Yoshua Bengio

And this is not just good, it's essential.

So I'm totally fine with people exploring directions that are contrary to mine or look orthogonal to mine.

I am more than fine.

I think it's important.

I and my friends don't claim we have universal truth about what will, especially about what will happen in the future.

Now, that being said, we have our intuitions, and then we act accordingly, according to where we think we can be most useful and where society has the most to gain or to lose.

We should have those debates and not end up in a society where there's only one voice and one way of thinking, and research money is spread out, so...

So I think there are short-term things that are already happening and then there are long-term things that we need to do.

In the short term, there are techniques that have been proposed and I think will continue to be improved and maybe alternatives will come up to take data sets.

in which we know there is bias, we can measure it.

Pretty much any data set where humans are being observed, taking decisions, will have some sort of bias, discrimination against particular groups and so on.

And we can use machine learning techniques to try to build predictors, classifiers that are going to be less biased.

We can do it, for example, using adversarial methods to make our systems less sensitive to these variables we should not be sensitive to.

So these are clear, well-defined ways of trying to address the problem.

Maybe they have weaknesses and more research is needed and so on.

But I think, in fact, they're sufficiently mature that governments should start regulating companies where it matters, say, like insurance companies, so that they use those techniques.

Because those techniques will probably reduce the bias.

But at a cost, for example, maybe their predictions will be less accurate.

And so companies will not do it until you force them.

All right, so this is short term.