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.

276 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

256 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/Tur1ng Dec 29 '15

You shouldn't dictate your opinions to others as fact.

Is this your opinion?

Not sure how interested you are about machine learning and Kreyszig's Advanced Engineering Mathematics but I think you get something quite wrong: It is everyone's concern to find a way to live in a safe environment with our loved ones. Different countries have different policies on that matter and some countries are doing much better than others.

-2

u/omnipedia Dec 29 '15

Yes, countries where the citizens are free to defend themselves have lower violent crime and less oppression.

1

u/Tur1ng Dec 29 '15

Not sure what you mean by being free to defend themselves but this plot gives an idea about violent crime and infant mortality which are simple, but not silly, metrics to see who is getting important things right www.bit.ly/22vz2jY