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> I work within a university and socially impactful research goes through rigerous ethics committees before being approved This is a gross exaggeration. Only
by cvwright 3y ago
> I work within a university and socially impactful research goes through rigerous ethics committees before being approved
This is a gross exaggeration. Only a small portion of academic research requires IRB approval, and it's mostly limited to experiments on humans or animals.
If we were to start requiring IRB pre-approval for all research that might be "socially impactful", it would be the end of progress as we know it.
The first step would be to determine what counts as "socially impactful". You couldn't limit it to just AI. What about security and privacy? Why not all of CS? And then, why not Economics or History?
Source: worked for various universities doing research, first as graduate assistant, then scientist, then tenure-track professor, for 19 or 20 years.
- throw_nbvc1234 3y agoI think there's a big difference between "socially impactful" and "enevitable seeming break down of our social structures"; that difference being the potential (direct) downside. It seems unlikely that most history or economic research would have the same downsides as AI. Some things in CS are already regulated such as encryption via EAR: https://web.stanford.edu/group/export/encrypt_ear.html https://web.stanford.edu/group/export/encrypt_ear.html
- evolve2k 3y agoAre you working in medical/health? There are very different ethics bars for different fields. Do you see no value in having ethics committees? Is your argument that they took appropriate precautions before releasing their paid tools publically? My point isn’t that these AI research houses should have the same ethics committee as a university, it’s that they should have ethics committee appropriate to the risks around the work they are doing.