Our guest today is Pedro Domingos, who is joining an elite group of repeat guests – he joined us before in episode 34 in April 2023.

Pedro is Professor Emeritus Of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He has done pioneering work in machine learning, like the development of Markov logic networks, which combine probabilistic reasoning with first-order logic. He is probably best known for his book "The Master Algorithm" which describes five different "tribes" of AI researchers, and argues that progress towards human-level general intelligence requires a unification of their approaches.

More recently, Pedro has become a trenchant critic of what he sees as exaggerated claims about the power and potential of today’s AI, and of calls to impose constraints on it.

He has just published “2040: A Silicon Valley Satire”, a novel which ridicules Big Tech and also American politics.

Selected follow-ups:

• Pedro Domingos - University of Washington
• Previous London Futurists Podcast episode featuring Pedro Domingos
• 2040: A Silicon Valley Satire
• The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
• The Bonfire of the Vanities
• Ron Howard
• Mike Judge
• Martin Scorsese
• Pandora’s Brain
• Transcendence
• Future of Life Institute moratorium open letter
• OpenAI working on new reasoning technology under code name ‘Strawberry’
• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach - by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
• Google's AI reasons its way around the London Underground - Nature
• Conscium
• Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview - by Blake Lemoine
• Could a Large Language Model be Conscious? - Talk by David Chalmers at NeurIPS 2022
• Jeremy Bentham
• The Extended Phenotype - 1982 book by Richard Dawkins
• Clarion West: Workshops for people who are serious about writing

Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration