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The real problem with ethics is that it's not a science nor a rigorous discipline: it's a trend. It's whatever is trendy to say and think at the moment. You cer

The real problem with ethics is that it's not a science nor a rigorous discipline: it's a trend. It's whatever is trendy to say and think at the moment. You certainly don't have to understand the tech to practice "ethics" (if any technical knowledge was required the field would be pretty much empty). The way it works is you basically shame people and tech. You don't need to make a strong or valid case against a behavior or a tech, like a law would, because it's not legally binding. It's not real engineering regulations like a building or fire code. At best it's a mob made of folks who convinced other ethics PhDs to grant them a PhD that will rally against you and shame you [0]. Great move from Google to stop feeding the ethics racket. [0] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter-amid-acrimonious-exchanges-on-ai-bias/ https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-twitter...

rav 6y ago
> Great move from Google to stop feeding the ethics racket. Read the article again - it's Google being uninvited as a sponsor. The title is poorly translated from German and should probably be changed to something like "Google no longer wanted as a sponsor of AI ethics conference".
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  It's a nice way for the conference to make it seem they are the ones who decided to terminate the relationship. That's like quitting right before getting fired to save face.
  - Bancakes 6y ago
    You're holding Google to falsely high regard.
teruakohatu 6y ago
> It's not real engineering regulations like a building or fire code AI or Data Science ethicists tend to be qualified data scientists who have a better understanding of concepts like differential privacy than the vast majority of software developers. Don't dismiss them all because you disagree with some of them.
- astrea 6y ago
  While you both take two sides of the argument, the truth, as it tends to be, lies somewhere in the middle. While I agree that there are some qualified scientists, etc. that have taken up this issue, there is still a sort of extension of cancel culture of "LinkedInfluencers" and such that just hop on the bandwagon of hating anything vaguely AI adjacent. I think the playground dismissal of his point: "Don't dismiss them all because you disagree with some of them." was rather thoughtless.
  - teruakohatu 6y ago
    > "Don't dismiss them all because you disagree with some of them." was rather thoughtless. Th OP refered to them as a back scratching "mob", but when I say don't dismiss them all you accuse me of being "rather thoughtless" and using a "playground dismissal" when I gave specific reasons why they are qualified for the job.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
motohagiography 6y ago
While I could agree to a point, it's hard to separate the flavour of ethics from the need for reflection itself. A thorny ethics example from my own role was a decade+ ago I was hired to do a privacy impact assessment (PIA) on an ML solution for detecting benefits fraud. It had all the ingredients for a complete debacle: "artificial intelligence"(?!), a vulnerable population, credit reporting companies, arms length government agencies, highly paid consulting firms, etc. What we delivered was modifications to the system to solve their core fraud risk problem without making peoples lives (more of) a dystopian hell. Privacy is the currently the technology ethics department in large institutions, and I really see the AI ethics people as fancy privacy people with more math. Privacy has moved on from being a technical discipline that old hacker dudes like me did to being one largely done by women with law degrees. The tension between the security architect competency and the privacy policy analyst is still there in the field, but now we all see how they add a lot of value without needing the bottom-up view of a technologist. The flavour of ethics in the privacy field has evolved, and I was absolutely suspicious of the change, as if you weren't a cypherpunk in privacy in 2005, you were a 5th column infiltrator looking to co-opt it for corporate ends - but of course, that's not true. Anyway a lot of text to say don't throw out babies with bathwater on AI ethics, but I'm saying they're not as new as anyone thinks, and if you think privacy is important, then you will probably recognize ethics in AI is important as well.
- Dracophoenix 6y ago
  What's we're the differences you has noticed between "old hacker" privacy and "female lawyer" privacy?
manux 6y ago
> The real problem with ethics is that it's not a science This is simply untrue. The goal of AI ethics research is (also) to build algorithms where one of the _inputs_ is a set of ethics. It doesn't matter what those ethics are. It just so happens that the "set of ethics" currently fed in tends to have a particular flavor ("woke liberal" ethics), which you seem to disagree with. Finding the algorithms matters, and it's likely that the standard ethics put in are going to come from some dominant ideology, but we still need the algorithms if we are to understand how to make AI that aligns with humanity's interests (however they are defined). I'd call that computer science.
- LunaSea 6y ago
  As you pointed out, people don't agree on a set of rules, so what's the point of the algorithm and field?
  - manux 6y ago
    Here's an analogy: laws vary from country to country, from state to state, city to city. But we understand the principle of law-making, what laws mean and how they're applied. This is fairly uniform. What really changes from place to place is the content of those laws. AI ethics and AI safety are attempting to give us a set of "law-making" rules but for AI. We get to decide (democratically ideally), in countries, states, cities, what "ethics" (what laws) we want, but AI Ethics as a field gives us tools to achieve that regardless of what the ethics/laws are. For example, how do we encode the trolley problem in self-driving cars? We could decide democratically that cars should act and kill 1 instead of 5. Or the opposite. But then how do we translate that into ifs and else? No one really knows how to do that.
- tanseydavid 6y ago
  >> I'd call that computer science. Yes it's Computer Science but it's implementing normative-ethics. Why not provide the AI descriptive-ethics instead and let it decide for itself?
currymj 6y ago
this just isn't true; if you skim some abstracts of papers in the field, you will see that in fact there is a lot of technical content. a lot of the big famous names in AI ethics (e.g. Moritz Hardt, Cynthia Dwork) also have very strong contributions outside this field.
yesenadam 6y ago
> The real problem with ethics is that it's not a science nor a rigorous discipline: it's a trend. It's whatever is trendy to say and think at the moment. Maybe it's trendy to say and think that? but that doesn't sound anything like ethics. Ethics is a part of philosophy, not a part of science or maths. That it is what it is, is not a "problem with ethics". (Sorry if I misunderstand you. Maybe you were just talking about "AI ethics". ...In which case, what do people who call AI ethics "ethics" call ethics, a.k.a. moral philosophy?)
hdhdhsjsbdh 6y ago
Hell, why not get rid of ethics entirely? Especially since people have been arguing about this for thousands of years already. And really it’s been pointless if you think about it, considering we can’t just answer it like a math problem. What good has it done us, other than forming the basis of modern societies, jurisprudence, religion – basically the substrate upon which humanity is built. We’ve clearly moved past the need for it though.
Bancakes 6y ago
Ethics can last centuries and are the basis of customary law and the idea of a "reasonable and prudent person". AI engineers don't have their hide in the game, they just work. It's not interesting. Introducing AI as automation for human jobs has consequences beyond one company's profits. So there needs to be non-profits or committees that take a stance and represent themselves. There doesn't need to be some scientific papr on "AI hut my job" because all the science is on the company's part, making the AI in the first place.

rav 6y ago

> Great move from Google to stop feeding the ethics racket. Read the article again - it's Google being uninvited as a sponsor. The title is poorly translated from German and should probably be changed to something like "Google no longer wanted as a sponsor of AI ethics conference".

908B64B197 6y ago
It's a nice way for the conference to make it seem they are the ones who decided to terminate the relationship. That's like quitting right before getting fired to save face.
- Bancakes 6y ago
  You're holding Google to falsely high regard.

teruakohatu 6y ago

> It's not real engineering regulations like a building or fire code AI or Data Science ethicists tend to be qualified data scientists who have a better understanding of concepts like differential privacy than the vast majority of software developers. Don't dismiss them all because you disagree with some of them.

astrea 6y ago
While you both take two sides of the argument, the truth, as it tends to be, lies somewhere in the middle. While I agree that there are some qualified scientists, etc. that have taken up this issue, there is still a sort of extension of cancel culture of "LinkedInfluencers" and such that just hop on the bandwagon of hating anything vaguely AI adjacent. I think the playground dismissal of his point: "Don't dismiss them all because you disagree with some of them." was rather thoughtless.
- teruakohatu 6y ago
  > "Don't dismiss them all because you disagree with some of them." was rather thoughtless. Th OP refered to them as a back scratching "mob", but when I say don't dismiss them all you accuse me of being "rather thoughtless" and using a "playground dismissal" when I gave specific reasons why they are qualified for the job.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

motohagiography 6y ago

While I could agree to a point, it's hard to separate the flavour of ethics from the need for reflection itself. A thorny ethics example from my own role was a decade+ ago I was hired to do a privacy impact assessment (PIA) on an ML solution for detecting benefits fraud. It had all the ingredients for a complete debacle: "artificial intelligence"(?!), a vulnerable population, credit reporting companies, arms length government agencies, highly paid consulting firms, etc. What we delivered was modifications to the system to solve their core fraud risk problem without making peoples lives (more of) a dystopian hell. Privacy is the currently the technology ethics department in large institutions, and I really see the AI ethics people as fancy privacy people with more math. Privacy has moved on from being a technical discipline that old hacker dudes like me did to being one largely done by women with law degrees. The tension between the security architect competency and the privacy policy analyst is still there in the field, but now we all see how they add a lot of value without needing the bottom-up view of a technologist. The flavour of ethics in the privacy field has evolved, and I was absolutely suspicious of the change, as if you weren't a cypherpunk in privacy in 2005, you were a 5th column infiltrator looking to co-opt it for corporate ends - but of course, that's not true. Anyway a lot of text to say don't throw out babies with bathwater on AI ethics, but I'm saying they're not as new as anyone thinks, and if you think privacy is important, then you will probably recognize ethics in AI is important as well.

Dracophoenix 6y ago
What's we're the differences you has noticed between "old hacker" privacy and "female lawyer" privacy?

manux 6y ago

> The real problem with ethics is that it's not a science This is simply untrue. The goal of AI ethics research is (also) to build algorithms where one of the _inputs_ is a set of ethics. It doesn't matter what those ethics are. It just so happens that the "set of ethics" currently fed in tends to have a particular flavor ("woke liberal" ethics), which you seem to disagree with. Finding the algorithms matters, and it's likely that the standard ethics put in are going to come from some dominant ideology, but we still need the algorithms if we are to understand how to make AI that aligns with humanity's interests (however they are defined). I'd call that computer science.

LunaSea 6y ago
As you pointed out, people don't agree on a set of rules, so what's the point of the algorithm and field?
- manux 6y ago
  Here's an analogy: laws vary from country to country, from state to state, city to city. But we understand the principle of law-making, what laws mean and how they're applied. This is fairly uniform. What really changes from place to place is the content of those laws. AI ethics and AI safety are attempting to give us a set of "law-making" rules but for AI. We get to decide (democratically ideally), in countries, states, cities, what "ethics" (what laws) we want, but AI Ethics as a field gives us tools to achieve that regardless of what the ethics/laws are. For example, how do we encode the trolley problem in self-driving cars? We could decide democratically that cars should act and kill 1 instead of 5. Or the opposite. But then how do we translate that into ifs and else? No one really knows how to do that.
tanseydavid 6y ago
>> I'd call that computer science. Yes it's Computer Science but it's implementing normative-ethics. Why not provide the AI descriptive-ethics instead and let it decide for itself?

currymj 6y ago

this just isn't true; if you skim some abstracts of papers in the field, you will see that in fact there is a lot of technical content. a lot of the big famous names in AI ethics (e.g. Moritz Hardt, Cynthia Dwork) also have very strong contributions outside this field.

yesenadam 6y ago

> The real problem with ethics is that it's not a science nor a rigorous discipline: it's a trend. It's whatever is trendy to say and think at the moment. Maybe it's trendy to say and think that? but that doesn't sound anything like ethics. Ethics is a part of philosophy, not a part of science or maths. That it is what it is, is not a "problem with ethics". (Sorry if I misunderstand you. Maybe you were just talking about "AI ethics". ...In which case, what do people who call AI ethics "ethics" call ethics, a.k.a. moral philosophy?)

hdhdhsjsbdh 6y ago

Hell, why not get rid of ethics entirely? Especially since people have been arguing about this for thousands of years already. And really it’s been pointless if you think about it, considering we can’t just answer it like a math problem. What good has it done us, other than forming the basis of modern societies, jurisprudence, religion – basically the substrate upon which humanity is built. We’ve clearly moved past the need for it though.

Bancakes 6y ago

Ethics can last centuries and are the basis of customary law and the idea of a "reasonable and prudent person". AI engineers don't have their hide in the game, they just work. It's not interesting. Introducing AI as automation for human jobs has consequences beyond one company's profits. So there needs to be non-profits or committees that take a stance and represent themselves. There doesn't need to be some scientific papr on "AI hut my job" because all the science is on the company's part, making the AI in the first place.