How Causal Inference Can Lead To Real Intelligence In Machines

Last year, the machine learning community was thrown into disarray when its top minds Yann LeCun, Ali Rahimi and Judea Pearl had a faceoff on the state of artificial intelligence and machine learning. While Rahimi and Pearl tried to tone down the hype around AI, LeCun was aghast over the scepticism around intelligence and causality of the models. Pearl also went on record to say that deep learning was stuck with curve fitting and called it "sacrilege". From the point of view of the mathematical hierarchy, Pearl said that no matter how well the data is manipulated, it's still a curve-fitting exercise. This a very controversial accusation coming from Pearl, who was awarded the ACM Turing Award for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning.