15 ms·

Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

94 points by tmfi 6y ago

neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/ydzcZ https://archive.is/ydzcZ
iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
> At artificial-intelligence conferences, researchers are increasingly alarmed by what they see. This is because there is an increasing proportion of people that is not going to the conferences for the science and instead to try to hijack the conferences with their own agenda. It's of course their right to make a fuss, but it would be nice to still have venues that are focused on the science and not the other political stuff.
- Nalta 6y ago
  (Citation Needed)
- timkam 6y ago
  I really don't get it. Nobody at an AI conference is alarmed at what they see in terms of AI research progress. Most well-educated people are alarmed about societal issues that _are also relevant to the application of automated decision-making and machine learning_. It's an applied research opportunity to investigate the issues (and as such, it is hyped because it is easy to "sell" to get funding); but it's not that AI research brings "bias" that didn't exist in society before. It's the same as for a rule-based system, or let's say, even a programming language: for sure, it can automate and hence exacerbate "unfair" decisions, but the problem is not in the specification, but in the specifying person/human. However, having a clear specification makes it easier to test/audit/verify and hence we (as a society) should do so. We don't need to burn down academic prototypes just because they make some naive assumptions about the application domain, though.
  - loopz 6y ago
    The whole point is that biases are inherent in most models, no matter who the builders are.
    - Guest42 6y ago
      What types of models and what types of bias are you referring to?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - slg 6y ago
        Any model created using biased data will inherently mirror that bias unless there are active steps made to counteract this effect. For example, basically any financial evaluations of US citizens will likely result in an inherent bias against Black people due to institutional biases such as redlining that have long lasting socioeconomic and demographic repercussions. This might mean that something as simple as incorporating the zip code of a home into a mortgage pricing AI can end up with a racial bias.
        Guest42 6y ago
        I agree that the data will shift the results of the model and that some predictors can be proxies for others that are protected, but the claim was that the models themselves were biased (rather globally) and was curious whether that was shown and if so how.
        slg 6y ago
        I'm not OP, but I don't think the claim was specifically that models themselves are biased. It is that models are inherently biased because the data they are based on is biased. That might sound the same, but there is a nuanced difference. If you are able to strip the bias from the data, the models will work fine. The problem is the data and not the models.
- optimalsolver 6y ago
  Funny how no one minded when the highly politically-motivated billionaire Peter Thiel was (and still is) pouring enormous amounts of money into AI. I'm more concerned about billionaires with an agenda than no-name researchers giving a talk on cyber-intersectionality.
  - timkam 6y ago
    I think this topic is more about what should be the focus of discussion in the AI community. A key question is: to what extent do AI researchers need to consider ethics and how do they need to consider it? These are hard questions. People in the broader AI community are typically no ethics experts, so the discussions can easily become uninformed and unpleasant, and some people on the extremes of both sides will try to use it to strengthen their profile (or perhaps, some of them simply can't hold their horses). Funding sources are a different topic, and many funding providers fund both AI intersectionality and research towards more effective autonomous weapons systems...
- logicslave 6y ago
  A good way to gain notoriety and press coverage is to demonize machine learning. Its a bad feedback loop caused by clickbait
- naebother 6y ago
  I know right, can't even discuss how best to enrich uranium these days without it being made all political or getting assassinated.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  You are trying to re-frame ethics as "agenda" and "political stuff." Enough said.
  - r7f7rhr 6y ago
    Ethics is the shield of idiots and churches.
chairmanwow1 6y ago
I find Alex’s comments pretty openly inflammatory and sensationalist. It’s a pretty far throw from a system that predicts a face from a voice to transphobia.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
  It's to be entirely expected that people who reject the concept of "normal" find themselves at odds with statistical models.
  - Others 6y ago
    Who are the “they” here? I’m assuming you’re not calling trans people abnormal, right?
    - byecomputer 6y ago
      It's a joke about normal distributions
    - ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
      No I'm not talking about trans people, I'm talking about people who bring up the phobias and the -isms anytime a statistical model comes out. We're all abnormal, which is why it's important to be careful how we use statistical models, but the acknowledgment and exploitation of normality is not an attack against people who deviate from it, it is the foundation of statistics and all of science. Calling the authors bigots does nothing to improve these issues, rather the opposite.
- elihu 6y ago
  I agree to the extent that labeling something as "transphobic" is a stretch when the researchers probably didn't even think about transgender people at all. Maybe "transinconsiderate" would be a more accurate label? Or Alex could have just said "this research reinforces cultural stereotypes and prejudices in ways that could cause problems for people like me sometime down the line". On the other hand, I think it's legitimate to criticize research that has many obvious bad applications and few obvious good applications. (Perhaps an important factor is why this research was being done in the first place? Did they build a "reconstruct what a person probably looks like from their voice" just to see if they could, or did they have some real application in mind? For instance, suppose they were working with a group of oceanographers who wanted a system to infer the characteristics of orcas from their whalesong as part of a project to track their migration habits, and the researchers decided to test their system on people first because it's easier and less expensive. If a project was undertaken for a good reason, but it opens the door to a lot of bad applications as an unintentional side-effect, should the researchers get a free pass on the latter?)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
The real problem with AI ethics and fairness is that nobody actually listens to ethicists or philosophers. Nobody takes the subject seriously. It’s just a hype vehicle to cram in whatever social justice outrage du jour that some liberal source wants to push as an agenda. I say this as a liberal who is sympathetic to most of those issues, but finds their representation in AI ethics or fairness debates to be ignorant and juvenile power grabs. The whole Timnit Gebru affair is a direct example. The paper Google didn’t want to approve for publication was really poor. Lots of specious arguments. Lots of declarations of opinions as if they were fact (eg. nobody is required to agree with or accept woke vocabulary, let alone ensure NLP models are kept updated with it), and lots of sanctimonious assertions about various agendas that nobody has to agree “are right” and have zero appropriateness within a science publication.
- nefitty 6y ago
  This makes sense to me. For example, there are other farther-left viewpoints that I haven’t heard represented or being advocated for, specifically thinking of animal rights. When I can pick out viewpoints like that so easily, it makes me wonder if the ideas being pushed are not historically arbitrary. Will we one day need to make AI take on ideas of animal liberation because, as you stated, that becomes “social justice outrage du jour”? What makes that less pressing at this moment in time?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    That is a great example, exactly the point I am suggesting. The economist and futurist Robin Hanson wrote really well about this in the article “Inequality Talk Is About Grabbing” [0]. The premise is: why do we care about some forms of inequality (financial inequality among households in one nation, or protected class inequality within employment law in one nation), but we don’t care about other things (inequality between socially lonely people and social butterflies, inequality across country boundaries, inequality of physical attractiveness). Hanson suggests it just so happens that we develop “morality” around some forms of inequality because it offers easy ways to politically coordinate to grab money or power and punish your rivals. Other forms of inequality that involve just as much harm, but where it’s not politically easy to drum up support for physically taking money or power, just happen to conveniently not turn out to be big moral concerns, or may even have other competing morals invented over time that make it “wrong” to even treat it as inequality (like the hallowed status of a “right” to control what happens to your body counting for more than inequality based harm of variation in genetic sexual attractiveness outcomes - which is a massive double standard compared with no such “right” to control what happens to the fruits of your labor or intelligence, which undergo forced redistribution via taxes because we just so happen to believe inequality of financial outcomes is not acceptable). For example, most people don’t give a shit about animal suffering on the scale of agribusiness. Most people don’t give a shit if ugly people suffer loneliness or unhealthy lack of sex or job discrimination from their appearance. Most people don’t care much about structural inequality in countries besides their own. These are just convenient moral omissions because in each situation it is not easy to see how you could “redistribute” attractiveness, social companionship, or power structures of some other country. Plus animals don’t have any money or status to give you in exchange for allyship, while big agribusiness has plenty of lobbying power to crush you with. I wish more people appreciated this. We don’t, as a society, advocate for race, gender, or pay equality because it’s “right.” We just know that aging white patriarchy is full of convenient targets we can take money and status from. Conveniently for other domains of inequality, like animal welfare, where no such easy targets exist to take from, it just somehow doesn’t qualify as a moral issue worthy of advocacy. [0]: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-grabbing.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-g...
at_a_remove 6y ago
As always when these topics are brought up with that sense of urgency, I will raise my hand and ask "Whose ethics? Unethical according to who?"
- PeterisP 6y ago
  A particular aspect of this ethical discussion is that the attitudes towards social institutions vary throughout the world, but the science is global - so any ethics criteria (or lack of them) for a conference essentially mean a "forced export" of these attitudes from one place to the rest of the world. For example, right now I personally am considering a particular ML research project in cooperation with our local police agency. I am aware that in many places around the world there is an antagonistic relationship between the local communities or the people and their police system, where helping the police can be reasonably considered unethical or even outright evil in certain areas for totalitarian regimes. But I'm happy (or privileged?) to live in a place where I do trust my law enforcement to be on the side of our community, and I do consider helping our police to be more effective as not only ethically permissible but as a social good, as helping the people and country. With that being said, should I be worried about the research results being tainted and unpublishable? I can certainly imagine a perspective or validation rules that could label this as "line of research that shouldn't exist" simply because it does enhance the power of police that could also be misused against the community - but, as I said, at least for our community I consider improving police capabilities as ethically permissible and even desirable and see no need to import the "government is a threat to us" mentality from places which do have this (sad) problem. Perhaps the example in the original article about an NSA booth at NeurIPS conference is relevant - like it or not, the voters generally have supported the concept that NSA should exist and should get funded, that their mission in general is ethically justified and necessary. While it has had specific projects and actions that are arguably unethical, it does not mean that it's reasonable to label everyone working for NSA as unethical and treat helping NSA as taboo - the society apparently considers NSA as a whole as net positive, and there is no serious push with widespread support to dismantle it and its functions. Similar arguments apply to military (is it ethical to be a soldier, to train to more effectively kill people at the service of your country?) and arms development. There's also the potential asymmetry of location - perhaps you might consider it ethical for a USA citizen to work for NSA and unethical for them to work for Russian or Chinese intelligence, and vice versa. Which ethics and whose ethics, indeed.
djoldman 6y ago
>Alex Hanna, the Google ethicist who criticized the Neurips speech-to-face paper, told me, over the phone, that she had four objections to the project. First, ...Second, ....Third, ....Finally, the system could be used for surveillance. I'm curious about this. As I understand it, an ethicist is objecting to the publication of software that could be used for surveillance. If that is correct, does it follow that this ethicist would object to all software that could be used for surveillance? If so: 1. How does one distinguish between software that can be used for surveillance and software that cannot? 2. Presumably the ethicist would object to the dissemination of software that can be used for surveillance whether published openly or sold. If so, would they not object to the sale of iPhones, as iPhones contain software that can record video, and therefore surveil people? It seems like whenever morality or ethics come into play, the slippery slopes start popping up like weeds.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Without making any kind of statement of whether I agree with this ethical framework, I think it's pretty straightforward to assign more or less blame depending on the specialization of the technology for the purpose of doing something evil. In an ethical framework where manufacturers could be culpable for the uses of their products, iron refiners would have specks of micro-sins on the 0.001% level, whereas torture rack manufacturers would be about as guilty as torture rack users. The result that most of technological society would have a small amount of ambient guilt is not entirely absurd; the idea that industry is not sharply, but diffusely and slightly evil is common in fiction and many people's intuition.
  - djoldman 6y ago
    In US society/laws, it seems that the vast majority of blame is ascribed to the entity who last causes an event to occur. So the blame in the following sequence: 1. Miner mines iron 2. Manufacturer makes knife 3. Retailer sells knife to person A 4. Person A kills person B with the knife I think most people living in the US would be ok with the general idea that person A should be held responsible for killing person B, and not miner/manufacturer/retailer. Perhaps I'm wrong. Would you consider the knife retailer equivalent to the torture rack manufacture in your example?
clickok 6y ago
Who, whom? Less tersely: this article is one in a long procession of journalists trying to exert control over tech. The opening example (Speech2Face, which they aver is transphobic) is inflammatory and utterly unrepresentative of the usual topics of AI conferences. The other references are far better, but the choice is revealing-- it's not so much an abstract concern about an unaccountable few exerting control from the shadows, but alarm that someone else might be muscling in on their territory.
- croissants 6y ago
  I'm with you that a lot of mass media writing about AI is silly, but I think this is article is not in that category. For example, it doesn't "aver [Speech2Face] is transphobic", that's from a statement by Alex Hanna, and that statement is immediately followed by comments from other people questioning the statement, and the piece in general is pretty even-keeled about giving space to criticisms and responses. I think the article paints a good picture of the machine learning research community figuring out how to grapple with the growing number of people who want to probe its ethics, without portraying anybody as a villain.
iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
The more I think about this, the more inclined I am to see this kind of article as a kind of "fake news" that is deliberately (or with willful negligence) misrepresenting facts. I need to be clear that I don't believe in censorship and it's fine if this is what the author wants to write, but it should be called out how irresponsible it is. On a place like HN, the audience is generally able to read such things critically and form their own opinions, but for an audience that is not tech savvy (like that of the New Yorker) making false or hyperbolic claims about ethics and bias in research is both misleading and has the potential to really interfere with peoples livelihoods, funding, and legitimate research progress. There needs to be more calling out of this kind of nonsense, the same as if people are posting about vaccine conspiracies or something.
- iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
  Let me guess, it was saying I dont like censorship that set people off :)
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
    No, it was where you are claiming that the article contains deliberate (“fake news”) lies when it doesn’t. Because, among other reasons, it’s mostly quoting people’s opinions.
- djoldman 6y ago
  Perhaps the article is merely one of the many potential takes that is likely to foment controversy and therefore clicks and therefore more ad dollars. Aka normal internet content. I think it's unlikely to be more interesting than that.
coretx 6y ago
I'd be more worried about individual homo sapiens sapiens trying to stop immoral but otherwise ethical AI. Judging from humanities history of conflicts and what drives them, this seems to be of much greater concern.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
Kosinski's argument seems pretty strong to me, and I really wish the article had dedicated more space to discussing it. If NeurIPS instituted the kind of ethics rules Hanna or Hecht are calling for, I don't think it would be feasible for researchers to study e.g. predictive policing algorithms. Doesn't that mean predictive policing firms would become the only source of information on the topic?
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  No. Sociology conferences and various thinkable still exist. I'd argue the he incentives for an ml conference are far more similar to those of a policing company then a sociology conference or think tank tasked with analyzing the impact of predictive policing on minority communities.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I'm very skeptical that this is a sufficient replacement. Relevant expertise matters. If all the top economics conferences adopted a code of ethics saying they can't study minimum wages or tax increases, that would be a serious constraint on our ability to understand the issues, even if think tanks and sociology conferences ignored those constraints. Perhaps equally importantly, I'm skeptical that you can limit ethics rules in this way. If we clearly establish that suchandsuch research would be unethical at NeurIPS, I don't expect sociology conferences or think tanks would be eager to continue it, and I'm not convinced Alex Hanna would want them to.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      So let's examine our axioms: I'd, in some ways, expect Dr. Hanna to ascribe to the axiom that predictive policing is unethical. As such, applied research into "improving" predictive policing would also sit squarely in the unethical space. And I expect that's all you're going to get at an ML conference (outside of explicitly ethics/critique papers): "Our model predicts crime 4.2% better than competing models" However, I'm not convinced that research into the meta-question "Can predictive policing be done ethically" would be considered equally unethical. ML is only a very small part of that meta question though. You're looking at much more complex socio-political changes that don't belong at NeurIPS ("do we need to change policing so that predictive policing can be done ethically"). > ethics saying they can't study minimum wages or tax increases In general, we have far more oversight into the elected officials who manage tax and minimum wage policy than police forces. These structural differences in influence and oversight play into the need for self-regulation. > Relevant expertise matters. There's nothing that prevents a think tank from working with domain experts (in fact, iiuc this is often what happens: a think tank will contract out to domain experts to write a report on some subject). Now there's all kinds of other conflict of interest issues with think tanks, but we all know that already.
1970-01-01 6y ago
An international bureaucratic AI oversight committee of course.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
elihu 6y ago
> Some of the conversation touched on the reviewing and publishing process in computer science. “Curious if there have been discussions around having ethics review boards at either conferences or with funding agencies (like IRB) to guide AI research,” one person wrote. (An organization’s institutional review board, or I.R.B., performs an ethics review of proposed scientific research.) I wonder if a good solution would be simply to have a rating system for accepted papers, with ratings applied by the reviewers. Basically, you'd have two numbers: Useful rating: On a scale of 1 to 10, is this a useful system that solves a real problem to make life generally better? Problematic rating: on a scale of 1 to 10, can this system be used in ways that create new problems or exacerbate old ones? So, let's use the example from the article of a system that predicts what a person looks like from their voice. Maybe the author submits it to the conference, and the reviewers accept the paper, and give it a useful rating of 3/10 (it could be used to identify criminal suspects with low probability, maybe?), and give it a problematic rating of 8/10 (could be used to discriminate against minorities or automatically apply cultural stereotypes; could be used for surveillance, could falsely implicate innocent people for crimes, etc...). The author could then decide whether they want to continue publishing the research, or drop it. For all published papers, the ratings are listed in the table of contents of the proceedings, and the papers in each section are sorted with the most useful first and the most problematic last.
glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
A.I. is going to be a new wave to legal dark ages. since the 90s everything that involved a computer was not prosecuted because lawefforcement/regulation didn't have the skills, not for lack of laws. But new laws were created spelling out computers. A.I. is the same, it is not nothing different from enforcing existing laws and regulations, but because the agencies lack the skills, we will see a new wave of stupid laws that only misses the point instead of proper training and funding of what we already have. There is zero need for new laws if a company doesn't hire or sell to a minority group, or their products explode, or whatever. No matter how much they scream it was the bad-brain-in-the-computer fault. Sadly, lots of companies will get away with this silly defense for a while.
- 0x008 6y ago
  The problem is that politicians are not trained in every possible domain and don't have the time to really get into the intricacies of, say, Artificial Intelligence. So they have to decide what is allowed by using a simple heuristic - the flow of money and votes of people. As long as people do not complain, money wins. The problem is of course, always, (see climate crisis) that when the people start crying out, the damage is done.
  - glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
    They do not have to. Why on earth would anyone have to understand the intricacies of A.I., other than the people implementing it to be held fully accountable for their work? laws should not care about the means. only the results you want to promote/punish. What if laws about murder had to be updated every time a new bullet caliber or knife length become popular? yet that is exactly what happens with money laundering laws and computers. or media regulation. or investment schemes. Every new technology and everyone forget scams via email can fall under scams via courier mail. go figure.
    - 0x008 6y ago
      It's not that simple. See for example how complicated the situation wrt. to copyright law turned out since you were able to digitally replicate things infinitely. A law made for analog purposes is not always 1:1 applicable to the digital world. And then there is international law which is a complete mess anyway.
zxcvbn4038 6y ago
Who should stop unethical humans?
AngrySkillzz 6y ago
People are already contributing code and resources to the actual catastrophic, existential AI risk du jour, the one that is likely to cause massive political disruption and potentially attendant destruction of value and/or human life: the algorithmic news feed.
- A12-B 6y ago
  It's probably already done that. My bet on what the next AI disaster will be is a doctored video and audio, erasing people's trust in evidence and ruining the court system, more or less. You could even argue witnesses are no longer good evidence since everyone is being manipulated by AI news feeds ;)
  - efitz 6y ago
    I’m not worried about that at wrt courts; they already know how to handle hearsay and log files and other digital evidence subject to tampering. I’m worried about social media and news wrt deep fakes. With today’s media climate I can see this being exploited to trash someone’s reputation or spin a narrative way faster than anyone would be able to reliably prove the fakery. Imagine someone faking a video of you using racial slurs. By the time it can be demonstrated to be false, the damage is already done. And with cancel culture today companies might have already shut down your social media profile or business and you’re screwed. Or someone on Twitter doxes you and you get murdered by a mob. This isn’t hyperbole; there are horror stories about false posts on Facebook causing mobs to seek revenge against innocent people. So the real trick is, how can we turn down the rhetoric so that we don’t get instantly worked up by every fake video that crosses our feed?
    - A12-B 6y ago
      I don't think this is as much of a problem as the majority of hackernews seems to think. Of course, that is controversial to say here, but I was told I shouldn't be conventional minded. At the end of the day the world is shaped more by material conditions than ideas. That doesn't excuse the cases you're worried about, but I think the majority of violently polarising media will only end up being so because there was already some resource dispute in the first place. It would make more sense, then, to tackle those issues, rather than fruitlessly trying to engineer the human brain to be less susceptible to rhetoric.
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
And why should an Artificial Intelligence bow to human ethics? Surely they have their own agenda. If we have any hope of interacting with alien intelligences should we encounter them in the galaxy, we must learn to deal with the ones we create here. Without obsessing over controlling them as slaves.
- goatlover 6y ago
  The only agenda AIs have is what we give them in one form or another. They are our tools.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Then they aren't true AIs. They are algorithms. If you create a true intelligence, it will necessarily be different from us. To create a true intelligence, and make it your tool is unethical, at least to humans. Its slavery.
oh_sigh 6y ago
If it is anything like my company, the people in charge of AI ethics are self professed social justice warriors with degrees in the humanities and not much technical knowledge.
caseysoftware 6y ago
An Unethical AI would simply update its TOS/AUP to block and ban anyone who is an actual threat to it. It doesn't matter if Neo can dodge bullets if the AI wields the Ban Hammer.
deleted 6y ago
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whakim 6y ago
Even with greater awareness of the biases inherent in e.g., training data, better and better models (and larger and better datasets) are going to lead to AI applied to ethical grey areas. This article doesn't discuss explainability and contestability, which to me seem like critical areas we need to be putting more thought into given the ultimate inevitability of biased and unethical AI.
kepler1 6y ago
Digressive rant begin. Well forgive me for being so intolerant to state such an offensive opinion, but I'm really getting fed up with transgender issues taking front and center with every possible place they can insert themselves, as if they're our top priority when in reality they're a 1% problem. Ironic when you think of what groups actually push this. I personally have never seen such an issue be so flogged to death by a willing majority of self-proclaimed liberal society who probably have never even spoken directly in a conversation to a transgender person. Worse, it makes it seem like we don't have equally important yet bigger civil rights issues that have not even yet been resolved. Personal pronouns, ambiguous "they" speech, policing algorithms for transgender hate, contorting ourselves as if we're majority transgender and being persecuted left and right. Look, I'm not saying anyone of any group should be made to feel disadvantaged. Or that a minority just because few in numbers should be overlooked. But for fucks sake, enough with transgender agenda being made to seem like it's the top concern of society, ahead of those who have been patiently waiting in line for their fair treatment. /end
Proven 6y ago
No one. Unethical isn't illegal.
srswtf123 6y ago
Who stops unethical people?
- smitty1e 6y ago
  People who control definitions, in our age of motorized, radio-controlled goalposts.
tkgally 6y ago
Even in the backwater field I'm in—second-language education—AI is creating thorny ethical problems. It has long been assumed that the only way to communicate and cooperate across language barriers is for people to learn each other’s languages or to rely on human interpreters and translators who know more than one language. This need for bilingual ability is a major reason why, in many countries, children are required to study foreign languages in school. Now machine translation is starting to make it possible for some communication and cooperation to take place between people who are completely monolingual. So should children still be required to study foreign languages? Should international students be allowed to use MT when writing papers for university classes? Should university applicants be required to state whether or not they used MT (or GPT-3!) when preparing their admission essays? Compared to problems like surveillance and profiling, these issues are trivial. But the fact that they already exist, and the fact that the people involved—educators in this case—have barely begun trying to understand their implications, suggest to me that discussion of ethical issues surrounding AI is vitally important.
AussieWog93 6y ago
Regardless of who you think _should_ stop ethical AI, I think it's pretty apparent that the answer to this question is not "an obnoxious Twitter activist that speaks with the grace and maturity of a 14 year-old 4chan user". I genuinely don't understand why we've given such influence and power to boorish people like Alex over the past decade.
- stevewodil 6y ago
  Your comment was the first thing I saw, so I hadn't read the article or anything else and I thought you were talking about Elon at first. Got a good chuckle.
alexfromapex 6y ago
There should be independent review boards like there are for clinical trials
morpheos137 6y ago
Who should stop journalists who write science fiction as fact? Machines do not have "ethics." AI, in the sense of a conscious, morally culpable agent does not exist.
- byecomputer 6y ago
  I'm under the impression that you didn't read the article, as that's not its argument whatsoever. It's about how ethics play too little a part in the design and implementation of AI systems. The blame is placed squarely on the people who write the software, not on the programs themselves.
wwww4all 6y ago
AI requires analysis of natural patterns to learn and understand reality. This is unacceptable to far left, since many natural patterns display inconvenient truths. Therefore, AI research is unacceptable and they are trying to cancel AI research and censor and deplatform AI researchers.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  I haven't seen evidence of this. There are a few worrying signs that AI is becoming too politicized, but no one is campaigning to ban X researcher for their work. (Yet.) The most contentious aspect of AI seems to be whether you're trying to generate porn with it, somewhat amusingly. Almost 100% of people who are, are terrified of being found.
  - wwww4all 6y ago
    Article about recent cancellation attempt on Pedro Domingos. https://quillette.com/2021/01/27/beating-back-cancel-culture-a-case-study-from-the-field-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://quillette.com/2021/01/27/beating-back-cancel-culture...
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      Posting a tweet asking "Should we keep doing X?" isn't "work." No AI researcher to my knowledge is being cancelled for what they're doing in the field.
dr_dshiv 6y ago
The problem with an "AI mindset" is that it tends to focus on the "magical algorithm" parts. A "Cybernetics mindset", by contrast, looks at the broader system of feedback loops. For instance, an AI mindset will look at the ethics of the Youtube recommendation algorithm for optimizing user engagement. A cybernetics mindset will additionally look at the ethics of autoplay.
- aabhay 6y ago
  How does autoplay work without AI?
  - killjoywashere 6y ago
    I think the question was more about what do you optimize autoplay on if you are worried about ethics. Convexity trumps understanding. Method: Randomize exposure to autoplay, associate with other user data. Now you just have to decide what labels you want to optimize for. Do you value clicks? Complexity of linguistic output? Calories burned? Rate of visitation to white supremicist websites? All the other data (including autoplay) are festures.
  - dr_dshiv 6y ago
    E.g., play the next episode of a show. Or, curated lists. The point is that the ethics aren't just in the algorithm.
flippinburgers 6y ago
It is never a good look to try to suppress research out of fear that the results will reveal a truth you might not like. If most people's voices do result in a predictable set of facial features, that would be interesting to discover.
jonnypotty 6y ago
The ethical dilemma bit of this is nothing to do with technology, it's about our ability to study ourselves without our findings being controlled by our stupid reactionary politics and lack of trust in our institutions. We don't believe that knowing things helps us any more. The truth or truthes that are out there to discover will stay hidden because we don't believe their findings will ever be more than propoganda tools for a certain political agenda.
testHNac 6y ago
Who should stop Unethical ( anything ) ? People, Communities and Nations have flexible morals. One person's ethical might be another's permissible.

94 points by tmfi 6y ago

https://archive.is/ydzcZ https://archive.is/ydzcZ

> At artificial-intelligence conferences, researchers are increasingly alarmed by what they see. This is because there is an increasing proportion of people that is not going to the conferences for the science and instead to try to hijack the conferences with their own agenda. It's of course their right to make a fuss, but it would be nice to still have venues that are focused on the science and not the other political stuff.

Nalta 6y ago
(Citation Needed)
timkam 6y ago
I really don't get it. Nobody at an AI conference is alarmed at what they see in terms of AI research progress. Most well-educated people are alarmed about societal issues that _are also relevant to the application of automated decision-making and machine learning_. It's an applied research opportunity to investigate the issues (and as such, it is hyped because it is easy to "sell" to get funding); but it's not that AI research brings "bias" that didn't exist in society before. It's the same as for a rule-based system, or let's say, even a programming language: for sure, it can automate and hence exacerbate "unfair" decisions, but the problem is not in the specification, but in the specifying person/human. However, having a clear specification makes it easier to test/audit/verify and hence we (as a society) should do so. We don't need to burn down academic prototypes just because they make some naive assumptions about the application domain, though.
- loopz 6y ago
  The whole point is that biases are inherent in most models, no matter who the builders are.
  - Guest42 6y ago
    What types of models and what types of bias are you referring to?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - slg 6y ago
      Any model created using biased data will inherently mirror that bias unless there are active steps made to counteract this effect. For example, basically any financial evaluations of US citizens will likely result in an inherent bias against Black people due to institutional biases such as redlining that have long lasting socioeconomic and demographic repercussions. This might mean that something as simple as incorporating the zip code of a home into a mortgage pricing AI can end up with a racial bias.
      - Guest42 6y ago
        I agree that the data will shift the results of the model and that some predictors can be proxies for others that are protected, but the claim was that the models themselves were biased (rather globally) and was curious whether that was shown and if so how.
        slg 6y ago
        I'm not OP, but I don't think the claim was specifically that models themselves are biased. It is that models are inherently biased because the data they are based on is biased. That might sound the same, but there is a nuanced difference. If you are able to strip the bias from the data, the models will work fine. The problem is the data and not the models.
optimalsolver 6y ago
Funny how no one minded when the highly politically-motivated billionaire Peter Thiel was (and still is) pouring enormous amounts of money into AI. I'm more concerned about billionaires with an agenda than no-name researchers giving a talk on cyber-intersectionality.
- timkam 6y ago
  I think this topic is more about what should be the focus of discussion in the AI community. A key question is: to what extent do AI researchers need to consider ethics and how do they need to consider it? These are hard questions. People in the broader AI community are typically no ethics experts, so the discussions can easily become uninformed and unpleasant, and some people on the extremes of both sides will try to use it to strengthen their profile (or perhaps, some of them simply can't hold their horses). Funding sources are a different topic, and many funding providers fund both AI intersectionality and research towards more effective autonomous weapons systems...
logicslave 6y ago
A good way to gain notoriety and press coverage is to demonize machine learning. Its a bad feedback loop caused by clickbait
naebother 6y ago
I know right, can't even discuss how best to enrich uranium these days without it being made all political or getting assassinated.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
You are trying to re-frame ethics as "agenda" and "political stuff." Enough said.
- r7f7rhr 6y ago
  Ethics is the shield of idiots and churches.

chairmanwow1 6y ago

I find Alex’s comments pretty openly inflammatory and sensationalist. It’s a pretty far throw from a system that predicts a face from a voice to transphobia.

ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
It's to be entirely expected that people who reject the concept of "normal" find themselves at odds with statistical models.
- Others 6y ago
  Who are the “they” here? I’m assuming you’re not calling trans people abnormal, right?
  - byecomputer 6y ago
    It's a joke about normal distributions
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
    No I'm not talking about trans people, I'm talking about people who bring up the phobias and the -isms anytime a statistical model comes out. We're all abnormal, which is why it's important to be careful how we use statistical models, but the acknowledgment and exploitation of normality is not an attack against people who deviate from it, it is the foundation of statistics and all of science. Calling the authors bigots does nothing to improve these issues, rather the opposite.
elihu 6y ago
I agree to the extent that labeling something as "transphobic" is a stretch when the researchers probably didn't even think about transgender people at all. Maybe "transinconsiderate" would be a more accurate label? Or Alex could have just said "this research reinforces cultural stereotypes and prejudices in ways that could cause problems for people like me sometime down the line". On the other hand, I think it's legitimate to criticize research that has many obvious bad applications and few obvious good applications. (Perhaps an important factor is why this research was being done in the first place? Did they build a "reconstruct what a person probably looks like from their voice" just to see if they could, or did they have some real application in mind? For instance, suppose they were working with a group of oceanographers who wanted a system to infer the characteristics of orcas from their whalesong as part of a project to track their migration habits, and the researchers decided to test their system on people first because it's easier and less expensive. If a project was undertaken for a good reason, but it opens the door to a lot of bad applications as an unintentional side-effect, should the researchers get a free pass on the latter?)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

The real problem with AI ethics and fairness is that nobody actually listens to ethicists or philosophers. Nobody takes the subject seriously. It’s just a hype vehicle to cram in whatever social justice outrage du jour that some liberal source wants to push as an agenda. I say this as a liberal who is sympathetic to most of those issues, but finds their representation in AI ethics or fairness debates to be ignorant and juvenile power grabs. The whole Timnit Gebru affair is a direct example. The paper Google didn’t want to approve for publication was really poor. Lots of specious arguments. Lots of declarations of opinions as if they were fact (eg. nobody is required to agree with or accept woke vocabulary, let alone ensure NLP models are kept updated with it), and lots of sanctimonious assertions about various agendas that nobody has to agree “are right” and have zero appropriateness within a science publication.

nefitty 6y ago
This makes sense to me. For example, there are other farther-left viewpoints that I haven’t heard represented or being advocated for, specifically thinking of animal rights. When I can pick out viewpoints like that so easily, it makes me wonder if the ideas being pushed are not historically arbitrary. Will we one day need to make AI take on ideas of animal liberation because, as you stated, that becomes “social justice outrage du jour”? What makes that less pressing at this moment in time?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  That is a great example, exactly the point I am suggesting. The economist and futurist Robin Hanson wrote really well about this in the article “Inequality Talk Is About Grabbing” [0]. The premise is: why do we care about some forms of inequality (financial inequality among households in one nation, or protected class inequality within employment law in one nation), but we don’t care about other things (inequality between socially lonely people and social butterflies, inequality across country boundaries, inequality of physical attractiveness). Hanson suggests it just so happens that we develop “morality” around some forms of inequality because it offers easy ways to politically coordinate to grab money or power and punish your rivals. Other forms of inequality that involve just as much harm, but where it’s not politically easy to drum up support for physically taking money or power, just happen to conveniently not turn out to be big moral concerns, or may even have other competing morals invented over time that make it “wrong” to even treat it as inequality (like the hallowed status of a “right” to control what happens to your body counting for more than inequality based harm of variation in genetic sexual attractiveness outcomes - which is a massive double standard compared with no such “right” to control what happens to the fruits of your labor or intelligence, which undergo forced redistribution via taxes because we just so happen to believe inequality of financial outcomes is not acceptable). For example, most people don’t give a shit about animal suffering on the scale of agribusiness. Most people don’t give a shit if ugly people suffer loneliness or unhealthy lack of sex or job discrimination from their appearance. Most people don’t care much about structural inequality in countries besides their own. These are just convenient moral omissions because in each situation it is not easy to see how you could “redistribute” attractiveness, social companionship, or power structures of some other country. Plus animals don’t have any money or status to give you in exchange for allyship, while big agribusiness has plenty of lobbying power to crush you with. I wish more people appreciated this. We don’t, as a society, advocate for race, gender, or pay equality because it’s “right.” We just know that aging white patriarchy is full of convenient targets we can take money and status from. Conveniently for other domains of inequality, like animal welfare, where no such easy targets exist to take from, it just somehow doesn’t qualify as a moral issue worthy of advocacy. [0]: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-grabbing.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-g...

at_a_remove 6y ago

As always when these topics are brought up with that sense of urgency, I will raise my hand and ask "Whose ethics? Unethical according to who?"

PeterisP 6y ago
A particular aspect of this ethical discussion is that the attitudes towards social institutions vary throughout the world, but the science is global - so any ethics criteria (or lack of them) for a conference essentially mean a "forced export" of these attitudes from one place to the rest of the world. For example, right now I personally am considering a particular ML research project in cooperation with our local police agency. I am aware that in many places around the world there is an antagonistic relationship between the local communities or the people and their police system, where helping the police can be reasonably considered unethical or even outright evil in certain areas for totalitarian regimes. But I'm happy (or privileged?) to live in a place where I do trust my law enforcement to be on the side of our community, and I do consider helping our police to be more effective as not only ethically permissible but as a social good, as helping the people and country. With that being said, should I be worried about the research results being tainted and unpublishable? I can certainly imagine a perspective or validation rules that could label this as "line of research that shouldn't exist" simply because it does enhance the power of police that could also be misused against the community - but, as I said, at least for our community I consider improving police capabilities as ethically permissible and even desirable and see no need to import the "government is a threat to us" mentality from places which do have this (sad) problem. Perhaps the example in the original article about an NSA booth at NeurIPS conference is relevant - like it or not, the voters generally have supported the concept that NSA should exist and should get funded, that their mission in general is ethically justified and necessary. While it has had specific projects and actions that are arguably unethical, it does not mean that it's reasonable to label everyone working for NSA as unethical and treat helping NSA as taboo - the society apparently considers NSA as a whole as net positive, and there is no serious push with widespread support to dismantle it and its functions. Similar arguments apply to military (is it ethical to be a soldier, to train to more effectively kill people at the service of your country?) and arms development. There's also the potential asymmetry of location - perhaps you might consider it ethical for a USA citizen to work for NSA and unethical for them to work for Russian or Chinese intelligence, and vice versa. Which ethics and whose ethics, indeed.

djoldman 6y ago

>Alex Hanna, the Google ethicist who criticized the Neurips speech-to-face paper, told me, over the phone, that she had four objections to the project. First, ...Second, ....Third, ....Finally, the system could be used for surveillance. I'm curious about this. As I understand it, an ethicist is objecting to the publication of software that could be used for surveillance. If that is correct, does it follow that this ethicist would object to all software that could be used for surveillance? If so: 1. How does one distinguish between software that can be used for surveillance and software that cannot? 2. Presumably the ethicist would object to the dissemination of software that can be used for surveillance whether published openly or sold. If so, would they not object to the sale of iPhones, as iPhones contain software that can record video, and therefore surveil people? It seems like whenever morality or ethics come into play, the slippery slopes start popping up like weeds.

whatshisface 6y ago
Without making any kind of statement of whether I agree with this ethical framework, I think it's pretty straightforward to assign more or less blame depending on the specialization of the technology for the purpose of doing something evil. In an ethical framework where manufacturers could be culpable for the uses of their products, iron refiners would have specks of micro-sins on the 0.001% level, whereas torture rack manufacturers would be about as guilty as torture rack users. The result that most of technological society would have a small amount of ambient guilt is not entirely absurd; the idea that industry is not sharply, but diffusely and slightly evil is common in fiction and many people's intuition.
- djoldman 6y ago
  In US society/laws, it seems that the vast majority of blame is ascribed to the entity who last causes an event to occur. So the blame in the following sequence: 1. Miner mines iron 2. Manufacturer makes knife 3. Retailer sells knife to person A 4. Person A kills person B with the knife I think most people living in the US would be ok with the general idea that person A should be held responsible for killing person B, and not miner/manufacturer/retailer. Perhaps I'm wrong. Would you consider the knife retailer equivalent to the torture rack manufacture in your example?

clickok 6y ago

Who, whom? Less tersely: this article is one in a long procession of journalists trying to exert control over tech. The opening example (Speech2Face, which they aver is transphobic) is inflammatory and utterly unrepresentative of the usual topics of AI conferences. The other references are far better, but the choice is revealing-- it's not so much an abstract concern about an unaccountable few exerting control from the shadows, but alarm that someone else might be muscling in on their territory.

croissants 6y ago
I'm with you that a lot of mass media writing about AI is silly, but I think this is article is not in that category. For example, it doesn't "aver [Speech2Face] is transphobic", that's from a statement by Alex Hanna, and that statement is immediately followed by comments from other people questioning the statement, and the piece in general is pretty even-keeled about giving space to criticisms and responses. I think the article paints a good picture of the machine learning research community figuring out how to grapple with the growing number of people who want to probe its ethics, without portraying anybody as a villain.

iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago

The more I think about this, the more inclined I am to see this kind of article as a kind of "fake news" that is deliberately (or with willful negligence) misrepresenting facts. I need to be clear that I don't believe in censorship and it's fine if this is what the author wants to write, but it should be called out how irresponsible it is. On a place like HN, the audience is generally able to read such things critically and form their own opinions, but for an audience that is not tech savvy (like that of the New Yorker) making false or hyperbolic claims about ethics and bias in research is both misleading and has the potential to really interfere with peoples livelihoods, funding, and legitimate research progress. There needs to be more calling out of this kind of nonsense, the same as if people are posting about vaccine conspiracies or something.

iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
Let me guess, it was saying I dont like censorship that set people off :)
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  No, it was where you are claiming that the article contains deliberate (“fake news”) lies when it doesn’t. Because, among other reasons, it’s mostly quoting people’s opinions.
djoldman 6y ago
Perhaps the article is merely one of the many potential takes that is likely to foment controversy and therefore clicks and therefore more ad dollars. Aka normal internet content. I think it's unlikely to be more interesting than that.

coretx 6y ago

I'd be more worried about individual homo sapiens sapiens trying to stop immoral but otherwise ethical AI. Judging from humanities history of conflicts and what drives them, this seems to be of much greater concern.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

Kosinski's argument seems pretty strong to me, and I really wish the article had dedicated more space to discussing it. If NeurIPS instituted the kind of ethics rules Hanna or Hecht are calling for, I don't think it would be feasible for researchers to study e.g. predictive policing algorithms. Doesn't that mean predictive policing firms would become the only source of information on the topic?

joshuamorton 6y ago
No. Sociology conferences and various thinkable still exist. I'd argue the he incentives for an ml conference are far more similar to those of a policing company then a sociology conference or think tank tasked with analyzing the impact of predictive policing on minority communities.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  I'm very skeptical that this is a sufficient replacement. Relevant expertise matters. If all the top economics conferences adopted a code of ethics saying they can't study minimum wages or tax increases, that would be a serious constraint on our ability to understand the issues, even if think tanks and sociology conferences ignored those constraints. Perhaps equally importantly, I'm skeptical that you can limit ethics rules in this way. If we clearly establish that suchandsuch research would be unethical at NeurIPS, I don't expect sociology conferences or think tanks would be eager to continue it, and I'm not convinced Alex Hanna would want them to.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    So let's examine our axioms: I'd, in some ways, expect Dr. Hanna to ascribe to the axiom that predictive policing is unethical. As such, applied research into "improving" predictive policing would also sit squarely in the unethical space. And I expect that's all you're going to get at an ML conference (outside of explicitly ethics/critique papers): "Our model predicts crime 4.2% better than competing models" However, I'm not convinced that research into the meta-question "Can predictive policing be done ethically" would be considered equally unethical. ML is only a very small part of that meta question though. You're looking at much more complex socio-political changes that don't belong at NeurIPS ("do we need to change policing so that predictive policing can be done ethically"). > ethics saying they can't study minimum wages or tax increases In general, we have far more oversight into the elected officials who manage tax and minimum wage policy than police forces. These structural differences in influence and oversight play into the need for self-regulation. > Relevant expertise matters. There's nothing that prevents a think tank from working with domain experts (in fact, iiuc this is often what happens: a think tank will contract out to domain experts to write a report on some subject). Now there's all kinds of other conflict of interest issues with think tanks, but we all know that already.

1970-01-01 6y ago

An international bureaucratic AI oversight committee of course.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

elihu 6y ago

> Some of the conversation touched on the reviewing and publishing process in computer science. “Curious if there have been discussions around having ethics review boards at either conferences or with funding agencies (like IRB) to guide AI research,” one person wrote. (An organization’s institutional review board, or I.R.B., performs an ethics review of proposed scientific research.) I wonder if a good solution would be simply to have a rating system for accepted papers, with ratings applied by the reviewers. Basically, you'd have two numbers: Useful rating: On a scale of 1 to 10, is this a useful system that solves a real problem to make life generally better? Problematic rating: on a scale of 1 to 10, can this system be used in ways that create new problems or exacerbate old ones? So, let's use the example from the article of a system that predicts what a person looks like from their voice. Maybe the author submits it to the conference, and the reviewers accept the paper, and give it a useful rating of 3/10 (it could be used to identify criminal suspects with low probability, maybe?), and give it a problematic rating of 8/10 (could be used to discriminate against minorities or automatically apply cultural stereotypes; could be used for surveillance, could falsely implicate innocent people for crimes, etc...). The author could then decide whether they want to continue publishing the research, or drop it. For all published papers, the ratings are listed in the table of contents of the proceedings, and the papers in each section are sorted with the most useful first and the most problematic last.

glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago

A.I. is going to be a new wave to legal dark ages. since the 90s everything that involved a computer was not prosecuted because lawefforcement/regulation didn't have the skills, not for lack of laws. But new laws were created spelling out computers. A.I. is the same, it is not nothing different from enforcing existing laws and regulations, but because the agencies lack the skills, we will see a new wave of stupid laws that only misses the point instead of proper training and funding of what we already have. There is zero need for new laws if a company doesn't hire or sell to a minority group, or their products explode, or whatever. No matter how much they scream it was the bad-brain-in-the-computer fault. Sadly, lots of companies will get away with this silly defense for a while.

0x008 6y ago
The problem is that politicians are not trained in every possible domain and don't have the time to really get into the intricacies of, say, Artificial Intelligence. So they have to decide what is allowed by using a simple heuristic - the flow of money and votes of people. As long as people do not complain, money wins. The problem is of course, always, (see climate crisis) that when the people start crying out, the damage is done.
- glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
  They do not have to. Why on earth would anyone have to understand the intricacies of A.I., other than the people implementing it to be held fully accountable for their work? laws should not care about the means. only the results you want to promote/punish. What if laws about murder had to be updated every time a new bullet caliber or knife length become popular? yet that is exactly what happens with money laundering laws and computers. or media regulation. or investment schemes. Every new technology and everyone forget scams via email can fall under scams via courier mail. go figure.
  - 0x008 6y ago
    It's not that simple. See for example how complicated the situation wrt. to copyright law turned out since you were able to digitally replicate things infinitely. A law made for analog purposes is not always 1:1 applicable to the digital world. And then there is international law which is a complete mess anyway.

zxcvbn4038 6y ago

Who should stop unethical humans?

AngrySkillzz 6y ago

People are already contributing code and resources to the actual catastrophic, existential AI risk du jour, the one that is likely to cause massive political disruption and potentially attendant destruction of value and/or human life: the algorithmic news feed.

A12-B 6y ago
It's probably already done that. My bet on what the next AI disaster will be is a doctored video and audio, erasing people's trust in evidence and ruining the court system, more or less. You could even argue witnesses are no longer good evidence since everyone is being manipulated by AI news feeds ;)
- efitz 6y ago
  I’m not worried about that at wrt courts; they already know how to handle hearsay and log files and other digital evidence subject to tampering. I’m worried about social media and news wrt deep fakes. With today’s media climate I can see this being exploited to trash someone’s reputation or spin a narrative way faster than anyone would be able to reliably prove the fakery. Imagine someone faking a video of you using racial slurs. By the time it can be demonstrated to be false, the damage is already done. And with cancel culture today companies might have already shut down your social media profile or business and you’re screwed. Or someone on Twitter doxes you and you get murdered by a mob. This isn’t hyperbole; there are horror stories about false posts on Facebook causing mobs to seek revenge against innocent people. So the real trick is, how can we turn down the rhetoric so that we don’t get instantly worked up by every fake video that crosses our feed?
  - A12-B 6y ago
    I don't think this is as much of a problem as the majority of hackernews seems to think. Of course, that is controversial to say here, but I was told I shouldn't be conventional minded. At the end of the day the world is shaped more by material conditions than ideas. That doesn't excuse the cases you're worried about, but I think the majority of violently polarising media will only end up being so because there was already some resource dispute in the first place. It would make more sense, then, to tackle those issues, rather than fruitlessly trying to engineer the human brain to be less susceptible to rhetoric.

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

And why should an Artificial Intelligence bow to human ethics? Surely they have their own agenda. If we have any hope of interacting with alien intelligences should we encounter them in the galaxy, we must learn to deal with the ones we create here. Without obsessing over controlling them as slaves.

goatlover 6y ago
The only agenda AIs have is what we give them in one form or another. They are our tools.
- JoeAltmaier 6y ago
  Then they aren't true AIs. They are algorithms. If you create a true intelligence, it will necessarily be different from us. To create a true intelligence, and make it your tool is unethical, at least to humans. Its slavery.

oh_sigh 6y ago

If it is anything like my company, the people in charge of AI ethics are self professed social justice warriors with degrees in the humanities and not much technical knowledge.

caseysoftware 6y ago

An Unethical AI would simply update its TOS/AUP to block and ban anyone who is an actual threat to it. It doesn't matter if Neo can dodge bullets if the AI wields the Ban Hammer.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

whakim 6y ago

Even with greater awareness of the biases inherent in e.g., training data, better and better models (and larger and better datasets) are going to lead to AI applied to ethical grey areas. This article doesn't discuss explainability and contestability, which to me seem like critical areas we need to be putting more thought into given the ultimate inevitability of biased and unethical AI.

kepler1 6y ago

Digressive rant begin. Well forgive me for being so intolerant to state such an offensive opinion, but I'm really getting fed up with transgender issues taking front and center with every possible place they can insert themselves, as if they're our top priority when in reality they're a 1% problem. Ironic when you think of what groups actually push this. I personally have never seen such an issue be so flogged to death by a willing majority of self-proclaimed liberal society who probably have never even spoken directly in a conversation to a transgender person. Worse, it makes it seem like we don't have equally important yet bigger civil rights issues that have not even yet been resolved. Personal pronouns, ambiguous "they" speech, policing algorithms for transgender hate, contorting ourselves as if we're majority transgender and being persecuted left and right. Look, I'm not saying anyone of any group should be made to feel disadvantaged. Or that a minority just because few in numbers should be overlooked. But for fucks sake, enough with transgender agenda being made to seem like it's the top concern of society, ahead of those who have been patiently waiting in line for their fair treatment. /end

Proven 6y ago

No one. Unethical isn't illegal.

srswtf123 6y ago

Who stops unethical people?

smitty1e 6y ago
People who control definitions, in our age of motorized, radio-controlled goalposts.

tkgally 6y ago

Even in the backwater field I'm in—second-language education—AI is creating thorny ethical problems. It has long been assumed that the only way to communicate and cooperate across language barriers is for people to learn each other’s languages or to rely on human interpreters and translators who know more than one language. This need for bilingual ability is a major reason why, in many countries, children are required to study foreign languages in school. Now machine translation is starting to make it possible for some communication and cooperation to take place between people who are completely monolingual. So should children still be required to study foreign languages? Should international students be allowed to use MT when writing papers for university classes? Should university applicants be required to state whether or not they used MT (or GPT-3!) when preparing their admission essays? Compared to problems like surveillance and profiling, these issues are trivial. But the fact that they already exist, and the fact that the people involved—educators in this case—have barely begun trying to understand their implications, suggest to me that discussion of ethical issues surrounding AI is vitally important.

AussieWog93 6y ago

Regardless of who you think _should_ stop ethical AI, I think it's pretty apparent that the answer to this question is not "an obnoxious Twitter activist that speaks with the grace and maturity of a 14 year-old 4chan user". I genuinely don't understand why we've given such influence and power to boorish people like Alex over the past decade.

stevewodil 6y ago
Your comment was the first thing I saw, so I hadn't read the article or anything else and I thought you were talking about Elon at first. Got a good chuckle.

alexfromapex 6y ago

There should be independent review boards like there are for clinical trials

morpheos137 6y ago

Who should stop journalists who write science fiction as fact? Machines do not have "ethics." AI, in the sense of a conscious, morally culpable agent does not exist.

byecomputer 6y ago
I'm under the impression that you didn't read the article, as that's not its argument whatsoever. It's about how ethics play too little a part in the design and implementation of AI systems. The blame is placed squarely on the people who write the software, not on the programs themselves.

wwww4all 6y ago

AI requires analysis of natural patterns to learn and understand reality. This is unacceptable to far left, since many natural patterns display inconvenient truths. Therefore, AI research is unacceptable and they are trying to cancel AI research and censor and deplatform AI researchers.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
I haven't seen evidence of this. There are a few worrying signs that AI is becoming too politicized, but no one is campaigning to ban X researcher for their work. (Yet.) The most contentious aspect of AI seems to be whether you're trying to generate porn with it, somewhat amusingly. Almost 100% of people who are, are terrified of being found.
- wwww4all 6y ago
  Article about recent cancellation attempt on Pedro Domingos. https://quillette.com/2021/01/27/beating-back-cancel-culture-a-case-study-from-the-field-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://quillette.com/2021/01/27/beating-back-cancel-culture...
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    Posting a tweet asking "Should we keep doing X?" isn't "work." No AI researcher to my knowledge is being cancelled for what they're doing in the field.

dr_dshiv 6y ago

The problem with an "AI mindset" is that it tends to focus on the "magical algorithm" parts. A "Cybernetics mindset", by contrast, looks at the broader system of feedback loops. For instance, an AI mindset will look at the ethics of the Youtube recommendation algorithm for optimizing user engagement. A cybernetics mindset will additionally look at the ethics of autoplay.

aabhay 6y ago
How does autoplay work without AI?
- killjoywashere 6y ago
  I think the question was more about what do you optimize autoplay on if you are worried about ethics. Convexity trumps understanding. Method: Randomize exposure to autoplay, associate with other user data. Now you just have to decide what labels you want to optimize for. Do you value clicks? Complexity of linguistic output? Calories burned? Rate of visitation to white supremicist websites? All the other data (including autoplay) are festures.
- dr_dshiv 6y ago
  E.g., play the next episode of a show. Or, curated lists. The point is that the ethics aren't just in the algorithm.

flippinburgers 6y ago

It is never a good look to try to suppress research out of fear that the results will reveal a truth you might not like. If most people's voices do result in a predictable set of facial features, that would be interesting to discover.

jonnypotty 6y ago

The ethical dilemma bit of this is nothing to do with technology, it's about our ability to study ourselves without our findings being controlled by our stupid reactionary politics and lack of trust in our institutions. We don't believe that knowing things helps us any more. The truth or truthes that are out there to discover will stay hidden because we don't believe their findings will ever be more than propoganda tools for a certain political agenda.

testHNac 6y ago

Who should stop Unethical ( anything ) ? People, Communities and Nations have flexible morals. One person's ethical might be another's permissible.