When it comes to AI research the West is winning, the East is rising and women are being left behind The US and Europe might be top dogs in machine learning at the moment, but the East is catching up fast, helped by massive government spending. That's one of the key findings the second annual AI Index, a compendium that empirically tracks how AI research is progressing over time. The organization tracks research papers, …
Pick a topic, any topic, and you will almost certainly see that researchers in the West are publishing the most, and most influentually as judged by citations (not least because English is, in many cases, their first language) but the East is catching up and it is mostly men in senior positions.
Where's the quantifiable metric for "Does it work?".
"On average, a whopping 80 per cent of AI professors are male in top universities across US and Europe. Applications for AI-related jobs in America were more likely to be made by men, as they made up about 71 per cent of the application pool."
So, increase publicity, remove impediments (which are...?) but what's the "right answer"? 50:50? 80:20 in favour of women? Who decides? What about the Welsh?
There IS no right answer. That's the whole point of the whinging. There'll always be something to whinge about. The pay gap is (nearly) non existent and generally women have every opportunity to make it into any role they want in the western world. On average they seem to just choose not to.
but what's the "right answer"?
Women must be forced, against their will, to enter these positions whereupon the mixture will be a more pleasing 50:50, but all said women will be miserable doing things they don't want to instead.
So the gender-mongers will have that to bang on about instead.
The right answer to to roll your eyes at such 'research' and then ignore them. Then they'll accuse you of being indifferent.
Kafka-trap. You're in one, and you can't get out.
When we have sorted out genuine human stupidity then feel free to embark on artificial intelligence.
Until then, I would much rather see professorships for the Advanced Study of Causes of Human Unintelligence, than everyone whining about how they are not getting an equal share in the AI/ML casserole of dreams.
.. even if they are Welsh.
Diversity in AI has always been pretty poor and the field has attempted to fix this and lots of different support groups like Women in Machine Learning (WiML), AI4ALL, and Black in AI have popped up to increase outreach. But it’s still heavily dominated by men.
So what? It's a career choice anyone with enough brains can freely choose to make and enter. If the people freely choosing to do so are predominantly straight white men, then so what? Contrary to the emotive nonsense spaffed all over the media these days, balls are not a birth defect and nor is white skin.
On average, a whopping 80 per cent of AI professors are male in top universities across US and Europe. Applications for AI-related jobs in America were more likely to be made by men, as they made up about 71 per cent of the application pool.
So its clear then that the blame for this situation lies with the women not applying for these jobs?
It’s not all bad news, however.
It's not actually bad news at all. People are free to choose what education they want and which career to persue. If any given career choice is predominnatly made by one subgroup of the population, then so what?
My career success has come as a direct result of my own efforts. It hasn't disadvantaged anyone at any step of the way. I'm tired of being protrayed in the media as some sort of pantomine villain, just because I didn't give my job to a one legged black lesbian, whether she wanted it or not.
The Register used to publish far less emotive and far better reasoned articles than this. What is going wrong?
Comparing Socialist* countries corporate and government spending vs Capitalist countries corporate and government spending and drawing conclusions from the categories seems to stretch credulity. Though hey I guess its the sort of error a western data trained machine learning model would make so bonus points for that.
(* or whatever label you care to put on China)
Applications for AI-related jobs in America were more likely to be made by men, as they made up about 71 per cent of the application pool.
Err... That is less than the ration men to women in CS jobs in USA. It was > 75% if memory serves me right. 70% is more diverse than anything in the areas which became prominent in the late 90-es like computer networking, embedded software, etc. There you are looking at 85%+
So actually, by that metric AI is more diverse than most of CS.
Give the end game of AI research is to create an intelligence that is smarter than any human, as electronic computer are able to out count a human computer, an AI singularity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity) is possibly little more than a decade away, when Turing complete Professors (after a semantic shift) are as common and cheap as Turing Complete Computers are today. Then no genitals will be necessary for the evolution of the field.
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