Becoming a Data Head

CHAPTER 12Conceptualize Deep Learning

“AI is sometimes heralded as the new industrial revolution. If deep learning is the steam engine of this revolution, then data is its coal: the raw material that powers our intelligent machines, without which nothing would be possible.”

—François Chollet, AI researcher and author¹

Congratulations on making it this far. This chapter, in many ways, serves as the climax of your Data Head journey. It's where we weave several pieces together and lay the groundwork to the growing subfield of machine learning called deep learning.

Today, the use of deep learning drives bleeding-edge technologies, and our collective fascination with it is that it can sometimes appear to be all too human. Deep learning comprises the group of technologies that drive facial recognition, autonomous driving, cancer detection, and speech translation. That is, they help drive decisions that were once considered the province of humans. Though, as we'll describe here soon, deep learning is neither new nor as much like the human mind as you might have heard.

That said, much of the excitement, promise, and hype in the data space concerns the potential of deep learning. The business world, unsurprisingly, is investing piles of money to increase deep learning's footprint, and it's poised to impact many industries in the coming years. But as deep learning grows, so does its hype—and often overlooked are the ethical concerns it creates.

In this chapter, we'll reveal the components ...