A pencil in a very literal sense does have biases. The way it has been sharpened will greatly affect the quality and shape of writing that it can be used to cre

A pencil in a very literal sense does have biases. The way it has been sharpened will greatly affect the quality and shape of writing that it can be used to create. This is a natural feature of pencils and implements like AIs that we create. There will be biases in tools. A major problem with AI biases appears to be that presently, people have little ability to infer biases in closed source models. This suggests that open source approaches provide the only avenue to allow users to understand the sources of bias. My pencil was sharpened in a factory, on a machine I cannot see---it is not clear to me why it is hard to write "8" with it. / My AI was trained in a computing cluster on private data---I cannot hope to understand why it only makes jokes about men. Everything changes when I control the machine that builds the pencil and sharpens it. The assumption that people assume AI is god feels somewhat presumptuous. Is this really a sound basis for ethical reasoning in this context? Do you, or frankly anyone working in AI ethics, have data to back this up? I would love to learn more about this aspect. In popular culture, there is just as much the idea of the AI as a flawed being, of limited capacities due to its machine incarnation, unable to relate to actual human experience and motivations. There is just as much tradition of this as of AI=god. Of course, this is all a moot point, I think, because the motivated response is to reign in something. We won't be able to! The field of AI ethics can dominate inside google or openai, but it will soon have no teeth. If you want to focus on ethical use and development of AI, you're going to have to focus on people, not machines. It's a social, not engineering, problem.