#042 - Pedro Domingos - Ethics and Cancel Culture

Today we have professor Pedro Domingos and we are going to talk about activism in machine learning, cancel culture, AI ethics and kernels. In Pedro's book the master algorithm, he segmented the AI community into 5 distinct tribes with 5 unique identities (and before you ask, no the irony of an anti-identitarian doing do was not lost on us!). Pedro recently published an article in Quillette called Beating Back Cancel Culture: A Case Study from the Field of Artificial Intelligence. Domingos has railed against political activism in the machine learning community and cancel culture. Recently Pedro was involved in a controversy where he asserted the NeurIPS broader impact statements are an ideological filter mechanism.

Important Disclaimer: All views expressed are personal opinions.

00:00:00 Caveating

00:04:08 Main intro

00:07:44 Cancelling culture is a culture and intellectual weakness 

00:12:26 Is cancel culture a post-modern religion? 

00:24:46 Should we have gateways and gatekeepers? 

00:29:30 Does everything require broader impact statements? 

00:33:55 We are stifling diversity (of thought) not promoting it. 

00:39:09 What is fair and how to do fair?

00:45:11 Models can introduce biases by compressing away minority data 

00:48:36 Accurate but unequal soap dispensers 

00:53:55 Agendas are not even self-consistent 

00:56:42 Is vs Ought: all variables should be used for Is 

01:00:38 Fighting back cancellation with cancellation?

01:10:01 Intent and degree matter in right vs wrong. 

01:11:08 Limiting principles matter 

01:15:10 Gradient descent and kernels 

01:20:16 Training Journey matter more than Destination 

01:24:36 Can training paths teach us about symmetry?

01:28:37 What is the most promising path to AGI? 

01:31:29 Intelligence will lose its mystery