10 ms·

University of Helsinki free MOOC on the Ethics of AI

144 points by ignoramous 6y ago

1cvmask 6y ago
Humans are “flawed” and “biased” (product of their environments and learnings) and thus anything they create and “control” is by definition “flawed” and “biased”. AI is just a set of the many tools humans have created. The biases can be both positive or negative. It is like people who talk about human rights while ordering bombings of children far away. The ethics of AI is similarly flawed. It might solve some problems here but might inadvertently or deliberately accentuate others depending on your perspective. It is a sense a cost/benefit solution where we may never even be aware of the costs but just the benefits (those who incur the costs may not have a voice or be muzzled). I am all for AI by the way. I simply see it as a tool. It is up to societies to formulate acceptable policies and measure the costs and benefits. Humans were good and bad before AI and I see nothing changing there.
- holstvoogd 6y ago
  What is you point? The fact that humans have shit ethics does not mean we need not address ethics in AI. Especially if the AI is then used to justify the biases. And that comparison is completely ridiculous.
  - HexagonalKitten 6y ago
    Right, like we extensively worked out the ethics of automobiles before we allowed them. Can you imagine if we let cars contribute to inequity by allowing rich people to own them and not poor people? Or if it was possible to just aim a car at people without the self-driving stopping you.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  The point is that things like AI can multiply the effect of any human bias. Humans were fundamentally just "bad" after as before the invention of the machine gun (technically mostly modern artillery, but I'm being poetic), but there probably wouldn't have been as many dead at the Somme without it. We are seeing every day how AI can be used to censor and suppress, that means we need to be increasingly systematic in how we approach biases both in practice and as a concept (the latter aimed really at those who apply political dogma to what is ultimately a scientific question).
  - teataster 6y ago
    This is one of the best criticisms of AI that I have read. Leaving science alone and working on our own biases should be the way forward. But with censorship on the rise in every corner of the world and political spectrum, I would say things are bleak.
    - hungryforcodes 6y ago
      But who decides which biases are good or bad? If we have no yardstick for that, we become ineffective at personal progress.
  - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
    To follow up (from a different debate, but this point still stands) > A core, not side, effect of technology is its ability to magnify power and multiply force — for both attackers and defenders. > For the most part, though, society still wins. The bad guys simply can’t do enough damage to destroy the underlying social system. The question for us is: can society still maintain security as technology becomes more advanced? https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/03/when_technology.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/03/when_technolo...
- simion314 6y ago
  The idea is the AI developers should be first of all aware of the potential problems, I would say that maybe AI should be done by competent engineers that studied this domain including data science,statistics and ethics and maybe this engineers should be responsible similar how other professionals can lose their right to practice if they don't respect the rules. The excuse that the data is garbage so is not my fault is terrible, detecting if the data is garbage is part of your job IMO. My criticism applies for AI people that work on projects that have large consequences or affect a large number of people, for small we can keep the "no warranty disclaimer"
LunaSea 6y ago
Yet another example of wrong interpretation of statistical bias. Not that I expected much better from an AI Ethics course clearly not tought by serious machine learning experts.
- grassgreener 6y ago
  Hey grouchy - This course focuses on ethical bias. Maybe you should work on your attention to detail and keep your toxicity for yourself
  - LunaSea 6y ago
    If you think about ethical bias in a system that has no concept of ethics you are going to have a bad time. You're essentially trying to fix reality by altering datasets which is a completely erroneous way of solving the problem. It's playing God by determining what is right and what isn't all alone and without the input of society.
    - benjaminjosephw 6y ago
      These systems are created for some intent by humans. Studying the ethics of AI is really thinking about the ethical issues surrounding the practice of implementing AI systems. Ethical reflection on the intent and impact of the systems one builds is not mandatory in our field (it is for other professions) but probably still a good thing to consider if you want your contribute to society to be a positive one. Taking time to think about this stuff in a MOOC sounds like one way of avoiding doing that thinking alone and without the input of society.
      - LunaSea 6y ago
        I disagree. If you take one of the examples mentioned in said MOOC, which is the bias in word embeddings that makes vector arithmetic go from "doctor" to "nurse" if you replace "male" by "female". I agree that it would be nice if the returned vector would be "doctor" in both cases but the embedding code (the implementation) or the embedding algorithm (theory) have no idea about gender, ethics or moral. Here the bias comes from the datasets the AI trained on. The bias of those datasets comes from society writing texts in a biased way. So the solution to fixing this "bias" is fixing the language used in society which is not an AI problem nor a dataset problem.
908B64B197 6y ago
Ethics is a trend. It's whatever is trendy to say or think at the moment. A set of arbitrary unenforceable rules to shame practices that is decided by whoever convinced other ethicist to grant him a PhD. Of course, all that is done without going through the rigor of making these practices illegal. That would have a real impact. And require real work.
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  I'd say its just the reverse. Like the strange and consistent finding that people are shockingly unmotivated by monetary incentive, it seems likely that straight up legal penalties would be less effective than soft social pressure. We are fundamentally social creatures, and things like signaling and status are usually in the drivers seat.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    A law has to pass the rigorous test of court. Soft pressure just has to get a mob going on. > Like the strange and consistent finding that people are shockingly unmotivated by monetary incentive I find that hard to believe. Maybe again there's some strange societal pressure against voicing that money is a motivation.
    - indigochill 6y ago
      I would guess what GP is referring to is something along the lines of this book: https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/ https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/ IIRC, the idea is just that money only goes so far up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Once our material well-being is taken care of, we want mastery and autonomy and incentives geared that way are more effective than money.
  - konjin 6y ago
    It's quite lucky that it's not people who do most of the harm in society, it's corporations.
- pengstrom 6y ago
croissants 6y ago
I just read all of this. I think the whole course -- which is actually pretty short, like an hour or two of reading sans exercises, and for the most part clearly written -- would be a good assignment for a single day of a first-year university computer science course. It does offer a reasonable, albeit almost entirely nontechnical, overview of why people should care about AI ethics, and what caring about it "means". As for my reaction to it, I'll borrow a useful distinction the course makes near the beginning about three types of ethics: > 1) Meta-ethics studies the meaning of ethical concepts, the existence of ethical entities (ontology) and the possibility of ethical knowledge (epistemology). 2) Normative ethics concerns the practical means of determining a moral (or ethically correct) course of action. 3) Applied ethics concerns what a moral agent (defined as someone who can judge what is right and wrong and be held accountable) is obligated or permitted to do in a specific situation or a particular domain of action. In this language, the course is almost entirely about 1) with a few gestures in the direction of 2) and 3) near the end. I'm not totally unsympathetic to this; there are still people out there who are not convinced AI (or algorithmic) ethics is a "thing" (response: any apparatus that makes choices that matter involves ethics!), so I get why justifying the topic itself seems necessary. But in the other direction, I think people sometimes conflate "ethicist" with "person who will know what to do" -- that is, someone with expertise in 2) and 3) above. In my limited experience, ethicists seem to "work on" mostly 1). I hope there will be more work on the 2) and 3) parts of AI ethics in the near future. By the way, if you want a more technical look at this topic (albeit framed more narrowly as "fairness and machine learning"), there is a nice draft textbook on the topic [1]. It probably has enough material for a semester-long upper-level computer science course. [1] https://fairmlbook.org/ https://fairmlbook.org/
bra-ket 6y ago
I think it's premature to talk about "AI ethics" when AI is nowhere to be seen. In the US this whole "ethics" trend is being used as a tool to politicize and censor research[1]. [1] https://spectator.us/militant-liberals-politicizing-artificial-intelligence/ https://spectator.us/militant-liberals-politicizing-artifici...
- galaxyLogic 6y ago
  That story is from the magazine The Spectator right? According to Wikipedia "The Spectator is politically conservative and supports the Conservative Party" . Being openly "conservative" means biased. Although they are entitled to their opinions it is good to be aware that they have a (conservative) bias. They do not try to be objective, they try to be conservative. And what is "conservative bias"? It of course means conserving the status quo, conserving the power of the rich and powerful, conserving inequality. That kind of thing is what I think ethicists should be studying. Note that to the conservatives, since by default they want to conserve things, don't want change, they don't want ethicists snooping around asking questions about what if anything might be unethical about the existing power-structures. No Sir :-) So it seems to me that for a conservative magazine to criticize "ethicists" is very self-serving for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spectator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spectator
  - bra-ket 6y ago
    Bias is natural and inevitable, and it has to be acknowledged in research. The problem is, liberals want to shut down anyone who disagrees with their own bias. It's not about 'snooping around asking questions', but more like slandering and aggressively silencing people for having a different opinion. You'd think it would never affect you as a liberal but it was funny to watch Google's very progressive & liberal research leads labeled 'racists', and evil incarnates for standing in the way of the activist mob. I mean they're are still trying to 'cancel' Jeff Dean, of all people, for firing some activist [1], and Nando de Freitas for merely supporting both sides[2]. If this is your ethics discourse, I'd rather AI be unethical. [1] https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQqz7ScqxhSIxeYGrWjK0/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk... [2] https://twitter.com/NandoDF/status/1336030085640548354 https://twitter.com/NandoDF/status/1336030085640548354
caniszczyk 6y ago
There's also a free course from the Linux Foundation on this topic: https://www.edx.org/course/ethics-in-ai-and-big-data https://www.edx.org/course/ethics-in-ai-and-big-data
commonturtle 6y ago
This view on bio-ethicists reflects my views on ethics as an academic field in general: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/from-my-email-on-bioethicists.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/fr... Some quotes: > I realized quickly that the incentives are all wrong if what we want is people who will think hard about humanity’s pressing ethical dilemmas and who will suggest intuitively appealing solutions. > Since almost all ethicists are academics, they have to publish, and in order to publish you have to be novel, and since the basic principles of ethics are little changed for millennia the incentives to do thorough homework on the basis of principles which are widely understood and accepted is not great. > Furthermore, if you decide to be a utilitarian, then basically all ethical issues will boil down to cost/benefit analyses which you have to outsource to technocrats, so your unique expertise as an ethicist will be worth little.
zcw100 6y ago
I just finished the course and what a complete pile of garbage. It seems to reinforce group think more than anything. They ask for a lot of free form responses that are graded by peers and it's obvious that there is a correct and an incorrect point of view. I'm not sure which I'm more afraid of, unaccountable corporations or self appointed technocrats. They talk about ethics washing but don't seem to consider that this course is a part of that cycle.
- philosopherofAI 6y ago
  I am sorry, but I don´t follow your reasoning. Why do you think the course provides an example of ethics washing? As I understand the term, ethics washing means - roughly - that someone claims to be ethical, while (s)he is really not committed to implementing ethical principles in practice. I don´t think it is a fair accusation in the context of free online moocs. Correspondingly, I don´t understand your other concerns either. The course is an introductory, free online course for anyone interested in the state-of-art ethics of AI. As I see it, it is not meant to be a mind blowing course for professional philosophers doing AI ethics. One might expect professionals to know the field already. And it is not meant to provide a list of dogmas or principles for true believers; if you want to have your correct answers or to get the correct codes of conducts, this clearly isn´t your course. As a philosopher I found it very strange to claim that it´s "obvious" that there is a correct/incorrect point of view. Instead, I find it obvious that most of the questions are really complex. And what comes to the peer reviews, I see your point. I have a background in AI ethics - I am not an expert, but know some stuff - and I have also lectured online, so I know how difficult it is to design an introductory course for a non-specified target group. But as I see it, the peer reviews are meant to provide feedback and possibility to learn from others. Of course, in the best possible world, there would be a teacher commenting all the answers, but it is in contradiction with the mooc ideology. But your claim that the course "reinforces" group think - that´s crap. How exactly is it supposed to do that? Or, do you honestly find other people intellectually so... "under developed" that their thoughts can be manipulated simply by asking them to read or evaluate someone else´s answers? If this is the case, then - indeed - it is necessary to worry. And yes, if this is the case, then we are very glad that you are worrying it.

144 points by ignoramous 6y ago

Humans are “flawed” and “biased” (product of their environments and learnings) and thus anything they create and “control” is by definition “flawed” and “biased”. AI is just a set of the many tools humans have created. The biases can be both positive or negative. It is like people who talk about human rights while ordering bombings of children far away. The ethics of AI is similarly flawed. It might solve some problems here but might inadvertently or deliberately accentuate others depending on your perspective. It is a sense a cost/benefit solution where we may never even be aware of the costs but just the benefits (those who incur the costs may not have a voice or be muzzled). I am all for AI by the way. I simply see it as a tool. It is up to societies to formulate acceptable policies and measure the costs and benefits. Humans were good and bad before AI and I see nothing changing there.

holstvoogd 6y ago
What is you point? The fact that humans have shit ethics does not mean we need not address ethics in AI. Especially if the AI is then used to justify the biases. And that comparison is completely ridiculous.
- HexagonalKitten 6y ago
  Right, like we extensively worked out the ethics of automobiles before we allowed them. Can you imagine if we let cars contribute to inequity by allowing rich people to own them and not poor people? Or if it was possible to just aim a car at people without the self-driving stopping you.
mhh__ 6y ago
The point is that things like AI can multiply the effect of any human bias. Humans were fundamentally just "bad" after as before the invention of the machine gun (technically mostly modern artillery, but I'm being poetic), but there probably wouldn't have been as many dead at the Somme without it. We are seeing every day how AI can be used to censor and suppress, that means we need to be increasingly systematic in how we approach biases both in practice and as a concept (the latter aimed really at those who apply political dogma to what is ultimately a scientific question).
- teataster 6y ago
  This is one of the best criticisms of AI that I have read. Leaving science alone and working on our own biases should be the way forward. But with censorship on the rise in every corner of the world and political spectrum, I would say things are bleak.
  - hungryforcodes 6y ago
    But who decides which biases are good or bad? If we have no yardstick for that, we become ineffective at personal progress.
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  To follow up (from a different debate, but this point still stands) > A core, not side, effect of technology is its ability to magnify power and multiply force — for both attackers and defenders. > For the most part, though, society still wins. The bad guys simply can’t do enough damage to destroy the underlying social system. The question for us is: can society still maintain security as technology becomes more advanced? https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/03/when_technology.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/03/when_technolo...
simion314 6y ago
The idea is the AI developers should be first of all aware of the potential problems, I would say that maybe AI should be done by competent engineers that studied this domain including data science,statistics and ethics and maybe this engineers should be responsible similar how other professionals can lose their right to practice if they don't respect the rules. The excuse that the data is garbage so is not my fault is terrible, detecting if the data is garbage is part of your job IMO. My criticism applies for AI people that work on projects that have large consequences or affect a large number of people, for small we can keep the "no warranty disclaimer"

LunaSea 6y ago

Yet another example of wrong interpretation of statistical bias. Not that I expected much better from an AI Ethics course clearly not tought by serious machine learning experts.

grassgreener 6y ago
Hey grouchy - This course focuses on ethical bias. Maybe you should work on your attention to detail and keep your toxicity for yourself
- LunaSea 6y ago
  If you think about ethical bias in a system that has no concept of ethics you are going to have a bad time. You're essentially trying to fix reality by altering datasets which is a completely erroneous way of solving the problem. It's playing God by determining what is right and what isn't all alone and without the input of society.
  - benjaminjosephw 6y ago
    These systems are created for some intent by humans. Studying the ethics of AI is really thinking about the ethical issues surrounding the practice of implementing AI systems. Ethical reflection on the intent and impact of the systems one builds is not mandatory in our field (it is for other professions) but probably still a good thing to consider if you want your contribute to society to be a positive one. Taking time to think about this stuff in a MOOC sounds like one way of avoiding doing that thinking alone and without the input of society.
    - LunaSea 6y ago
      I disagree. If you take one of the examples mentioned in said MOOC, which is the bias in word embeddings that makes vector arithmetic go from "doctor" to "nurse" if you replace "male" by "female". I agree that it would be nice if the returned vector would be "doctor" in both cases but the embedding code (the implementation) or the embedding algorithm (theory) have no idea about gender, ethics or moral. Here the bias comes from the datasets the AI trained on. The bias of those datasets comes from society writing texts in a biased way. So the solution to fixing this "bias" is fixing the language used in society which is not an AI problem nor a dataset problem.

908B64B197 6y ago

Ethics is a trend. It's whatever is trendy to say or think at the moment. A set of arbitrary unenforceable rules to shame practices that is decided by whoever convinced other ethicist to grant him a PhD. Of course, all that is done without going through the rigor of making these practices illegal. That would have a real impact. And require real work.

ravi-delia 6y ago
I'd say its just the reverse. Like the strange and consistent finding that people are shockingly unmotivated by monetary incentive, it seems likely that straight up legal penalties would be less effective than soft social pressure. We are fundamentally social creatures, and things like signaling and status are usually in the drivers seat.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  A law has to pass the rigorous test of court. Soft pressure just has to get a mob going on. > Like the strange and consistent finding that people are shockingly unmotivated by monetary incentive I find that hard to believe. Maybe again there's some strange societal pressure against voicing that money is a motivation.
  - indigochill 6y ago
    I would guess what GP is referring to is something along the lines of this book: https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/ https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/ IIRC, the idea is just that money only goes so far up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Once our material well-being is taken care of, we want mastery and autonomy and incentives geared that way are more effective than money.
- konjin 6y ago
  It's quite lucky that it's not people who do most of the harm in society, it's corporations.
pengstrom 6y ago

croissants 6y ago

I just read all of this. I think the whole course -- which is actually pretty short, like an hour or two of reading sans exercises, and for the most part clearly written -- would be a good assignment for a single day of a first-year university computer science course. It does offer a reasonable, albeit almost entirely nontechnical, overview of why people should care about AI ethics, and what caring about it "means". As for my reaction to it, I'll borrow a useful distinction the course makes near the beginning about three types of ethics: > 1) Meta-ethics studies the meaning of ethical concepts, the existence of ethical entities (ontology) and the possibility of ethical knowledge (epistemology). 2) Normative ethics concerns the practical means of determining a moral (or ethically correct) course of action. 3) Applied ethics concerns what a moral agent (defined as someone who can judge what is right and wrong and be held accountable) is obligated or permitted to do in a specific situation or a particular domain of action. In this language, the course is almost entirely about 1) with a few gestures in the direction of 2) and 3) near the end. I'm not totally unsympathetic to this; there are still people out there who are not convinced AI (or algorithmic) ethics is a "thing" (response: any apparatus that makes choices that matter involves ethics!), so I get why justifying the topic itself seems necessary. But in the other direction, I think people sometimes conflate "ethicist" with "person who will know what to do" -- that is, someone with expertise in 2) and 3) above. In my limited experience, ethicists seem to "work on" mostly 1). I hope there will be more work on the 2) and 3) parts of AI ethics in the near future. By the way, if you want a more technical look at this topic (albeit framed more narrowly as "fairness and machine learning"), there is a nice draft textbook on the topic [1]. It probably has enough material for a semester-long upper-level computer science course. [1] https://fairmlbook.org/ https://fairmlbook.org/

bra-ket 6y ago

I think it's premature to talk about "AI ethics" when AI is nowhere to be seen. In the US this whole "ethics" trend is being used as a tool to politicize and censor research[1]. [1] https://spectator.us/militant-liberals-politicizing-artificial-intelligence/ https://spectator.us/militant-liberals-politicizing-artifici...

galaxyLogic 6y ago
That story is from the magazine The Spectator right? According to Wikipedia "The Spectator is politically conservative and supports the Conservative Party" . Being openly "conservative" means biased. Although they are entitled to their opinions it is good to be aware that they have a (conservative) bias. They do not try to be objective, they try to be conservative. And what is "conservative bias"? It of course means conserving the status quo, conserving the power of the rich and powerful, conserving inequality. That kind of thing is what I think ethicists should be studying. Note that to the conservatives, since by default they want to conserve things, don't want change, they don't want ethicists snooping around asking questions about what if anything might be unethical about the existing power-structures. No Sir :-) So it seems to me that for a conservative magazine to criticize "ethicists" is very self-serving for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spectator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spectator
- bra-ket 6y ago
  Bias is natural and inevitable, and it has to be acknowledged in research. The problem is, liberals want to shut down anyone who disagrees with their own bias. It's not about 'snooping around asking questions', but more like slandering and aggressively silencing people for having a different opinion. You'd think it would never affect you as a liberal but it was funny to watch Google's very progressive & liberal research leads labeled 'racists', and evil incarnates for standing in the way of the activist mob. I mean they're are still trying to 'cancel' Jeff Dean, of all people, for firing some activist [1], and Nando de Freitas for merely supporting both sides[2]. If this is your ethics discourse, I'd rather AI be unethical. [1] https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk9CqQqz7ScqxhSIxeYGrWjK0/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk... [2] https://twitter.com/NandoDF/status/1336030085640548354 https://twitter.com/NandoDF/status/1336030085640548354

caniszczyk 6y ago

There's also a free course from the Linux Foundation on this topic: https://www.edx.org/course/ethics-in-ai-and-big-data https://www.edx.org/course/ethics-in-ai-and-big-data

commonturtle 6y ago

This view on bio-ethicists reflects my views on ethics as an academic field in general: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/from-my-email-on-bioethicists.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/fr... Some quotes: > I realized quickly that the incentives are all wrong if what we want is people who will think hard about humanity’s pressing ethical dilemmas and who will suggest intuitively appealing solutions. > Since almost all ethicists are academics, they have to publish, and in order to publish you have to be novel, and since the basic principles of ethics are little changed for millennia the incentives to do thorough homework on the basis of principles which are widely understood and accepted is not great. > Furthermore, if you decide to be a utilitarian, then basically all ethical issues will boil down to cost/benefit analyses which you have to outsource to technocrats, so your unique expertise as an ethicist will be worth little.

zcw100 6y ago

I just finished the course and what a complete pile of garbage. It seems to reinforce group think more than anything. They ask for a lot of free form responses that are graded by peers and it's obvious that there is a correct and an incorrect point of view. I'm not sure which I'm more afraid of, unaccountable corporations or self appointed technocrats. They talk about ethics washing but don't seem to consider that this course is a part of that cycle.

philosopherofAI 6y ago
I am sorry, but I don´t follow your reasoning. Why do you think the course provides an example of ethics washing? As I understand the term, ethics washing means - roughly - that someone claims to be ethical, while (s)he is really not committed to implementing ethical principles in practice. I don´t think it is a fair accusation in the context of free online moocs. Correspondingly, I don´t understand your other concerns either. The course is an introductory, free online course for anyone interested in the state-of-art ethics of AI. As I see it, it is not meant to be a mind blowing course for professional philosophers doing AI ethics. One might expect professionals to know the field already. And it is not meant to provide a list of dogmas or principles for true believers; if you want to have your correct answers or to get the correct codes of conducts, this clearly isn´t your course. As a philosopher I found it very strange to claim that it´s "obvious" that there is a correct/incorrect point of view. Instead, I find it obvious that most of the questions are really complex. And what comes to the peer reviews, I see your point. I have a background in AI ethics - I am not an expert, but know some stuff - and I have also lectured online, so I know how difficult it is to design an introductory course for a non-specified target group. But as I see it, the peer reviews are meant to provide feedback and possibility to learn from others. Of course, in the best possible world, there would be a teacher commenting all the answers, but it is in contradiction with the mooc ideology. But your claim that the course "reinforces" group think - that´s crap. How exactly is it supposed to do that? Or, do you honestly find other people intellectually so... "under developed" that their thoughts can be manipulated simply by asking them to read or evaluate someone else´s answers? If this is the case, then - indeed - it is necessary to worry. And yes, if this is the case, then we are very glad that you are worrying it.