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I support research funding at all levels, and have nothing against mostly theoretical research, but is it really the best use of resources to throw $1 billion a
by gone35 9y ago
I support research funding at all levels, and have nothing against mostly theoretical research, but is it really the best use of resources to throw $1 billion at reinforcement learning without any similar investments into addressing mass unemployment and wealth inequality (both of which are well-documented to cause political instability), how existing gender and racial biases are being encoded in our algorithms, and on how to best get this technology into the hands of people working on high impact areas like medicine and agriculture around the world?
Not quite my field, but perhaps such currently intractable, high-impact societal and medical problems do require theoretical breakthroughs after all... I guess I'm just concerned Rachel that --to put it in reinforcement learning terms-- we need both exploration and exploitation.
- jph00 9y agoAbsolutely! We'd like to see investment in both. Currently we're just not seeing the investment we think there ought to be in the areas Rachel mentioned, or in application areas around food production, education, medicine, and so forth.
- icc97 9y agoPerhaps obvious question - but have you tried approaching the Gates foundation? They are more concerned with sorting the issues of inequality. Or, to be slightly obtuse, have you tried approaching Elon Musk for funding? Perhaps he'll be a bit more flush with cash once the Model 3's start rolling out the door and he'll have another billion around to donate. One of Musk's OpenAI principles was trying to democratise AI and that sounds pretty much exactly like what you're doing.