38 Quotes by Pedro Domingos

[T]he greatest mystery in the universe is not how it begins or ends, or what infinitesimal threads it's woven from, it's what goes on in a small child's mind: how a pound of gray jelly can grow into the seat of consciousness.

We should therefore welcome with open arms computers that are vastly more powerful than our brains, safe in the knowledge that our job is exponentially easier than theirs. They have to solve the problems; we just have to check that they did so to our satisfaction. AIs will think fast what we think slow, and the world will be the better for it. I, for one, welcome our new robot underlings.

People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they're too stupid and they've already taken over the world.

Evolution is the ultimate example of how much a simple learning algorithm can achieve given enough data. Its input is the experience and fate of all living creatures that ever existed. (Now that's big data.) On the other hand, it's been running for over three billion years on the most powerful computer on Earth: Earth itself.

One of the most important problems in machine learning—and life—is the exploration-exploitation dilemma. If you’ve found something that works, should you just keep doing it? Or is it better to try new things, knowing it could be a waste of time but also might lead to a better solution? Would you rather be a cowboy or a farmer? Start a company or run an existing one? Go steady or play the field? A midlife crisis is the yearning to explore after many years spent exploiting.

Despite all its successes, machine learning is still in the alchemy stage of science.

[M]achine learning will bring about not just a new era of civilization, but a new stage in the evolution of life on earth.

Tomorrow's cyberspace will be a vast parallel world that selects only the most promising things to try out in the real one. It will be like a new, global subconscious, the collective id of the human race.

And then Homo technicus will evolve into a myriad different intelligent species, each with its own niche, a whole new biosphere as different from today's as today's is from the primordial ocean.