Judea Pearl: Causal Reasoning, Counterfactuals, Bayesian Networks, and the Path to AGI

Judea Pearl is a professor at UCLA and a winner of the Turing Award, that’s generally recognized as the Nobel Prize of computing. He is one of the seminal figures in the field of artificial intelligence, computer science, and statistics. He has developed and championed probabilistic approaches to AI, including Bayesian Networks and profound ideas in causality in general. These ideas are important not just for AI, but to our understanding and practice of science. But in the field of AI, the idea of causality, cause and effect, to many, lies at the core of what is currently missing and what must be developed in order to build truly intelligent systems. For this reason, and many others, his work is worth returning to often. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts or support it on Patreon. This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”.  Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. 00:00 – Introduction 03:18 – Descartes and analytic geometry 06:25 – Good way to teach math 07:10 – From math to engineering 09:14 – Does God play dice? 10:47 – Free will 11:59 – Probability 22:21 – Machine learning 23:13 – Causal Networks 27:48 – Intelligent systems that reason with causation 29:29 – Do(x) operator 36:57 – Counterfactuals 44:12 – Reasoning by Metaphor 51:15 – Machine learning and causal reasoning 53:28 – Temporal aspect of causation 56:21 – Machine learning (continued) 59:15 – Human-level artificial intelligence 1:04:08 – Consciousness 1:04:31 – Concerns about AGI 1:09:53 – Religion and robotics 1:12:07 – Daniel Pearl 1:19:09 – Advice for students 1:21:00 – Legacy