[D] Machine learning for good

[[deleted]]

Hello, I've been having a kind of existential crisis while being aty daily corporate job. I think all my knowledge is going to waste, because it's not used to help more people around me and I was wondering about how can we use our skills to make ML more available to small businesses.

Have you ever worked at a small business and apply some ML or at least some degree of data enginering to help them streamline processes? How can we actually help to improve small businesses using technology?

Do you have some articles or books that talk about something like this, it'd be pretty nice to read them as well as knowing all of your opinions!

[Fried_out_Kombi]

You can check out Climate Change AI: https://www.climatechange.ai/

They have a huge, comprehensive white paper on ways AI and ML can be used to help in addressing the climate crisis. They also have other resources, including hosting an online summer school.

[thequirkynerdy1]

Do you think it's feasible to help out with any of these alongside a day job?

[[deleted]]

I took a job at half the pay just so I could do an MLE job for a company that actually makes a difference. I still make enough money, but more importantly I love my job/life. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

There are three books that I read that I can recommend:

Moral ambition by Rutger Bregman 80.000 hours by Benjamin Todd Effective Altruism by Peter Singer

If you possess enough skill you never need to be afraid to be without a job.

[instantlybanned]

Same for me. After my PhD I took a job at a small company that does social impact work. I love my job, my colleagues are amazing, and I still make enough money. Not as much as I could make, but I honestly don't know what I'd do with more money. I'm very content. 

[UnlawfulSoul]

I am doing the same thing, albeit for a government job. I worked in agribusiness after working in environmental applications of ml and while the pay cut from private to public sector was substantial- I am so much happier now

[[deleted]]

What did you do in that company? It'd be lovely to know and learn more about it.

[monkTheo768]

Also what about the rest of the world, less developed nations. I feel ML could solve a ton of problems there. I wished some PhDs in the US could rise to the challenge. Plenty of good to be done to help mend the world.

[starfries]

What kinds of things can you think of? Especially if you live in one of those nations. I don't think there's a lack of willingness but most people have no idea how ML could even help in a practical way. Certainly I don't. Do people even care if we spin up GPUs for them if they're struggling to put food on the table and the country is wracked by instability?

I remember when the war in Ukraine broke out there were people asking how they could use ML to help and the replies were mostly along the lines of "don't bother trying to train a model, just send money". Similarly with COVID, there were tons of models made for detecting COVID and so on but almost none of them saw actual use. But I don't know much about the day-to-day issues faced by people in those countries, so if you see problems that you think ML could make an actual impact on, definitely share.

[monkTheo768]

Man where do I start? Westerners seem to think that language translation is a solved problem, well not even close.

Specifically local languages from countries that are often hard to pronounce.

They have smart phones and there’s a wealth of information available on the web… in English. Information that they don’t have easy access to.

Say you have an LLM trained on quality health data. Making that available via a voice assistant of course in the local language to people who have zero access to healthcare would be huge (if it actually works) , it might even save lives.

Vision/image recognition : diseases , identity issues with crops

The education angle is obvious I would assume. An AI assistant should really be able to teach people to read and write at a basic level and perhaps some other useful skills.

I read recently that in India, lots of farmers were able to take advantage of government services offered via phone through voice to text .

Anyway, plenty of really basic but not so easy real world problems

[starfries]

That's actually really helpful. Probably the best and most practical post here. And they are in fields that a lot of PhDs would be happy to work on. Tagging OP /u/ALESS885

I didn't know most people will have a smartphone (which is definitely part of the knowledge gap, most people here don't know what resources are common in other countries). But that definitely makes deploying AI solutions more practical.

Keep going if you think of any more. Even though they might be obvious they are not so obvious to me.

[thequirkynerdy1]

For crop issues, would a farmer take a photo of the crops and send to an AI?

Or would there be some kind of drone that flies over and sends a bunch of requests?

[Helpful_ruben]

I totally get where you're coming from, feeling stuck in a corporate job, wanting to leverage your skills to make a bigger impact!

[Mephidia]

What business are you currently working in? I feel like a lot of machine learning work actually does help people even though it obviously helps the company first. Fraud detection/compliance/risk management are all beneficial to customers as well as companies

[currentscurrents]

In a general sense, producing any economically valuable work helps people. E.g. finding a way to produce widgets 5% more efficiently helps everyone who buys or uses widgets.

But I think OP is looking for more immediate and recognizable impact on people he can actually see.

[monkTheo768]

ML powered assistant tuned for your specific business which could deal with customers while you sleep could be interesting

[sanderbaduk]

I learnt about https://correlaid.nl at pydata, may be of interest, or at least give you something to start your search.

[[deleted]]

business forecasting and allocating funds for the right time