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Mozilla Announces $225,000 for Art and Advocacy Exploring A.I.
- jacquesm 8y agoHow does a project like this relate to Mozilla's core mission? I understand that it may be useful but this is far outside of what I would expect Mozilla to spend its funds on.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- iicc 8y agohttps://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ >Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
- alter_eco123 8y ago> Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. How do they think they'll accomplish that, short of taking over the world's governments? Hipsters gonna hips. It looks like they've got too much money too, despite being dependent on Google's handouts for survival.
- dmix 8y agoFrom Mozilla's blog post describing the project: > We’re awarding $225,000 to technologists and media makers who help the public understand how threats to a healthy internet affect their everyday lives. > In a world where biased algorithms, skewed data sets, and broken recommendation engines can radicalize YouTube users, promote racism, and spread fake news, it’s more important than ever to support artwork and advocacy work that educates and engages internet users. I guess that's somewhat related to their mission. Although they seem to be taking on more of an activism / PR role with this project. My guess is that it's largely people within Mozilla responding to the popular outrage against Russian 'bots', fake news, and the alt-right.
- cadecairos 8y agoThe Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation have vastly different budgets and staff, and have very different ways of supporting the same mission. The Foundation focuses on advocacy and movement building around internet related topics (i.e. Privacy & Security, Digital Inclusion), while the Corporation focuses mainly on Firefox, Research projects (Rust, WASM, WebVR), standards work, and other "product" related things. (source: I'm a Mozilla Foundation staff member)
- stewbrew 8y ago"... to help art and advocacy projects ..." Why not (serious) social science projects? Don't have today's sociologists have anything to say about this or do they need a few more decades for warm up.
- ASpring 8y agoI would argue that we are at a point where it's more important to raise awareness of the dangers of algorithmic bias and other AI issues because the public is not aware of them. Art is provocative and fits this role nicely. To answer your question directly though, there is "serious" work like that from people like Veale and Skirpan; also orgs like AI Now are very serious about this area.
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoThis would roughly fund 1-2 technical staff to work on one project for one year. Probably just 1 staff if the project involves statistical methodology work, data collection, and modeling to empirically assess society impacts rather than writing yet another safe AI / AGI risk essay. Not a normative judgment, just thinking about what people think this labor costs vs. what it actually costs.
- blackbrokkoli 8y agoRight, but the open-source community might be involved as well - maybe the money is more about promoting e.g. a platform than paying individual staff
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoYes, that is a good counterpoint.
- iicc 8y agoBetter link: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/06/04/mozilla-announces-225000-for-art-and-advocacy-exploring-artificial-intelligence/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/06/04/mozilla-announces-2...
- sctb 8y agoThanks! We've updated the submission from https://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-announces-225000-for-projects-examining-ais-effects-on-society https://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-announces-225000-for-pro....
- bgorman 8y agoMozilla can't afford to throw its money away on projects like this if it wants to stay relevant. This is two/three engineers salary for a year.
- ASpring 8y agoThis is little more than 1 engineer's salary and benefits for a year. Can you explain how this is Mozilla "throw[ing] its money away"?
- lucb1e 8y agoIf for that money one can get only one manyear in the bay area due to the cost of living, wouldn't it make much more sense to hire 4 people for a year elsewhere?
- staticassertion 8y agoIt seems obviously more complicated than that, otherwise the bay area wouldn't be what it is.
- lucb1e 8y agoFor companies that are physically there, but afaik Mozilla is quite spread out and people work remotely most of the time.
- bzbarsky 8y agoMozilla has both multiple offices and remote employees. So do various other companies with significant physical presences in the Bay Area (Google and Facebook come to mind).
- newfocogi 8y agoI would guess it is closer to the cost of 1 engineer, maybe below. Conservative estimate of the average engineer at a company in the bay area is above 100K in cash compensation plus the cost multiplier of an employee is easily 2x once you account for benefits and other employer costs.
- tmpz22 8y agoThis is a really important study that should be conducted by an organization with a strong engineering culture and as little bias as possible. Who would be better then Mozilla to do this? I really don't trust academia to do this with all of its misplaced incentives.
- Maybestring 8y agoThis isn't money for studies, it's money for digital art projects.
- forapurpose 8y ago> I really don't trust academia to do this with all of its misplaced incentives. We've really learned to repeat the anti-'academia' meme. There is no "academia"; Mozilla is an organization; "academia" is millions of people around the world in every place and environment imaginable. It's absurd to assume all these people are the same or coordinated somehow. Given the absurdity, one might ask: Who would be interested in discrediting everything produced by every college and university?
- trumped 8y agoSomeone needs to do it... thanks Mozilla
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- s-shellfish 8y agoWhile I believe there are real dangers AI can cause, I don't know how you'd go about proving such a thing without recreating the problem in a different constructed variant. Psychology and sociology are 'soft' sciences because you can't test people psychologically and sociologically in 'hard' ways without seriously crossing some serious ethical boundaries. It could be argued that a lot of the decisions being made that back the design in contemporary infrastructures already are engaged in this sort of testing and behavioral modification, in ways that seem innocent from the onset, but yet still propagate across social systems in ways that are far too chaotic and complex to forecast.
- Retric 8y ago"While AI will no doubt have countless benefits for people, and already is beneficial in a lot of cases" I think this is less about AGI/ full AI than it is about learning systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc... That said, the impact of this stuff especially in the context of the web is both profound and evolving.
- s-shellfish 8y agoTrained algorithms, even if they are not designed for directed impact, can be manipulated via data fed into them to have a targeted impact. To be trained is to have bias.
- emiliobumachar 8y agoProving to a high standard of proof would indeed be very hard. But a lot of useful Science can be done by observing, documenting, cataloging and explaining the effects of AI being already inflicted on us.
- s-shellfish 8y agoI don't know if I would use the word 'inflict' when one is inferring intents. I think if there were more transparency concerning these systems and their affiliated organizations, that would obviate the need to add another layer of reasoning, which would reduce the number of unknowns, rather than increase. Of course, that requires cooperation and trust. Which brings one back to the question of intents. Which can conflate intents meant to 'inflict' (harm?) or intents meant to grow, develop, inspire, progress.
- SolaceQuantum 8y agoIf anyone is interested I would recommend Alexandra Meliou. She does research at UMass and her work explores making data and large data manipulation more transparent, and also therefore does some amount in quantifying bias and diversity. I attended a talk by her and it was very enlightening. http://people.cs.umass.edu/~ameli/ http://people.cs.umass.edu/~ameli/
- eklavya 8y agoWhy is Mozilla investing in this study? It’s a good cause but should Mozilla be the one doing this? I feel bad when they are doing this but I still can’t use Firefox on macOS because they won’t implement support for keychain and then they go ahead and stretch themselves thin on these things. I mean it’s all good and fine but please also focus on the one thing you are supposed to be doing primarily. Disclaimer: I donate to Firefox.
- minitel 8y agoAs much as I love firefox, I'm sad to say that the executives who run Mozilla Corp are of a self-serving variety. Not in terms of material greed so much as in terms of craving social status. It's apparent in their meetings if you watch and listen. What I mean to say is, the people in charge of the purse strings are chasing after ego boosting "social good" type stuff over improving the tech and improving the internet. Stuff that will grab a few headlines and make them feel warm and fuzzy when they tell people about "their" company at dinner parties. The rank and file employees are some of the most awesome people on the planet though.
- maxerickson 8y agoThis is a rounding error in their budget. They have $500 million in revenues. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/
- eklavya 8y agoWhat would be the excuse to flat out ignore all those desperate user requests then? Issue list: https://github.com/jfitzell/mozilla-keychain/issues/88#issuecomment-332331685 https://github.com/jfitzell/mozilla-keychain/issues/88#issue...
- Spivak 8y ago"Why is an organization spending their money on things that I personally don't care about? Large groups of people can only do ever one thing at a time and problems can always be solved faster by throwing money at them."
- binnesjohn 8y agoMozilla please, focus only your browser and your firebird email client. Leave all other garbage alone, please.
- Proven 8y agoI wish it was a bit more specific - such as AI’s effects on transgender people, the disadvantaged and so on.
- andrewclunn 8y agoModern Hatred This corruption we've sown has now taken root in a void of trust. What's growing there? The fight against hatred looks like hate to me. Define acceptable enemies. Prejudices of the past have been defaced, so new ones form to take their place. Outrage gone viral. Social disease. Save us from ourselves, algorithms please. Attacks of anonymous authorship. Suppressed voices decry censorship. And it's rubbing off on me: this modern sort of hatred. Where calls for unity are really calls to blame: attempts to silence and to shame. Dissenting voices we hoped to render mute, that we wished we'd crushed. Am I one of them? We "the people" united for the cause. But did no one else here think to pause and question if the cause is just? Tribe loyalty our proxy for trust. Black and blue. Who matters? Which lives? Circled wagons on all sides. What we oppose is how we're defined. The price of safety is to toe the line. And it's rubbing off on me: this modern form of hatred. Now virtue is an act to be signaled and seen. Social capital is currency. Those villains we thought we'd crushed under boots into ash and dust. Are they really gone? Right and wrong sides of history. Are there consequences we cannot foresee? Does asking that make me the enemy? Empty rhetoric and sophistry. The backlash is the truth no one can hide. Institutions, leaders, and "experts" tried. No one believes the noble lie anymore. Tabula Rasa lies broken on the floor. And it's rubbing off on me: this brand of modern hatred. When justice is only meant for peoples, does the individual become evil? The hope we had for a world of peace and truth left to die and rust. Are those two at odds? And it's rubbing off on me: this brave new modern hatred. Not everything is beautiful that's true: the darkness within me and you.
- mankash666 8y agoThis is an unpopular opinion here, but the facts stand. Mozilla makes money disappear. Their 2016 revenues were in excess of $520M, and their claimed output was the Quantum browser. The two largest R&D verticals seem to be their browser and the codecs group. That still doesn't account for expenses of $520M in 2016, and much much more in 2017. Where is all the money going, Mozilla?
- microcolonel 8y agoIdeologically driven corruption, just like the corporate money, the university money, and the budgets of most major cities. ;- ) A similar thing could be happening to Wikimedia Foundation's finances.
- Immortalin 8y agoBrowser engineers aren't exactly cheap. 250k for a good C++ Dev is reasonable. Assuming 100 engineers (a very conservative estimate), that's 25 million in just pay alone. 50 million including codec. Now add in the costs of infrastructure, community engagement, DevOps, Marketing etc. and the costs will quickly balloon. Browsers are critical infrastructure like operating systems. Their complexity is on the same level as OSes, perhaps even more. It's exposed to hostile code everyday, you don't want people who don't know what they are doing to work on it. This isn't some sort of dating app where the only vulnerability you have to worry about is a code injection in the birthday form field.
- raverbashing 8y agoYeah, but you're not going to have every one of those 100 earning 250k/yr. Half of that for some, 1/3 for some others would be a more realistic value
- mankash666 8y agoSo the true benefit (to the community) is about $50M +- 10%. Heck, let's double it and call it $100M. The remaining expenses are fluff. In a corporation, one wouldn't be allowed to have non-essential expenses far exceed essential ones. In a non-profit, this philosophy needs doubling down on. I might be completely wrong, but Mozilla seems to be subsidizing the whims of a corrupt few at the top.
- s2g 8y agoAI can't create Art.