7 ms·

Your proposal has the exact opposite problem - the AI experts are incentivized to not make two much waves regarding the dangers, because that would endanger the

by 21 9y ago

Your proposal has the exact opposite problem - the AI experts are incentivized to not make two much waves regarding the dangers, because that would endanger the field (and money invested in it). Thus we get quotes from them like "overpopulation on Mars"

aje403 9y ago
This doesn't make any sense. Why are you lumping AI experts into a group? I'm trying to picture if the government went around to all highly qualifying AI PhDs asking them if they would like to join a prominent ethics panel to guide and aid in AI ethics regulation in industry. So, you're claiming they're going to decline that or accept and sabotage under the assumption that they're a. all members of a giant AI consortium and b. any ethics regulation is going to destroy their industry? As bad of an example as this is - look at other industries. Banking officials in government who set banking policies come from the finance industry. While this certainly has its problems and how they get there comes into question, they actually understand the industry they're regulating.
- 21 9y ago
  I didn't say forbid AI PhDs to work on ethics. I just say that an AI PhD shouldn't be a requirement. We already have an ethics discipline. This is an ethics problem. Do you also propose that for example self-driving cars accidents should be investigated by AI PhDs which worked on self-driving cars algorithms, and they should be the ones proposing regulations? Are you saying that a regular "car accident specialist" is ill equipped to handle these, and it's opinions aren't as valuable because he's an expert in "human car accidents" not "AI car accidents"?
  - aje403 9y ago
    Frankly, I think it should be. Extremely bright and educated people who have worked with the technology as an executive in a professional or educational/research setting. There is a legal term for what you are describing - it is called "conflict of interest". No, I do not think professionals should be involved in making decisions in matters in which they have a conflict of interest. Not all AI researchers are stakeholders in Uber, Waymo, or Tesla, hence you would select those people to investigate, as you would analogously do in any other matter of human affairs. In fact, I'll go a step further and say that an "AI specialist" should be working alongside a "car accident specialist" and "laywers". I am arguing that this is a better combination than "Ethics specialist", "car accident specialist" and "lawyers" to investigate the accident.
    - 21 9y ago
      > Not all AI researchers are stakeholders in Uber, Waymo, or Tesla, hence you would select those people to investigate Think if this would work in finance: asking JP Morgan people to investigate the Barclays Libor scandal. Smart people understand that a scandal against one of their peers will taint them also. Do you hear today Google/Amazon/.... or other big private data hoarders makeing noise against Facebook? The one which spoke, Apple, doesn't have and rely on private data as much. I would say that a serious ethics panel would have opposed the way Facebook handles private data, in a way that engineers working on them don't. Because engineers didn't study ethical/political problems of the past, and they don't understand how being lax with this can cause harm. BTW, in all universities, doing studies on humans/animals requires first getting approval from an Ethics comitee. Googling now a bit I see that they have people from all faculties - Engineering, Humanities, Law, ... So universities, which give those AI PhDs consider that it's valuable to have a diverse ethics panel, not just one composed of Engineering professors if they meet to discuss an engineering experiment ethics.
      - aje403 9y ago
        Actually, that's literally exactly what happens in finance, as I stated earlier. People leave JP Morgan or Goldman for a comfy position at the SEC and maintain their close friendships. Edit: and unfortunately, it does make sense, as unfortunate as that is Further, comparing the reactions of large companies with divergent interests to scandals is only tangentially relevant; that does not imply anything meaningful of the bias of hiring autonomous individuals from divergent backgrounds in AI; they do not all work on autonomous cars or <sell your data> at Big N. Finance has different social conventions as well. "engineers didn't study ethical/political problems of the past, and they don't understand how being lax with this can cause harm" - I would wager that the average CS professor at a top school is significantly more well-read in history, ethics, and many other subjects than the "AI Ethics major" being proposed. But okay, let's set up an AI McCarthy panel with "experts", we'll get bored of Trump scandals on TV eventually.
        21 9y ago
        > Average CS professor at a top school is significantly more well-read in history, ethics, and many other subjects than the "AI Ethics major" This sounds like the jokes of when a plumber comes in to fix the pipes of a physicist, and the physicist is like "Whats so hard here? It's just basic physics"
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> Thus we get quotes from them like "overpopulation on Mars" Context, please? :)
- 21 9y ago
  https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/19/andrew_ng_baidu_ai/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/19/andrew_ng_baidu_ai/
- gowld 9y ago
  Andrew Ng: https://www.google.com/search?q="overpopulation+on+Mars" https://www.google.com/search?q="overpopulation+on+Mars"
- sgt101 9y ago
  The point being that AGI is at least 50 years and probably 200 years or more away. It is such a distant threat and yet such a focus, and all the while we sit in our lovely apartments 40 minutes from nuclear incineration.
  - bllguo 9y ago
    yeah clearly Dr. Ng was addressing fears of AGI in that quote. Thing is that machine learning can be used for nefarious purposes, intentionally or even unintentionally, without AGI being a reality. Those are more realistic fears the conflation of machine learning and AGI causes confusion yet again..
    - sgt101 9y ago
      Agree - I think that your point of the use of the tool rather than the tool itself being of sole concern is really important. Clearly devices (like Nukes) that can kill thousands must be regulated tightly, but to extend the same level of control to the whole technology makes applications (like medical scanners using nuclear tech) that are of great benefit potentially untenable.
  - Houshalter 9y ago
btilly 9y ago
Re-read it. I did not say that AI expertise by itself was enough. And I did not say that nothing should happen. I said that people whose expertise is in being experts on what others should do are going to not do a good job. Let's take a concrete recent example. http://time.com/5209144/google-search-engine-algorithm-bias-racism/ http://time.com/5209144/google-search-engine-algorithm-bias-... decries how Google search results are racist and are biased against black girls. It is written by someone whose background is clearly not machine learning, but who qualifies as an expert in the ethics of machine learning. She has a PhD, tenure at a well-regarded university, and a book on the subject. While her article complains about the results of machine learning algorithms, and how horrible they are, she said nothing that showed an understanding of how they actually work. Why they produce the results that they do. Her diagnosis is that Google is a racist and sexist company. Her proposed solution is that Silicon Valley companies should be forced to hire blacks, and particularly black women, for the express purpose of keeping companies accountable for their racist environments. The truth is that Google's internal environment is neither racist nor sexist - quite the opposite in fact. The actual problem is in the data available to Google of what people click on. How you can modify the algorithm to be slanted towards socially acceptable results is a tricky problem that requires a CS background. How you can modify the incentives so that companies are motivated to produce good results is an even more tricky problem. Yet if she got to create the regulations, what would happen? We would literally get a requirement to hire politically correct thought police! How well do you think that would work?
- gridaphobe 9y ago
  Can you point to where the author recommended that Google and co. be forced to hire black women (or any identity group for that matter)? What she did say is that it's not surprising that Google search produces biased results, given that minorities are underrepresented and topics like ethics are barely discussed in engineering schools. It sounds to me like she is attempting to raise awareness of a systemic issue in the tech industry, which requires no qualifications other than knowledge of the issue.
  - spc476 9y ago
    > This is no surprise when black women are not employed in any significant numbers at Google. Not only are African Americans underemployed at Google, Facebook, Snapchat and other popular technology companies as computer programmers, but also jobs that could employ the expertise of people who understand the ramifications of racist and sexist stereotyping and misrepresentation and that require undergraduate and advanced degrees in ethnic, Black/African American, women and gender, American Indian, or Asian American studies do not exist. > We need people designing technologies for society to have training and an education on the histories of marginalized people, at a minimum, and we need them working alongside people with rigorous training and preparation from the social sciences and humanities. To design technology for people, without a detailed and rigorous study of people and communities, makes for the many kinds of egregious tech designs we see that come at the expense of people of color and women. So perhaps not a direct call to hire minorities, but a direct call to hire people versed in identity politics and various non-white studies.

by 21 9y ago

aje403 9y ago

This doesn't make any sense. Why are you lumping AI experts into a group? I'm trying to picture if the government went around to all highly qualifying AI PhDs asking them if they would like to join a prominent ethics panel to guide and aid in AI ethics regulation in industry. So, you're claiming they're going to decline that or accept and sabotage under the assumption that they're a. all members of a giant AI consortium and b. any ethics regulation is going to destroy their industry? As bad of an example as this is - look at other industries. Banking officials in government who set banking policies come from the finance industry. While this certainly has its problems and how they get there comes into question, they actually understand the industry they're regulating.

21 9y ago
I didn't say forbid AI PhDs to work on ethics. I just say that an AI PhD shouldn't be a requirement. We already have an ethics discipline. This is an ethics problem. Do you also propose that for example self-driving cars accidents should be investigated by AI PhDs which worked on self-driving cars algorithms, and they should be the ones proposing regulations? Are you saying that a regular "car accident specialist" is ill equipped to handle these, and it's opinions aren't as valuable because he's an expert in "human car accidents" not "AI car accidents"?
- aje403 9y ago
  Frankly, I think it should be. Extremely bright and educated people who have worked with the technology as an executive in a professional or educational/research setting. There is a legal term for what you are describing - it is called "conflict of interest". No, I do not think professionals should be involved in making decisions in matters in which they have a conflict of interest. Not all AI researchers are stakeholders in Uber, Waymo, or Tesla, hence you would select those people to investigate, as you would analogously do in any other matter of human affairs. In fact, I'll go a step further and say that an "AI specialist" should be working alongside a "car accident specialist" and "laywers". I am arguing that this is a better combination than "Ethics specialist", "car accident specialist" and "lawyers" to investigate the accident.
  - 21 9y ago
    > Not all AI researchers are stakeholders in Uber, Waymo, or Tesla, hence you would select those people to investigate Think if this would work in finance: asking JP Morgan people to investigate the Barclays Libor scandal. Smart people understand that a scandal against one of their peers will taint them also. Do you hear today Google/Amazon/.... or other big private data hoarders makeing noise against Facebook? The one which spoke, Apple, doesn't have and rely on private data as much. I would say that a serious ethics panel would have opposed the way Facebook handles private data, in a way that engineers working on them don't. Because engineers didn't study ethical/political problems of the past, and they don't understand how being lax with this can cause harm. BTW, in all universities, doing studies on humans/animals requires first getting approval from an Ethics comitee. Googling now a bit I see that they have people from all faculties - Engineering, Humanities, Law, ... So universities, which give those AI PhDs consider that it's valuable to have a diverse ethics panel, not just one composed of Engineering professors if they meet to discuss an engineering experiment ethics.
    - aje403 9y ago
      Actually, that's literally exactly what happens in finance, as I stated earlier. People leave JP Morgan or Goldman for a comfy position at the SEC and maintain their close friendships. Edit: and unfortunately, it does make sense, as unfortunate as that is Further, comparing the reactions of large companies with divergent interests to scandals is only tangentially relevant; that does not imply anything meaningful of the bias of hiring autonomous individuals from divergent backgrounds in AI; they do not all work on autonomous cars or <sell your data> at Big N. Finance has different social conventions as well. "engineers didn't study ethical/political problems of the past, and they don't understand how being lax with this can cause harm" - I would wager that the average CS professor at a top school is significantly more well-read in history, ethics, and many other subjects than the "AI Ethics major" being proposed. But okay, let's set up an AI McCarthy panel with "experts", we'll get bored of Trump scandals on TV eventually.
      - 21 9y ago
        > Average CS professor at a top school is significantly more well-read in history, ethics, and many other subjects than the "AI Ethics major" This sounds like the jokes of when a plumber comes in to fix the pipes of a physicist, and the physicist is like "Whats so hard here? It's just basic physics"

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> Thus we get quotes from them like "overpopulation on Mars" Context, please? :)

21 9y ago
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/19/andrew_ng_baidu_ai/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/19/andrew_ng_baidu_ai/
gowld 9y ago
Andrew Ng: https://www.google.com/search?q="overpopulation+on+Mars" https://www.google.com/search?q="overpopulation+on+Mars"
sgt101 9y ago
The point being that AGI is at least 50 years and probably 200 years or more away. It is such a distant threat and yet such a focus, and all the while we sit in our lovely apartments 40 minutes from nuclear incineration.
- bllguo 9y ago
  yeah clearly Dr. Ng was addressing fears of AGI in that quote. Thing is that machine learning can be used for nefarious purposes, intentionally or even unintentionally, without AGI being a reality. Those are more realistic fears the conflation of machine learning and AGI causes confusion yet again..
  - sgt101 9y ago
    Agree - I think that your point of the use of the tool rather than the tool itself being of sole concern is really important. Clearly devices (like Nukes) that can kill thousands must be regulated tightly, but to extend the same level of control to the whole technology makes applications (like medical scanners using nuclear tech) that are of great benefit potentially untenable.
- Houshalter 9y ago

btilly 9y ago

Re-read it. I did not say that AI expertise by itself was enough. And I did not say that nothing should happen. I said that people whose expertise is in being experts on what others should do are going to not do a good job. Let's take a concrete recent example. http://time.com/5209144/google-search-engine-algorithm-bias-racism/ http://time.com/5209144/google-search-engine-algorithm-bias-... decries how Google search results are racist and are biased against black girls. It is written by someone whose background is clearly not machine learning, but who qualifies as an expert in the ethics of machine learning. She has a PhD, tenure at a well-regarded university, and a book on the subject. While her article complains about the results of machine learning algorithms, and how horrible they are, she said nothing that showed an understanding of how they actually work. Why they produce the results that they do. Her diagnosis is that Google is a racist and sexist company. Her proposed solution is that Silicon Valley companies should be forced to hire blacks, and particularly black women, for the express purpose of keeping companies accountable for their racist environments. The truth is that Google's internal environment is neither racist nor sexist - quite the opposite in fact. The actual problem is in the data available to Google of what people click on. How you can modify the algorithm to be slanted towards socially acceptable results is a tricky problem that requires a CS background. How you can modify the incentives so that companies are motivated to produce good results is an even more tricky problem. Yet if she got to create the regulations, what would happen? We would literally get a requirement to hire politically correct thought police! How well do you think that would work?

gridaphobe 9y ago
Can you point to where the author recommended that Google and co. be forced to hire black women (or any identity group for that matter)? What she did say is that it's not surprising that Google search produces biased results, given that minorities are underrepresented and topics like ethics are barely discussed in engineering schools. It sounds to me like she is attempting to raise awareness of a systemic issue in the tech industry, which requires no qualifications other than knowledge of the issue.
- spc476 9y ago
  > This is no surprise when black women are not employed in any significant numbers at Google. Not only are African Americans underemployed at Google, Facebook, Snapchat and other popular technology companies as computer programmers, but also jobs that could employ the expertise of people who understand the ramifications of racist and sexist stereotyping and misrepresentation and that require undergraduate and advanced degrees in ethnic, Black/African American, women and gender, American Indian, or Asian American studies do not exist. > We need people designing technologies for society to have training and an education on the histories of marginalized people, at a minimum, and we need them working alongside people with rigorous training and preparation from the social sciences and humanities. To design technology for people, without a detailed and rigorous study of people and communities, makes for the many kinds of egregious tech designs we see that come at the expense of people of color and women. So perhaps not a direct call to hire minorities, but a direct call to hire people versed in identity politics and various non-white studies.