38 Quotes by Pedro Domingos

As so often happens in computer science, we’re willing to sacrifice efficiency for generality.

Society is changing, one learning algorithm at a time.

Each of the five tribes of machine learning has its own master algorithm, a general-purpose learner that you can in principle use to discover knowledge from data in any domain. The symbolists’ master algorithm is inverse deduction, the connectionists’ is backpropagation, the evolutionaries’ is genetic programming, the Bayesians’ is Bayesian inference, and the analogizers’ is the support vector machine.

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.

People often think computers are all about numbers, but they’re not. Computers are all about logic.

It’s not man versus machine; it’s man with machine versus man without. Data and intuition are like horse and rider, and you don’t try to outrun a horse; you ride it.

Michelangelo said that all he did was see the statue inside the block of marble and carve away the excess stone until the statue was revealed. Likewise, an algorithm carves away the excess transistors in the computer until the intended function is revealed, whether it’s an airliner’s autopilot or a new Pixar movie. An.

Homo sapiens is the species that adapts the world to itself instead of adapting itself to the world.

If you’re a lazy and not-too-bright computer scientist, machine learning is the ideal occupation, because learning algorithms do all the work but let you take all the credit.