Machine learning is fundamentally conservative
Examples are good and on point, the conclusion is not. When he tries to frame it all in some grand political&#x2F;quasi-philosophical manner, it becomes outright wrong and stupid, but I won&#x27;t argue with that part, because it won&#x27;t be useful to anyone.<p>What I want to point out is that nothing he says should be attributed specifically to &quot;machine learning&quot;. Machine learning is a set of techniques to make inferences from data automatically, but there is no implicit restriction on what the inferences should be. So machine learning is not &quot;conservative&quot; — almost all popular applications of it are. There is no inherent reason why an ML-algorithm should suggest the most similar videos to the ones you watched recently. The same way you can use (say) association learning to find most common item sets, you can use it to find the least common item sets with the given item, and recommend them instead. Or anything in between. But application designers usually choose the less creative option to recommend (understandably so) stuff similar to what you already got.<p>Sometimes it&#x27;s ok: if the most popular thing to ask somebody to sit on nowadays is &quot;my face&quot; it&#x27;s only logical to advice that, I see nothing wrong with this application. But many internet shops indeed could benefit from considering what a user has already bought (from this very shop), because it isn&#x27;t likely he will want to buy a second similar, but different TV anytime soon. Or, when recommending a movie, you could try to optimize for something different than &quot;the most popular stuff watched by people that watched a lot of stuff you did watch&quot; — which is a &quot;safe&quot; thing to recommend, but at the same time not really interesting. Of course, finding another sensible approach is a lot of work, but it doesn&#x27;t mean there isn&#x27;t one: maybe it could be &quot;a movie with unusually high score given by somebody, who also highly rated a number of movies you rated higher than the average&quot;.