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That's easy. I work for a company that has a similar body. Its a PITA but they prevent over-zealous POs and engineers from building creepy things that get the b
by aenis 4y ago
That's easy. I work for a company that has a similar body. Its a PITA but they prevent over-zealous POs and engineers from building creepy things that get the brand in trouble. (E.g., "why don't we record our users and predict their sentiment from facial expressions and tone of the voice" - those people will tell you why it's a bad idea). There, hope it helps.
- majjgepolja 4y ago
- lm28469 4y agoDo you have any source for that or are you an armchair statistician ?
- majjgepolja 4y agoJust look at the armchair advocate fired from Google last year.
- chess_buster 4y agoJust like your comment.
- krona 4y agoThat just sounds like your product owners and legal department have outsourced one of their core competencies to another department, perhaps to reduce their own accountability.
- aenis 4y agoPOs have different incentives - they usually get rewarded for features built. A good PO has lots of ideas, some of those may be good for the product ("we will serve more relevant ads if we spy on our users!") and bad for the brand. The ML Ethics teams are usually part of the legal teams and are staffed mainly with lawyers. Not sure how it was with Twitter. It's also entirely possible those teams did not do a very good job, considering what a sh1thole Twitter is, so they may as well do without one.
- ceejayoz 4y agoWhy are you ok outsourcing to a legal department, but not an ethics one?
- threeseed 4y agoIt isn't one of their core competencies though. If you look in the medical industry for example ethical decisions are always managed by a different group than Product/Legal because it's a completely different set of skills and competencies. Even more so at places like Twitter which are heavily dependent on ML models to make real-time decisions. And so you need a dedicated team that is proactive rather then reactive like a Legal team would be.
- krona 4y ago> It isn't one of their core competencies though. Putting the "what will our users think" question in an ethical framing is not obviously (to me) going to benefit users. (Especially when modern fashionable ethics centers around utilitarian normative ethics, but that's besides the point.)
- aenis 4y agoRight. The real point is of course to make sure what gets built is good for the brand. That revealing how something works won't make people mad, disgusted, less likely to use its services, do business with it, etc. Of course hardly anybody really cares about the ethics per se - only for the perception of the company. Some companies, such as for instance Procter & Gamble or Apple care about their brand equity a lot, since they rely on it to charge above market premiums. Twitter needs to care about that too, since if they get caught doing something unsavoury they will turn toxic to their advertisers, or at least those who care about their brands. I am not a marketing exec but if Twitter now drops the pretense of caring about ethics you will see major advertisers pull out, and make a point of communicating why they do it. Thats the ROI on having functioning ethics teams.
- watwut 4y agoProduct owners and legal departments are not accountable for unethical features or behaviors is a big point.