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- avoid implicit/explicit biases - respect privacy of individuals - avoid personal identification Overall don’t do anything with AI that is ethically wrong t

- avoid implicit/explicit biases - respect privacy of individuals - avoid personal identification Overall don’t do anything with AI that is ethically wrong to do it by other means (for example, you can replace AI with expensive human labor to do it).

anonytrary 8y ago
> Overall don’t do anything with AI that is ethically wrong to do it by other means (for example, you can replace AI with expensive human labor to do it) Not sure I understand what you mean -- can you explain this?
- joshuamorton 8y ago
  If I understand correctly, he's saying "if it would be unethical if executed by a human, it's unethical if done by a machine". Depending on where you draw the line here, things like military applications, insurance price calculation, or drawing convincing Photoshops of famous people in the nude could all be in that category.
  - sonofgod 8y ago
    There's a difference between "unethical to make a human do" and "create an unethical result": e.g. there are ethical benefits from the automation of risky jobs. The obvious one in ML and computers is image recognition of horrific images. (Granted, there are then additional issues of where and how you deploy that technology.)
skwb 8y ago
To expand on tinkertellers comments, a lot of ml based ai is based on historical data. For example, identifying factors associated with hiring a good employee may identify colinear features that correlate but do not contribute to being a good employee. Because historically women/ people of color/ homosexuals were discriminated against, identifying these latent features as them being “bad employees” may carry biases that you are not wishing to use for an ai hiring task.
cimmanom 8y ago
I think this list is great. As AI begins to be applied to problems like driving that affect the real world instead of just information, I’d add: Ethical use of AI should not create negative externalities - negative impacts on people other than those making the choice to use it. This includes the example in another post about bias in hiring perpetuated by implicitly biased historical data sets. It also includes pedestrians dying or being maimed because autonomous vehicle developers want to test their vehicles in real world conditions before they’re truly ready. And some of the proposals I’ve seen that would force pedestrians to change their behavior to accommodate autonomous vehicles or blame pedestrians for their own deaths if hit by a self-driving car while not carrying a special sensor. An ethical AI would not be able to park itself illegally (snarling traffic because its double parked or parked in a bus lane; potentially endangering cyclists who have to ride around it if it’s in a bike lane, for instance) until police are sensed in the vicinity — even if the owner directed it to. AI should not be used to triple Uber’s fleet size in NYC without hiring more drivers: doing so would bring already clogged streets to a standstill, costing billions in lost productivity [0]. (In 2009, when the streets were less congested than today, the externalized cost of driving a car into midtown during rush hour was $160 [1].) [0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2018/01/17/nyc-economy-may-lose-due-to-traffic-congestion.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/newyork/new... [1] http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/07/03/how-driving-a-car-into-manhattan-costs-160/ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/07/03/how-driving...
- arctop_dan 8y ago
  > As AI begins to be applied to problems like driving that affect the real world instead of just information, I’d add: > Ethical use of AI should not create negative externalities - negative impacts on people other than those making the choice to use it. I’d go one step further and say that ethical AI should not create any negative externalities to humans period -- not even those that choose to use it. An example that can be informative here is different than the traditional AI-driving “trolley problem” (i.e. do nothing and kill five people on the crosswalk, or swerve and kill only the passenger), it relates to a more subtle, quotidien challenge faced in autonomous cars: what happens to backseat driving? How will a car that is driven by an AI treat its passengers ethically and insure that it never does them any harm? Even a minor discomfort because, say, an acceleration pattern made them uncomfortable, is an ethical issue if the human has no recourse or if there is systematic prioritization of other goals over the human’s. One solution is to make cars sensitive to humans’ feelings while they’re being driven, so that the car’s brain has an awareness that, within the right framework, lets it continuously adjust its behavior to serve its passengers better. Essentially, the aim is to make the car empathic, artificially giving it the type of human intuition that can help avoid unintended outcomes big or small. The more that AI systems in general can be sensitive to our human experience, the better I believe. It is very hard, pragmatically speaking, to always balance the need for easy/cheap AND safe solutions in the real-world. Clearly defined goals and non-goals as well as intermediate steps for measuring against them at least seem to be a good start, since these provide the framework that lets fast feedback mechanisms guide AI to evolve in a way that’s coupled directly with human interest.

anonytrary 8y ago

> Overall don’t do anything with AI that is ethically wrong to do it by other means (for example, you can replace AI with expensive human labor to do it) Not sure I understand what you mean -- can you explain this?

joshuamorton 8y ago
If I understand correctly, he's saying "if it would be unethical if executed by a human, it's unethical if done by a machine". Depending on where you draw the line here, things like military applications, insurance price calculation, or drawing convincing Photoshops of famous people in the nude could all be in that category.
- sonofgod 8y ago
  There's a difference between "unethical to make a human do" and "create an unethical result": e.g. there are ethical benefits from the automation of risky jobs. The obvious one in ML and computers is image recognition of horrific images. (Granted, there are then additional issues of where and how you deploy that technology.)

skwb 8y ago

To expand on tinkertellers comments, a lot of ml based ai is based on historical data. For example, identifying factors associated with hiring a good employee may identify colinear features that correlate but do not contribute to being a good employee. Because historically women/ people of color/ homosexuals were discriminated against, identifying these latent features as them being “bad employees” may carry biases that you are not wishing to use for an ai hiring task.

cimmanom 8y ago

I think this list is great. As AI begins to be applied to problems like driving that affect the real world instead of just information, I’d add: Ethical use of AI should not create negative externalities - negative impacts on people other than those making the choice to use it. This includes the example in another post about bias in hiring perpetuated by implicitly biased historical data sets. It also includes pedestrians dying or being maimed because autonomous vehicle developers want to test their vehicles in real world conditions before they’re truly ready. And some of the proposals I’ve seen that would force pedestrians to change their behavior to accommodate autonomous vehicles or blame pedestrians for their own deaths if hit by a self-driving car while not carrying a special sensor. An ethical AI would not be able to park itself illegally (snarling traffic because its double parked or parked in a bus lane; potentially endangering cyclists who have to ride around it if it’s in a bike lane, for instance) until police are sensed in the vicinity — even if the owner directed it to. AI should not be used to triple Uber’s fleet size in NYC without hiring more drivers: doing so would bring already clogged streets to a standstill, costing billions in lost productivity [0]. (In 2009, when the streets were less congested than today, the externalized cost of driving a car into midtown during rush hour was $160 [1].) [0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2018/01/17/nyc-economy-may-lose-due-to-traffic-congestion.amp.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bizjournals.com/newyork/new... [1] http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/07/03/how-driving-a-car-into-manhattan-costs-160/ http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/07/03/how-driving...

arctop_dan 8y ago
> As AI begins to be applied to problems like driving that affect the real world instead of just information, I’d add: > Ethical use of AI should not create negative externalities - negative impacts on people other than those making the choice to use it. I’d go one step further and say that ethical AI should not create any negative externalities to humans period -- not even those that choose to use it. An example that can be informative here is different than the traditional AI-driving “trolley problem” (i.e. do nothing and kill five people on the crosswalk, or swerve and kill only the passenger), it relates to a more subtle, quotidien challenge faced in autonomous cars: what happens to backseat driving? How will a car that is driven by an AI treat its passengers ethically and insure that it never does them any harm? Even a minor discomfort because, say, an acceleration pattern made them uncomfortable, is an ethical issue if the human has no recourse or if there is systematic prioritization of other goals over the human’s. One solution is to make cars sensitive to humans’ feelings while they’re being driven, so that the car’s brain has an awareness that, within the right framework, lets it continuously adjust its behavior to serve its passengers better. Essentially, the aim is to make the car empathic, artificially giving it the type of human intuition that can help avoid unintended outcomes big or small. The more that AI systems in general can be sensitive to our human experience, the better I believe. It is very hard, pragmatically speaking, to always balance the need for easy/cheap AND safe solutions in the real-world. Clearly defined goals and non-goals as well as intermediate steps for measuring against them at least seem to be a good start, since these provide the framework that lets fast feedback mechanisms guide AI to evolve in a way that’s coupled directly with human interest.