Pedro Domingos

Pedro Domingos (born 1965 in Lisbon) is a Portuguese-American computer scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Washington. A winner of the SIGKDD Innovation Award — data science’s highest honor — he spent decades on core machine-learning research (Markov logic networks, cost-sensitive learning) before reaching a mass audience with “The Master Algorithm” (2015), which framed the quest for a universal learning algorithm as the great scientific adventure of the age.

The happy warrior against doom

Domingos treats AI fear as a category error. He has long argued the Terminator scenario confuses being intelligent with being human, and that dumb, half-working systems — not superintelligence — are what actually cause harm. In a 2018 AEI interview he insisted that machine learning is a technology like any other, adding that there are dangers to guard against but that technology has historically given people more freedom, not less.

He is equally combative toward the AI-ethics establishment as toward the doomers: his X feed is a running polemic against both, a stance that boiled over in a widely covered 2020 clash over NeurIPS review practices and “cancel culture” in machine learning. In 2024 he channeled the critique into “2040: A Silicon Valley Satire,” a comic novel that lampoons the industry’s messiah complexes and panic merchants alike. Critics call him dismissive; he answers that exaggerated fear is itself a harm, because it hands regulation to incumbents and slows real progress.