When Pedro Domingos was growing up in Lisbon, he loved to read and to learn. In fact, when he was 13 years old, he decided that he wanted to learn everything that there is to know. It did not take him long to decide that it might be a little more useful to, instead of knowing everything, to become deeply knowledgeable about a few topics.
His university studies led him to computer science in the 1980s, just as personal computers were beginning to catch on. Today, Pedro is a professor at the University of Washington and the author of The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World. In this book he describes the five schools of thought on machine learning and advocates for a grand unifying theory.
In this episode of the Social Entrepreneur podcast, we discuss:

The benefit of deep expertise in one field of knowledge, when balanced with a broad interests in other fields.
The exponential growth of computer processing power.
The equally explosive growth of software.
The power of algorithms, and how three words, “and, or, not” are changing our world.
How machine learning is a technology that builds itself.
How machine learning becomes culturally acceptable.
Examples of disruptions brought about my machine learning.
The surprising impact of machine learning on knowledge workers.
How the combination of machine learning with robotics is brining machine learning into the physical world.
The business impact of being able to lease machine learning or even find algorithms for free on GitHub.
Where machine learning is going as a practice.

Resources:

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World: http://amzn.to/1PJinUa
Pedro Domingos on the web: http://pedrodomingos.org
Pedro Domingos on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pmddomingos
GitHub: https://github.com
Give Well: http://www.givewell.org
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT: http://www.povertyactionlab.org