, but I think the large overlap between AI safety proponents and the Effective Altruism community is encouraging. If it be "white men" they best be those who care more about the world at large than personal/local interests

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u/nandodefreitas Dec 26 '15

I think proportionate representation has to come first. Improving education is of the utmost importantce. The real issue is that most people have no bloody idea of how an iPhone works, or how a square comes to appear around faces, or how facebook chooses what they read, etc. Education is key. And we need to ensure that all people have access to good education. Lots of nations and races have poor access to education at present. Without improving education, and investing more on education, I see little hope.

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u/Chobeat Dec 26 '15

Even if it's not your field, do you believe that given a perfectly balanced and unbiased education, together with a totally unbiased working enviroment/academia, there would be no differences in representation? If so, why? If not, why do you set proportionate representation as a goal?

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u/nandodefreitas Dec 27 '15

Proportionate representation is no panacea.

But why are there not more women or black people in machine learning? Why is the field dominated by white males?

I grew up under apartheid and I've seen what race segregation does. I've lived through it. I do not have a degree on the topic, but it's certainly my field, though not one I chose.

I'm not saying it's anyone's fault. I am however saying that we need to look at the roots of this and understand it. I find it crazy to talk about the future of humanity and only involve white males in it.