Judea Pearl, longtime ASA member, was recognized as a leader shaping the future of artificial intelligence.
the book of why
Judea Pearl, AI, and Causality: What Role Do Statisticians Play?
In the first half of 2023, the machine learning programs ChatGPT and GPT-4 changed the landscape of artificial intelligence research seemingly overnight. Judea Pearl’s research bridges the subjects of statistics and artificial intelligence and highlights the importance of causality in both settings. Dana Mackenzie, Pearl’s co-author for The Book of Why, interviews him here to get his take on recent developments. When they wrote their book in 2018, Pearl contended machine learning had not yet moved past the first rung of the “ladder of causation.” Computers could not correctly answer queries about interventions and still less about counterfactual scenarios. Has his assessment changed?
Judea Pearl
Judea Pearl is a Turing Award Winner, and author of “The Book of Why,” which has been described as the democratization of causal inference.