In this post we continue our summaries of the NeurIPS invited talks from the 2020 meeting. Here, we cover the talks by Chris Bishop (Microsoft Research) and Saiph Savage (Carnegie Mellon University). Chris began his talk by suggesting that now is a particularly exciting time to be involved in AI. What he termed "the real AI revolution" has nothing to do with artificial general intelligence (AGI), but is driven by the way we create software, and hence new technology. Machine learning is becoming ubiquitous and can be used to solve many problems that cannot, yet, be solved using other methods.

Saiph Savage, director of the human-computer interaction lab at West Virginia University, advocates for the workers who put in the time to develop training data for artificial intelligence. Many of the most successful and widely used machine-learning models are trained with the help of thousands of low-paid gig workers. Millions of people around the world earn money on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, which allow companies and researchers to outsource small tasks to online crowdworkers. According to one estimate, more than a million people in the US alone earn money each month by doing work on these platforms. Around 250,000 of them earn at least three-quarters of their income this way.

Many of the most successful and widely used machine learning models are trained with the help of thousands of low-paid gig workers. Millions of people around the world earn money on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, which allow companies and researchers to outsource small tasks to online crowdworkers. According to one estimate, more than a million people in the US alone earn money each month by doing work on these platforms. Around 250,000 of them earn at least three quarters of their income this way. But despite many working for some of the richest AI labs in the world, they are paid below minimum wage and given no opportunities to develop their skills.

In the early days of research on Artificial Intelligence, Frank Rosenblatt, a scientist at Cornell University in the United States, invented what he called the "perceptron". The perceptron was an algorithm designed to classify objects it was shown and an ancestor of modern Artificial Intelligence. When Rosenblatt became a little boastful at a press conference in 1958, the New York Times picked up on it and went a little overboard with excitement. "NEW NAVY DEVICE LEARNS BY DOING; Psychologist Shows Embryo of Computer Designed to Read and Grow Wiser", read the title of an article. The Navy said the perceptron would be the first non-living mechanism "capable of receiving, recognizing and identifying its surroundings without any human training or control" Does this tone sound familiar?