7 ms·

Don’t ask if artificial intelligence is good or fair, ask how it shifts power

58 points by MindGods 6y ago

bsenftner 6y ago
This view is an improvement over the status quo view held by most technologist.
- krona 6y ago
  The 'technologist' would typically (I would argue) want to remove bias from data, not introduce it to make a model less effective at its intended purpose. The article suggests making models politically aware, which is probably standard practice in many parts of China.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bsenftner 6y ago
    I believe the article is advocating being aware of the 2nd level effects of our work, such as how the power hierarchy shifts when our software is in use.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > The 'technologist' would typically (I would argue) want to remove bias from data, not introduce it to make a model less effective at its intended purpose. This quote from the OP directly address that attitude: "When the field of AI believes it is neutral, it both fails to notice biased data and builds systems that sanctify the status quo and advance the interests of the powerful. What is needed is a field that exposes and critiques systems that concentrate power, while co-creating new systems with impacted communities: AI by and for the people." > The article suggests making models politically aware, which is probably standard practice in many parts of China. While that's a technically correct statement, it misses the point by a mile. Firstly, it's impossible to make non-political models: at a minimum they embed the politics of the status-quo, which is often falsely confused with the absence of "politics" (for the same reason it's hard to see the mountain itself when you're standing on top of it). Secondly, what makes a model designed to embed the politics of the Communist Party of China objectionable is not that it embeds an instance of the class "politics," but rather characteristics of that specific instance.
    - DougBTX 6y ago
      > This quote from the OP directly address that attitude It doesn’t directly address it, the parent was talking about intention, the article is talking about outcome. Smooshing then together produces nonsense: “when someone wants to remove bias from data, they will fail to notice biased data”. Surely it isn’t a given that someone trying to remove bias will believe that all bias has been removed?
  - landryraccoon 6y ago
    > remove bias from data, I wonder if this is really a possible goal. Might it not be better to be aware of the impossibility of true objectivity, and decide to be strongly opinionated in favor of certain values? Certainly if a machine learning model not only predicts something but acts as an actual agent in the world to affect some goal, it becomes impossible to claim pure objectivity, as the AI itself now is acting to change the world in pursuit of that goal. I mean, it's hard to argue purely "objectively" that cruelty , totalitarianism and power centralization are "wrong". Any statement about them eventually comes to a moral argument, which means that AI researchers ultimately have to take responsibility themselves for being opinionated moral agents. "Remove bias" could just be passing the buck for support for entrenching the status quo or worse. Things like democracy, egalitarianism, freedom of thought and opportunity don't just spring up spontaneously, they were hard to fight for and win.
  - Udik 6y ago
    > remove bias from data, not introduce it The problem is in finding the bias, since it's a quantity inferred ex post by checking the discrepancy between reality and expectations. And since we have come to ideologically reject the very idea that there might be reasons for the discrepancy, then it must be all up to bias. Which I personally think it's stupid and counterproductive, since when you have actual reasons you can act upon them to improve the situation, while "bias" is only useful to play a power game in which anyone who disagrees with you can be called racist and forced to repent and apologize for his/ her "bias".
Isinlor 6y ago
I'm not sure if machine learning researchers have tools to analyze how minutia of their research e.g. proposing new activation function in ANN will impact shifts in power in the future. I personally have no slightest clue how institutions like police across the world operate and what power dynamics are governing them. IMO academia is really bad at impacting anything mostly because they are couple of steps detached from actual engineering and management that leads to impactful deployments. Not to mention that academia overall is extremely naive - they failed for some 20 years to stand up for themselves when it comes to research publication. Some researchers even manage to loose rights to access their own research without paying big corporations... For anyone interested in raw power playing academia is like stealing a candy from a kid. The biggest impact academia could have is on education and that's probably where the focus should be concentrated.
jbob2000 6y ago
The best thing you can do with powerful technology is to give it away for free. Then everyone is on even footing and you don’t get an abusive power imbalance.
- RhysU 6y ago
  Nuclear proliferation is a counter example. Its danger goes up the more states that have the tech.
  - sgillen 6y ago
    More dangerous, less power imbalance.
  - twirlip 6y ago
    Hmm, when only one nation-state had atomic weapons, they were used. When two nation-states had them, conflict was measured in proxy wars and influence. Still, the accidental detonation of atomic weapons is significant, so your point holds true.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    North Korea has nuclear weapons and they seem to be the looniest state around (Russia, America, and China also have nuclear weapons); I think this horse has left the stable.
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Take a look at the trajectories North Korea has used in their missile tests. Their leadership may well be as loony as claimed, but whoever is picking parabolas knows how to speak softly and loft a high apogee. (similarly, no matter how loony their current CINC may be, whoever in the USAF redeployed B-52s from Andersen AFB to Minot AFB also understands aposematism)
  - xenocyon 6y ago
    I'm opposed to nuclear weapons, but: the principle of nuclear non-proliferation - or, in other words, the oligopolization of nuclear strike capability - is more of a subjective and self-serving value held by the US (and some other nuclear powers) than a universal objective truth. If, hypothetically, the US lacked nuclear weapons that other countries had, the acquisition of nuclear capability by a hitherto non-nuclear USA would suddenly be seen as very desirable, and there wouldn't be all this talk about the dangers of proliferation.
Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
Marxian analysis is the only analysis now, apparently.
- cambalache 6y ago
  It is going to get worst. If you think carefully and quoting Feynman "There is plenty of room at the bottom". Do you want examples? A Simon Bolivar statue was vandalized in Florida, now Bolivar was no saint but he is a South-American hero he died in 1830 and now he has been tarnished just by being a "White Slaver"(He was not). Well, let's see you can come now after the name Bolivia, named after him, you can also include Colombia, America, The Philippines, El Salvador, Dominican Republic and many many more. I have seen several prominent people just shy of outright requesting that. The Oscars are going to change their eligibility criteria and it will be based supposedly on the British awards, quoting from a NYT article "All entries in two British film categories, outstanding British film and outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer, are now required to increase representation to meet at least two of four diversity standards, like 'onscreen representation, themes and narratives,' and 'industry access and opportunities.' among others." Do you know what this means for art? Bye Celine, by Kafka,bye Joyce, bye Kurosawa, bye Kubrick, bye Lynch, bye Tarantino and so on. Only wholesome, clean , politically conscious entertainment will be recognized. Now, what does this remind you of? None of the current power-holders will be affected for all these changes, so no essential change. The big traditional companies are already on-board, Silicon Valley is on board, the savvy political parties are on-board, Hollywood is on-board , the media too. What this will do is to disenfranchise and silence any dissenting, dissonant voice and create a moralist culture which will dictate in a top-down form the "correct way" to do things and interpret the world. You disagree? No Facebook for you, No youtube, no mastercard, no visa, no Stanford, no Netflix, no New York Times, no BBC, nothing for you.
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    It seems like you are drastically overstating what the BFI's actual requirements are[1]. Basically if you hire some people outside of London/South East England and if you offer some paid interships and training to under-represented groups, you have passed. [1] https://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-diversity-standards-criteria-2019-07-23.pdf https://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-...
ghostcluster 6y ago
> A year ago, my colleagues and I created the Radical AI Network, building on the work of those who came before us. The group is inspired by Black feminist scholar Angela Davis’s observation that “radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root’”, and that the root problem is that power is distributed unevenly. I'm a bit uncomfortable with this kind of political posturing being published in Nature, the preeminent science journal. It seems the exact wrong forum for it.
- xmprt 6y ago
  The article is low on examples which doesn't lend it much credibility but I can sort of understand where she's coming from because Google's AI has had similar issues in the past. Namely YouTube classifies LGBTQ+ content as not advertiser friendly and therefore doesn't recommend it as much and often demonitizes it.
  - ramblerman 6y ago
    Would that not be based on the fact that, that content is somehow generating less revenue? Or you believe there is a more sinister reason?
    - tobr 6y ago
      Videos with titles with certain words might be flagged and can’t have ads. As I understand it they’re trying to prevent pornographic content from being monetized, and their list of dirty words include neutral LGBTQ+ terms like “gay” and “lesbian”. This has been verified by experiments where people upload the same video with different titles. [1] So it’s yet another opaque system that might not have a sinister intention, but has a pretty sinister outcome. 1: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/10/20893258/youtube-lgbtq-censorship-demonetization-nerd-city-algorithm-report https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/10/20893258/youtube-lgbt...
      - Nasrudith 6y ago
        Reminds me of another case of the opposite with Xbox Live where "gay" and "lesbian" were being censored to try to prevent the then prevalent use as a term of abuse. To be frank to me the algorithim seems to be a scapegoat for society's own fucked up norms and practices. It isn't a moral process and expecting it to act like one isn't reasonable - it would be like demanding a cargo value calculator stop listing concentrated drugs as the most profitable commodity by to transport per mass and volume because addiction ruin lives and overdose ends them. It is terrible but it is accurately describing the status quo.
mtgp1000 6y ago
>In my view, those who work in AI need to elevate those who have been excluded from shaping it, and doing so will require them to restrict relationships with powerful institutions that benefit from monitoring people. I am not going to choose who I work with based on their race/sexuality/gender. >Researchers should listen to, amplify, cite and collaborate with communities that have borne the brunt of surveillance: often women, people who are Black, Indigenous, LGBT+, poor or disabled. Right, we know, only privileged straight white men escape the clutches of surveillance. All these ideologues are doing is setting the stage for the marginalization of whites, a global minority and soon to be minority majority in the US. I can't believe this kind of casual discrimination has not only been normalized, but is openly and explicitly encouraged. This is not ok. Edit: you know, the same way that it takes generations to build wealth, it takes generations to build knowledge, especially institutional knowledge. If we just hand over a chunk of our industries to people because of their identities, by definition we will be even less of a meritocracy - and that's bad for all of society.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  What is "soon"? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Projections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... suggests "A report by the U.S. Census Bureau projects a decrease in the ratio of Whites between 2010 and 2050, from 79.5% to 74.0%") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rising_Tide_of_Color_Against_White_World-Supremacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rising_Tide_of_Color_Again... was almost exactly a century ago. Might be worth a read before we go stampede cattle through the Vatican.
meowface 6y ago
The core arguments, as far as I can tell, are: >Researchers should listen to, amplify, cite and collaborate with communities that have borne the brunt of surveillance: often women, people who are Black, Indigenous, LGBT+, poor or disabled. Conferences and research institutions should cede prominent time slots, spaces, funding and leadership roles to members of these communities. And: >Remarkably little research focuses on serving data subjects. What’s needed are ways for these people to investigate AI, to contest it, to influence it or to even dismantle it. For example, the advocacy group Our Data Bodies is putting forward ways to protect personal data when interacting with US fair-housing and child-protection services. I'm unable to find any other concrete suggestions or arguments. There are some things like "In addition, discussions of how research shifts power should be required and assessed in grant applications and publications.", but "how research/AI shifts power" seems to be a very fuzzy and ill-defined concept. People aren't going to agree on what power is and who possesses it and who doesn't and what does or doesn't constitute shifting or non-shifting of power, and to who, and how, and why. Let alone exactly how their research's tiny piece of the puzzle fits into it all. I think it'd be clearer if this contained specific claims or requested specific legal rights beyond broad terms like "shifting power": like anonymization of data, regulations on how companies and the government can collect and use people's data, how and when law enforcement can use automatic recognition systems, etc. Maybe an auditing organization for companies' and governments' heuristic systems (AI or otherwise), to look for type I errors (YouTube LGBT+ videos as not suitable for minors comes to mind). Maybe some way to determine what technologies could be ripe for abuse. It's like making your motto "our organization is dedicated to ensuring AI benefits the people, not the elites". Okay... who are the elites, who are the people, how could the elites and people be benefitted or harmed, etc.
- ponker 6y ago
  Lol. “Communities that have borne the brunt of surveillance” and then a list starting with “women.” Men are surveilled at vastly higher rates than women, and a huge majority of police brutality is against men (specifically, poor and black men). Next up is “Indigenous” which is also laughable, as at least in the US the federal government clearly couldn’t give two shits about what is or isn’t happening to Native American people.
khawkins 6y ago
Clearly, the goal of this article is to shift power into the hands of the author and her ideologically aligned community.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  Well, yes. If you don't like those that wield power you must contest it. Anyone that aims to accomplish a particular goal, such as more equitable AI, will need to challenge the ideology of power and seek to impose their own view.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Generally people accomplish goals by presenting intellectual arguments why the goals are good and should be worked towards. Engaging in power struggles to impose one's view by force is certainly an option that exists, but it's generally seen as toxic behavior and I do not think we should encourage it.
    - thundergolfer 6y ago
      If we read the same article, nowhere is there a suggestion of "[imposing] one's view by force". Your comment seems to suggest otherwise.
      - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
        "Impose their own view" comes from the comment I was responding to, and the commenter did not seem to be suggesting an imposition where "those that wield power" would have a choice in the matter.
        thundergolfer 6y ago
        I don't think you're reading their comment charitably. They're using "impose" in the context of politics being a contest. Winning a democratic election necessarily "imposes" upon the losers some decisions of the winners, eg. higher taxes. That's not authoritarianism, that's just politics.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
"Fair" and "good" are certainly tricky words to narrow down, granted. But to say they're not even worth discussing - that the only question to ask is whether AI shifts power to groups I like from groups I don't like - is to let politics swallow the entire field and make collaboration across ideological boundaries impossible. That's not going to lead to good outcomes for anyone.
- GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
  Typically ethics is devoid of politics. A simple apolitical question: is this research going to harm anyone? It’s open ended and simple enough to answer.
xlm1717 6y ago
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Dune
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  That is a pretty ironic given the sentiment is given from actual slavers who justify it over their ancestors not fighting the machines.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nil-sec 6y ago
The fraction of people in AI working on problems that need to consider diversity/fairness/etc. is rather small. Yes, those people, these specific applications, should be designed with care, should be overseen properly and in the best of all worlds should be unbiased. However, the recent discussion around this topic is framed like AI research in general is somehow unethical and should be informed more by minority populations. While this is something to strive for, for the sake of having a more just society, the impact of diversity on an AI system that say classifies mitochondria in yeast is not clear to me. I’d argue the majority of problems in AI right now are of this form and not of the form addressed by the author. If you want to push quotes, increase minority representation for occupations, do so. If you want to address specific biases in very specific applications then do that. Don’t use the latter to make an argument for the former though. These are two different issues and while I recognize the author sees a link here I’m not so certain about that. To be clear I think that both are worthy goals. But it’s somewhat disingenuous to make an inherent political argument, people may disagree with, and justify it by overgeneralizing a specific, niche technological ethics question to an entire field.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  I don't think you're making much of an effort to describe the variety of AI that are appearing. The thing about AI is it thrives on data and lots of large institutions have data that they use to make decision about people. Fairness questions come in. Google randomly, I see: AI Applications: Top 10 Real World Artificial Intelligence Applications Marketing, Banking, Finance, Agriculture, Health Care, Gaming, Space Exploration, In Autonomous Vehicles. About half of those seem like situation where fairness questions enter - banking and finance - plausibly (who gets a loan), marketing - plausibly (who gets sold what), health care - plausible (who gets treated, what groups' data is and isn't used for what, etc). The other not so much.
  - nil-sec 6y ago
    In industry, yes. I had the impression this article was aimed at academia and research in AI.
young_unixer 6y ago
Since when is Nature an outlet for political propaganda and racial discrimination? Seriously, what a useless article.
- collyw 6y ago
  It is concerning seeing Nature viewing everything from such a postmodernist perspective of power dynamics.

58 points by MindGods 6y ago

bsenftner 6y ago

This view is an improvement over the status quo view held by most technologist.

krona 6y ago
The 'technologist' would typically (I would argue) want to remove bias from data, not introduce it to make a model less effective at its intended purpose. The article suggests making models politically aware, which is probably standard practice in many parts of China.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bsenftner 6y ago
  I believe the article is advocating being aware of the 2nd level effects of our work, such as how the power hierarchy shifts when our software is in use.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > The 'technologist' would typically (I would argue) want to remove bias from data, not introduce it to make a model less effective at its intended purpose. This quote from the OP directly address that attitude: "When the field of AI believes it is neutral, it both fails to notice biased data and builds systems that sanctify the status quo and advance the interests of the powerful. What is needed is a field that exposes and critiques systems that concentrate power, while co-creating new systems with impacted communities: AI by and for the people." > The article suggests making models politically aware, which is probably standard practice in many parts of China. While that's a technically correct statement, it misses the point by a mile. Firstly, it's impossible to make non-political models: at a minimum they embed the politics of the status-quo, which is often falsely confused with the absence of "politics" (for the same reason it's hard to see the mountain itself when you're standing on top of it). Secondly, what makes a model designed to embed the politics of the Communist Party of China objectionable is not that it embeds an instance of the class "politics," but rather characteristics of that specific instance.
  - DougBTX 6y ago
    > This quote from the OP directly address that attitude It doesn’t directly address it, the parent was talking about intention, the article is talking about outcome. Smooshing then together produces nonsense: “when someone wants to remove bias from data, they will fail to notice biased data”. Surely it isn’t a given that someone trying to remove bias will believe that all bias has been removed?
- landryraccoon 6y ago
  > remove bias from data, I wonder if this is really a possible goal. Might it not be better to be aware of the impossibility of true objectivity, and decide to be strongly opinionated in favor of certain values? Certainly if a machine learning model not only predicts something but acts as an actual agent in the world to affect some goal, it becomes impossible to claim pure objectivity, as the AI itself now is acting to change the world in pursuit of that goal. I mean, it's hard to argue purely "objectively" that cruelty , totalitarianism and power centralization are "wrong". Any statement about them eventually comes to a moral argument, which means that AI researchers ultimately have to take responsibility themselves for being opinionated moral agents. "Remove bias" could just be passing the buck for support for entrenching the status quo or worse. Things like democracy, egalitarianism, freedom of thought and opportunity don't just spring up spontaneously, they were hard to fight for and win.
- Udik 6y ago
  > remove bias from data, not introduce it The problem is in finding the bias, since it's a quantity inferred ex post by checking the discrepancy between reality and expectations. And since we have come to ideologically reject the very idea that there might be reasons for the discrepancy, then it must be all up to bias. Which I personally think it's stupid and counterproductive, since when you have actual reasons you can act upon them to improve the situation, while "bias" is only useful to play a power game in which anyone who disagrees with you can be called racist and forced to repent and apologize for his/ her "bias".

Isinlor 6y ago

I'm not sure if machine learning researchers have tools to analyze how minutia of their research e.g. proposing new activation function in ANN will impact shifts in power in the future. I personally have no slightest clue how institutions like police across the world operate and what power dynamics are governing them. IMO academia is really bad at impacting anything mostly because they are couple of steps detached from actual engineering and management that leads to impactful deployments. Not to mention that academia overall is extremely naive - they failed for some 20 years to stand up for themselves when it comes to research publication. Some researchers even manage to loose rights to access their own research without paying big corporations... For anyone interested in raw power playing academia is like stealing a candy from a kid. The biggest impact academia could have is on education and that's probably where the focus should be concentrated.

jbob2000 6y ago

The best thing you can do with powerful technology is to give it away for free. Then everyone is on even footing and you don’t get an abusive power imbalance.

RhysU 6y ago
Nuclear proliferation is a counter example. Its danger goes up the more states that have the tech.
- sgillen 6y ago
  More dangerous, less power imbalance.
- twirlip 6y ago
  Hmm, when only one nation-state had atomic weapons, they were used. When two nation-states had them, conflict was measured in proxy wars and influence. Still, the accidental detonation of atomic weapons is significant, so your point holds true.
- catalogia 6y ago
  North Korea has nuclear weapons and they seem to be the looniest state around (Russia, America, and China also have nuclear weapons); I think this horse has left the stable.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Take a look at the trajectories North Korea has used in their missile tests. Their leadership may well be as loony as claimed, but whoever is picking parabolas knows how to speak softly and loft a high apogee. (similarly, no matter how loony their current CINC may be, whoever in the USAF redeployed B-52s from Andersen AFB to Minot AFB also understands aposematism)
- xenocyon 6y ago
  I'm opposed to nuclear weapons, but: the principle of nuclear non-proliferation - or, in other words, the oligopolization of nuclear strike capability - is more of a subjective and self-serving value held by the US (and some other nuclear powers) than a universal objective truth. If, hypothetically, the US lacked nuclear weapons that other countries had, the acquisition of nuclear capability by a hitherto non-nuclear USA would suddenly be seen as very desirable, and there wouldn't be all this talk about the dangers of proliferation.

Wolfenstein98k 6y ago

Marxian analysis is the only analysis now, apparently.

cambalache 6y ago
It is going to get worst. If you think carefully and quoting Feynman "There is plenty of room at the bottom". Do you want examples? A Simon Bolivar statue was vandalized in Florida, now Bolivar was no saint but he is a South-American hero he died in 1830 and now he has been tarnished just by being a "White Slaver"(He was not). Well, let's see you can come now after the name Bolivia, named after him, you can also include Colombia, America, The Philippines, El Salvador, Dominican Republic and many many more. I have seen several prominent people just shy of outright requesting that. The Oscars are going to change their eligibility criteria and it will be based supposedly on the British awards, quoting from a NYT article "All entries in two British film categories, outstanding British film and outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer, are now required to increase representation to meet at least two of four diversity standards, like 'onscreen representation, themes and narratives,' and 'industry access and opportunities.' among others." Do you know what this means for art? Bye Celine, by Kafka,bye Joyce, bye Kurosawa, bye Kubrick, bye Lynch, bye Tarantino and so on. Only wholesome, clean , politically conscious entertainment will be recognized. Now, what does this remind you of? None of the current power-holders will be affected for all these changes, so no essential change. The big traditional companies are already on-board, Silicon Valley is on board, the savvy political parties are on-board, Hollywood is on-board , the media too. What this will do is to disenfranchise and silence any dissenting, dissonant voice and create a moralist culture which will dictate in a top-down form the "correct way" to do things and interpret the world. You disagree? No Facebook for you, No youtube, no mastercard, no visa, no Stanford, no Netflix, no New York Times, no BBC, nothing for you.
- TheCoelacanth 6y ago
  It seems like you are drastically overstating what the BFI's actual requirements are[1]. Basically if you hire some people outside of London/South East England and if you offer some paid interships and training to under-represented groups, you have passed. [1] https://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-diversity-standards-criteria-2019-07-23.pdf https://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/downloads/bfi-...

ghostcluster 6y ago

> A year ago, my colleagues and I created the Radical AI Network, building on the work of those who came before us. The group is inspired by Black feminist scholar Angela Davis’s observation that “radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root’”, and that the root problem is that power is distributed unevenly. I'm a bit uncomfortable with this kind of political posturing being published in Nature, the preeminent science journal. It seems the exact wrong forum for it.

xmprt 6y ago
The article is low on examples which doesn't lend it much credibility but I can sort of understand where she's coming from because Google's AI has had similar issues in the past. Namely YouTube classifies LGBTQ+ content as not advertiser friendly and therefore doesn't recommend it as much and often demonitizes it.
- ramblerman 6y ago
  Would that not be based on the fact that, that content is somehow generating less revenue? Or you believe there is a more sinister reason?
  - tobr 6y ago
    Videos with titles with certain words might be flagged and can’t have ads. As I understand it they’re trying to prevent pornographic content from being monetized, and their list of dirty words include neutral LGBTQ+ terms like “gay” and “lesbian”. This has been verified by experiments where people upload the same video with different titles. [1] So it’s yet another opaque system that might not have a sinister intention, but has a pretty sinister outcome. 1: https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/10/20893258/youtube-lgbtq-censorship-demonetization-nerd-city-algorithm-report https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/10/20893258/youtube-lgbt...
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      Reminds me of another case of the opposite with Xbox Live where "gay" and "lesbian" were being censored to try to prevent the then prevalent use as a term of abuse. To be frank to me the algorithim seems to be a scapegoat for society's own fucked up norms and practices. It isn't a moral process and expecting it to act like one isn't reasonable - it would be like demanding a cargo value calculator stop listing concentrated drugs as the most profitable commodity by to transport per mass and volume because addiction ruin lives and overdose ends them. It is terrible but it is accurately describing the status quo.

mtgp1000 6y ago

>In my view, those who work in AI need to elevate those who have been excluded from shaping it, and doing so will require them to restrict relationships with powerful institutions that benefit from monitoring people. I am not going to choose who I work with based on their race/sexuality/gender. >Researchers should listen to, amplify, cite and collaborate with communities that have borne the brunt of surveillance: often women, people who are Black, Indigenous, LGBT+, poor or disabled. Right, we know, only privileged straight white men escape the clutches of surveillance. All these ideologues are doing is setting the stage for the marginalization of whites, a global minority and soon to be minority majority in the US. I can't believe this kind of casual discrimination has not only been normalized, but is openly and explicitly encouraged. This is not ok. Edit: you know, the same way that it takes generations to build wealth, it takes generations to build knowledge, especially institutional knowledge. If we just hand over a chunk of our industries to people because of their identities, by definition we will be even less of a meritocracy - and that's bad for all of society.

082349872349872 6y ago
What is "soon"? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Projections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... suggests "A report by the U.S. Census Bureau projects a decrease in the ratio of Whites between 2010 and 2050, from 79.5% to 74.0%") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rising_Tide_of_Color_Against_White_World-Supremacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rising_Tide_of_Color_Again... was almost exactly a century ago. Might be worth a read before we go stampede cattle through the Vatican.

meowface 6y ago

The core arguments, as far as I can tell, are: >Researchers should listen to, amplify, cite and collaborate with communities that have borne the brunt of surveillance: often women, people who are Black, Indigenous, LGBT+, poor or disabled. Conferences and research institutions should cede prominent time slots, spaces, funding and leadership roles to members of these communities. And: >Remarkably little research focuses on serving data subjects. What’s needed are ways for these people to investigate AI, to contest it, to influence it or to even dismantle it. For example, the advocacy group Our Data Bodies is putting forward ways to protect personal data when interacting with US fair-housing and child-protection services. I'm unable to find any other concrete suggestions or arguments. There are some things like "In addition, discussions of how research shifts power should be required and assessed in grant applications and publications.", but "how research/AI shifts power" seems to be a very fuzzy and ill-defined concept. People aren't going to agree on what power is and who possesses it and who doesn't and what does or doesn't constitute shifting or non-shifting of power, and to who, and how, and why. Let alone exactly how their research's tiny piece of the puzzle fits into it all. I think it'd be clearer if this contained specific claims or requested specific legal rights beyond broad terms like "shifting power": like anonymization of data, regulations on how companies and the government can collect and use people's data, how and when law enforcement can use automatic recognition systems, etc. Maybe an auditing organization for companies' and governments' heuristic systems (AI or otherwise), to look for type I errors (YouTube LGBT+ videos as not suitable for minors comes to mind). Maybe some way to determine what technologies could be ripe for abuse. It's like making your motto "our organization is dedicated to ensuring AI benefits the people, not the elites". Okay... who are the elites, who are the people, how could the elites and people be benefitted or harmed, etc.

ponker 6y ago
Lol. “Communities that have borne the brunt of surveillance” and then a list starting with “women.” Men are surveilled at vastly higher rates than women, and a huge majority of police brutality is against men (specifically, poor and black men). Next up is “Indigenous” which is also laughable, as at least in the US the federal government clearly couldn’t give two shits about what is or isn’t happening to Native American people.

khawkins 6y ago

Clearly, the goal of this article is to shift power into the hands of the author and her ideologically aligned community.

tehjoker 6y ago
Well, yes. If you don't like those that wield power you must contest it. Anyone that aims to accomplish a particular goal, such as more equitable AI, will need to challenge the ideology of power and seek to impose their own view.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  Generally people accomplish goals by presenting intellectual arguments why the goals are good and should be worked towards. Engaging in power struggles to impose one's view by force is certainly an option that exists, but it's generally seen as toxic behavior and I do not think we should encourage it.
  - thundergolfer 6y ago
    If we read the same article, nowhere is there a suggestion of "[imposing] one's view by force". Your comment seems to suggest otherwise.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      "Impose their own view" comes from the comment I was responding to, and the commenter did not seem to be suggesting an imposition where "those that wield power" would have a choice in the matter.
      - thundergolfer 6y ago
        I don't think you're reading their comment charitably. They're using "impose" in the context of politics being a contest. Winning a democratic election necessarily "imposes" upon the losers some decisions of the winners, eg. higher taxes. That's not authoritarianism, that's just politics.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

"Fair" and "good" are certainly tricky words to narrow down, granted. But to say they're not even worth discussing - that the only question to ask is whether AI shifts power to groups I like from groups I don't like - is to let politics swallow the entire field and make collaboration across ideological boundaries impossible. That's not going to lead to good outcomes for anyone.

GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
Typically ethics is devoid of politics. A simple apolitical question: is this research going to harm anyone? It’s open ended and simple enough to answer.

xlm1717 6y ago

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Dune

Nasrudith 6y ago
That is a pretty ironic given the sentiment is given from actual slavers who justify it over their ancestors not fighting the machines.

deleted 6y ago

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nil-sec 6y ago

The fraction of people in AI working on problems that need to consider diversity/fairness/etc. is rather small. Yes, those people, these specific applications, should be designed with care, should be overseen properly and in the best of all worlds should be unbiased. However, the recent discussion around this topic is framed like AI research in general is somehow unethical and should be informed more by minority populations. While this is something to strive for, for the sake of having a more just society, the impact of diversity on an AI system that say classifies mitochondria in yeast is not clear to me. I’d argue the majority of problems in AI right now are of this form and not of the form addressed by the author. If you want to push quotes, increase minority representation for occupations, do so. If you want to address specific biases in very specific applications then do that. Don’t use the latter to make an argument for the former though. These are two different issues and while I recognize the author sees a link here I’m not so certain about that. To be clear I think that both are worthy goals. But it’s somewhat disingenuous to make an inherent political argument, people may disagree with, and justify it by overgeneralizing a specific, niche technological ethics question to an entire field.

joe_the_user 6y ago
I don't think you're making much of an effort to describe the variety of AI that are appearing. The thing about AI is it thrives on data and lots of large institutions have data that they use to make decision about people. Fairness questions come in. Google randomly, I see: AI Applications: Top 10 Real World Artificial Intelligence Applications Marketing, Banking, Finance, Agriculture, Health Care, Gaming, Space Exploration, In Autonomous Vehicles. About half of those seem like situation where fairness questions enter - banking and finance - plausibly (who gets a loan), marketing - plausibly (who gets sold what), health care - plausible (who gets treated, what groups' data is and isn't used for what, etc). The other not so much.
- nil-sec 6y ago
  In industry, yes. I had the impression this article was aimed at academia and research in AI.

young_unixer 6y ago

Since when is Nature an outlet for political propaganda and racial discrimination? Seriously, what a useless article.

collyw 6y ago
It is concerning seeing Nature viewing everything from such a postmodernist perspective of power dynamics.