For all the research advances in machine learning, it certainly feels like the rewards are still collected by a select group of large tech companies based in traditional tech giant countries (US, China, etc). Furthermore, a large portion of our best ML engineers and scientists are working on systems with the primary objective of manipulating targeted audiences through advertising and social media. To me, this feels like a failing of our community when the same advanced models and techniques could be making a direct impact on climate change or development schemes.

I’m interested in what the community thinks about this. Are we locked in this cycle where we are left hoping that advances in machine learning trickle down to less profitable, but maybe more crucial, problems or is there a systematic change that we can make to democratize these techniques so that we see real world impact on lives globally?

I haven’t found much reading on this topic from within our field recently, so if there are any interesting articles about this, that would be appreciated!