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'AI Ethicists' is the ultimate grift of all time. For one, all these are self-appointed and they sort of fell back to AI Ethics, when they couldn't do hardcore

'AI Ethicists' is the ultimate grift of all time. For one, all these are self-appointed and they sort of fell back to AI Ethics, when they couldn't do hardcore (AI/ML). It's like how people who couldn't write software fell back to QA testing (Yes, I know there are exceptional QA testers who are passionate about QA, but those are exceptions). Unless you understand dynamic complex systems (Math and Physics), who can effectively calculate the NET Benefit of AI over the next several decades, you are as clueless as any other person Second, none of the AI Ethicists ever talk about the positives of AI (climate change, healthcare, material science, productivity) but always some imagined hurt for 'marginalized community'. Considering how these same people roasted Mr Beast for helping the said marginalized community, I'd take their opinion with the grain of salt. Third, in the extreme case, there is massive anti-tech, anti-white, anti-bro harborings from these AI Ethicists and want to shut down AI just because. If you don't believe me just watch the Twitter feed from Timnit, Alex Hanna. They are your typical flag-bearers for AI Ethics

zone411 3y ago
To those who observe the field from the outside, this might seem like an unjustified attack, but it is also 100% true. Unfortunately, many are afraid to say it because they fear for their careers.
ethanbond 3y ago
1) There are plenty of people who are concerned about the ethics of AI who don’t fit your description, including many of the most prolific researchers in the space e.g. Hinton, Suleyman, and Sutskever. 2) “No one knows what the outcome will be” is a reason for caution, not against it. 3) Lots of people worried about ethics of AI are excited about the positive possibilities, e.g. Hinton, Suleyman, and Sutskever 4) The “roast” of Mr Beast was made up hysteria. The only quoted person expressing disdain was a single aid worker expressing disdain that he got so much press when there are thousands of people making aid their full time effort, not that he helped. That same aid worker made it amply clear that she was thankful for his help. All of that is very reasonable and far from the “white man yelled at for helping” narrative. 5) There are a lot of people who are concerned about the ethics of AI who do not want to “shut down AI.” E.g. Hinton, Suleyman, and Sutskever. 6) You can also choose to look at the strong versions of arguments instead of the weak versions. When you’re dealing with a cataclysmic technological change which, as you implied, no one is equipped to fully reason about, it’s a good idea to take the strong forms of every argument.
- zooq_ai 3y ago
  1) Suleyman, Ilya are not AI Ethicists. They are great AI/ML practitioners who have great Ethics. Which kind of highlights my point. Hire great AI/ML practitioners with strong Ethics. E.g Demis, Jeff Dean are also great practitioners with integrity and ethics. Grift is having an AI Ethics division whose sole purpose is to kneecap advancement. E.g Timnit and Alex Hanna 2) You are assuming that openAI, Microsoft and Google aren't cautious about their development. In fact their entire LLM releases are filled with over-cautious approach 3) Once again Hinton or Suleyman and Ilya are not the Ethics the article is talking about. They are talking about low-level grifters whose entire identity is depended ant on AI Ethics. I'm perfectly fine with Hinton, Ilya and Mustafa acting as AI ethicists. 6) LLMs are not cataclysmic. It's been 1 year since chatGPT has been released and pretty much diffused through out the world along with Midjourney and Runway. Yet, the world seems to perfectly chugging along fine (Yes, I understand long-tail risks, but they are completely overblown). Calling LLMs cataclysmic and raising alarms is exactly the wrong approach because what you are doing is effectively numbing down the public to AI alarmism. We have seen this play out before Climate, Donald Trump (because Mitt Romney was cataclysmic), Andrew Tate (because Jordan Petersen was cataclysmic)
  - llamaimperative 3y ago
    Sure, if you really mean people whose title and entire background is "AI ethicists" there are certainly lots of grifters (not "all" of them as you claim). It's to everyone's advantage, however, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. 2) No, I'm not assuming anything. I'm observing in actual reality unexpected and unintended results with every single release. That is clear evidence that they do not have a complete grasp on what they're building, which doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be stopped, but it does mean we can't be asleep at the wheel and just assuming "technology makes everything better." 6) I didn't say LLMs are cataclysmic, but they have made evident a few things. First, that we aren't great at predicting emergent capabilities. Second, that builders of these technologies will be deploying them to the public en masse before they're well understood and indeed connect these technologies to vital systems with real-world impact. Third, that capitalist incentives will almost certainly override other concerns. These are good reasons to be worried about the path of development of AI overall. They indicate that the system (technological capitalism) around the systems (the technologies themselves) are going to struggle to really steer its development in a deliberate fashion. Competitive market incentives will steer the ship, and we have no reason to believe that'll change between here and AGI.
buzz27 3y ago
Do you feel the way about other fields of applied ethics? Bioethics for example? Technology ethics? Or even more broadly, ethics generally? Also, and, of course, one can be a professional ethicist without being "anti-tech, anti-white, anti-bro". Whatever that means.
beloch 3y ago
I wouldn't dismiss an entire field of critical thought out of hand. There are some important points that deserve to be addressed. Some have likened AI's potential for change to technologies that made the industrial revolution possible. The industrial revolution was a great thing right? Everybody had more of everything after it was over. But what about during the revolution? The truth is that a lot of people suffered a great decline in quality (and duration) of life during the industrial revolution until social change caught up with technological progress. e.g. In England, early in the revolution, it was still illegal for workers to change jobs. When the choice was stay at your current job or go to jail, it's not a surprise that wages stayed artificially low and worker safety conditions were appalling. The complete lack of environmental regulations and the resulting pollution is another famous example of how social change had to play catch-up with technology. Right now, there is a lot of potential for AI to increase human suffering in the short term even if it is a net benefit in the long-term. At least some of the "AI ethicists" out there are trying to get ahead of the curve, and that's laudible. You might want to read "Power and Progress - Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity" by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. It's not really an AI focused book, but it will give you an appreciation of why some caution is warranted.
- baryphonic 3y ago
  > The truth is that a lot of people suffered a great decline in quality (and duration) of life during the industrial revolution until social change caught up with technological progress. e.g. In England, early in the revolution, it was still illegal for workers to change jobs. When the choice was stay at your current job or go to jail, it's not a surprise that wages stayed artificially low and worker safety conditions were appalling. Certainly aspects of the Industrial Revolution were quite damaging (albeit ultimately fixed by the law, regulation and, yes, organized labor), but the data doesn't seem to indicate that quality of life or life expectancy decreased. In areas that industrialized the earliest (Britain, the US, Western Europe), life expectancy increased dramatically following the IR, and only recently has it plateaued or even fallen. Leisure activity became a real thing for most people, when before the IR it was reserved only for the highest classes. E.g. organized and even professional sports became popular after the IR. Compared to agricultural labor, which almost everyone did before the IR, including a large class of poor peasants, industrial work was often paid more and was more stable, and the labor restrictions weren't much different than what these societies had been used to. The problems with the IR were the edge cases, where these new machines could literally kill and maim people without a thought, something that was almost impossible in the agricultural fields. There was a new level of nuisance that arose from these industrial machines that spewed smoke and emitted stenches and were quite noisy. Further, the concentration of wealth that arose from economies of scale was a problem industrializing societies really had no idea how to tackle. I could go on. But I think the point is that in the average case, the IR was helpful on the whole.
spamizbad 3y ago
It's not as difficult to break into AI/ML as you think. Personally, I think a motivated, experience developer who sits down and learns the math, which is all undergraduate level, can skill-up and enter this field. It's very reminiscent of what took place with data science, where you had "weak" developers who were strong with math build models and then orgs would lean on professional software engineers to clean up and scale their work.
- zooq_ai 3y ago
  Entering the field is not the same as claiming "I can model the entire universe and it's economic system and predict the "net benefit to humanity for the next 100 years" of this one decision which exactly what AI ethicists are doing and which mainstream media is elevating this people to be capable of
  - spamizbad 3y ago
    But this is how almost every thought-leader in technology operates in our industry - and many others. In fact, there's numerous technology luminaries who aren't even engineers. I see no reason why AI gets to be special.
jay-barronville 3y ago
> Third, in the extreme case, there is massive anti-tech, anti-white, anti-bro harborings from these AI Ethicists and want to shut down AI just because. Yup, well said, except I don’t think it’s the extreme case; I find that most of the ethical AI folks I’ve encountered fall into this bucket. As I pointed out in my comment [0], they’ve completely turned this ethical AI thing into a political issue and what appears to be yet another issue to divide us even more. I’m a black man and I cringe every time I hear them going on and on about how AI is supposedly more of a massive threat to me because I’m black. Most of the issues they point to, however real they may be, tend to be mostly data-related issues, which can be addressed without turning to the racism and “tech bros” narrative. This reminds me of the Google Photos gorilla incident some years ago (I knew some of the folks involved). Everyone was piling on Google for identifying a black man as a gorilla in their Photos app; everyone in tech seemed to loved the narrative that Google was supposedly a white supremacist organization and did that on purpose when, in reality, it was simply a data issue. Obviously, that was a bad outcome and it’s perfectly reasonable to have expected better from Google, but rather than focusing on how to prevent issues like that in the future (i.e., making sure to have diverse training data sets), the tech industry turned that situation into an emotional virtue-signaling event to pander to black folks and push the narrative that tech is inherently evil and racist. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38592859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38592859

zone411 3y ago

To those who observe the field from the outside, this might seem like an unjustified attack, but it is also 100% true. Unfortunately, many are afraid to say it because they fear for their careers.

ethanbond 3y ago

1) There are plenty of people who are concerned about the ethics of AI who don’t fit your description, including many of the most prolific researchers in the space e.g. Hinton, Suleyman, and Sutskever. 2) “No one knows what the outcome will be” is a reason for caution, not against it. 3) Lots of people worried about ethics of AI are excited about the positive possibilities, e.g. Hinton, Suleyman, and Sutskever 4) The “roast” of Mr Beast was made up hysteria. The only quoted person expressing disdain was a single aid worker expressing disdain that he got so much press when there are thousands of people making aid their full time effort, not that he helped. That same aid worker made it amply clear that she was thankful for his help. All of that is very reasonable and far from the “white man yelled at for helping” narrative. 5) There are a lot of people who are concerned about the ethics of AI who do not want to “shut down AI.” E.g. Hinton, Suleyman, and Sutskever. 6) You can also choose to look at the strong versions of arguments instead of the weak versions. When you’re dealing with a cataclysmic technological change which, as you implied, no one is equipped to fully reason about, it’s a good idea to take the strong forms of every argument.

zooq_ai 3y ago
1) Suleyman, Ilya are not AI Ethicists. They are great AI/ML practitioners who have great Ethics. Which kind of highlights my point. Hire great AI/ML practitioners with strong Ethics. E.g Demis, Jeff Dean are also great practitioners with integrity and ethics. Grift is having an AI Ethics division whose sole purpose is to kneecap advancement. E.g Timnit and Alex Hanna 2) You are assuming that openAI, Microsoft and Google aren't cautious about their development. In fact their entire LLM releases are filled with over-cautious approach 3) Once again Hinton or Suleyman and Ilya are not the Ethics the article is talking about. They are talking about low-level grifters whose entire identity is depended ant on AI Ethics. I'm perfectly fine with Hinton, Ilya and Mustafa acting as AI ethicists. 6) LLMs are not cataclysmic. It's been 1 year since chatGPT has been released and pretty much diffused through out the world along with Midjourney and Runway. Yet, the world seems to perfectly chugging along fine (Yes, I understand long-tail risks, but they are completely overblown). Calling LLMs cataclysmic and raising alarms is exactly the wrong approach because what you are doing is effectively numbing down the public to AI alarmism. We have seen this play out before Climate, Donald Trump (because Mitt Romney was cataclysmic), Andrew Tate (because Jordan Petersen was cataclysmic)
- llamaimperative 3y ago
  Sure, if you really mean people whose title and entire background is "AI ethicists" there are certainly lots of grifters (not "all" of them as you claim). It's to everyone's advantage, however, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. 2) No, I'm not assuming anything. I'm observing in actual reality unexpected and unintended results with every single release. That is clear evidence that they do not have a complete grasp on what they're building, which doesn't necessarily mean it needs to be stopped, but it does mean we can't be asleep at the wheel and just assuming "technology makes everything better." 6) I didn't say LLMs are cataclysmic, but they have made evident a few things. First, that we aren't great at predicting emergent capabilities. Second, that builders of these technologies will be deploying them to the public en masse before they're well understood and indeed connect these technologies to vital systems with real-world impact. Third, that capitalist incentives will almost certainly override other concerns. These are good reasons to be worried about the path of development of AI overall. They indicate that the system (technological capitalism) around the systems (the technologies themselves) are going to struggle to really steer its development in a deliberate fashion. Competitive market incentives will steer the ship, and we have no reason to believe that'll change between here and AGI.

buzz27 3y ago

Do you feel the way about other fields of applied ethics? Bioethics for example? Technology ethics? Or even more broadly, ethics generally? Also, and, of course, one can be a professional ethicist without being "anti-tech, anti-white, anti-bro". Whatever that means.

beloch 3y ago

I wouldn't dismiss an entire field of critical thought out of hand. There are some important points that deserve to be addressed. Some have likened AI's potential for change to technologies that made the industrial revolution possible. The industrial revolution was a great thing right? Everybody had more of everything after it was over. But what about during the revolution? The truth is that a lot of people suffered a great decline in quality (and duration) of life during the industrial revolution until social change caught up with technological progress. e.g. In England, early in the revolution, it was still illegal for workers to change jobs. When the choice was stay at your current job or go to jail, it's not a surprise that wages stayed artificially low and worker safety conditions were appalling. The complete lack of environmental regulations and the resulting pollution is another famous example of how social change had to play catch-up with technology. Right now, there is a lot of potential for AI to increase human suffering in the short term even if it is a net benefit in the long-term. At least some of the "AI ethicists" out there are trying to get ahead of the curve, and that's laudible. You might want to read "Power and Progress - Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity" by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. It's not really an AI focused book, but it will give you an appreciation of why some caution is warranted.

baryphonic 3y ago
> The truth is that a lot of people suffered a great decline in quality (and duration) of life during the industrial revolution until social change caught up with technological progress. e.g. In England, early in the revolution, it was still illegal for workers to change jobs. When the choice was stay at your current job or go to jail, it's not a surprise that wages stayed artificially low and worker safety conditions were appalling. Certainly aspects of the Industrial Revolution were quite damaging (albeit ultimately fixed by the law, regulation and, yes, organized labor), but the data doesn't seem to indicate that quality of life or life expectancy decreased. In areas that industrialized the earliest (Britain, the US, Western Europe), life expectancy increased dramatically following the IR, and only recently has it plateaued or even fallen. Leisure activity became a real thing for most people, when before the IR it was reserved only for the highest classes. E.g. organized and even professional sports became popular after the IR. Compared to agricultural labor, which almost everyone did before the IR, including a large class of poor peasants, industrial work was often paid more and was more stable, and the labor restrictions weren't much different than what these societies had been used to. The problems with the IR were the edge cases, where these new machines could literally kill and maim people without a thought, something that was almost impossible in the agricultural fields. There was a new level of nuisance that arose from these industrial machines that spewed smoke and emitted stenches and were quite noisy. Further, the concentration of wealth that arose from economies of scale was a problem industrializing societies really had no idea how to tackle. I could go on. But I think the point is that in the average case, the IR was helpful on the whole.

spamizbad 3y ago

It's not as difficult to break into AI/ML as you think. Personally, I think a motivated, experience developer who sits down and learns the math, which is all undergraduate level, can skill-up and enter this field. It's very reminiscent of what took place with data science, where you had "weak" developers who were strong with math build models and then orgs would lean on professional software engineers to clean up and scale their work.

zooq_ai 3y ago
Entering the field is not the same as claiming "I can model the entire universe and it's economic system and predict the "net benefit to humanity for the next 100 years" of this one decision which exactly what AI ethicists are doing and which mainstream media is elevating this people to be capable of
- spamizbad 3y ago
  But this is how almost every thought-leader in technology operates in our industry - and many others. In fact, there's numerous technology luminaries who aren't even engineers. I see no reason why AI gets to be special.

jay-barronville 3y ago

> Third, in the extreme case, there is massive anti-tech, anti-white, anti-bro harborings from these AI Ethicists and want to shut down AI just because. Yup, well said, except I don’t think it’s the extreme case; I find that most of the ethical AI folks I’ve encountered fall into this bucket. As I pointed out in my comment [0], they’ve completely turned this ethical AI thing into a political issue and what appears to be yet another issue to divide us even more. I’m a black man and I cringe every time I hear them going on and on about how AI is supposedly more of a massive threat to me because I’m black. Most of the issues they point to, however real they may be, tend to be mostly data-related issues, which can be addressed without turning to the racism and “tech bros” narrative. This reminds me of the Google Photos gorilla incident some years ago (I knew some of the folks involved). Everyone was piling on Google for identifying a black man as a gorilla in their Photos app; everyone in tech seemed to loved the narrative that Google was supposedly a white supremacist organization and did that on purpose when, in reality, it was simply a data issue. Obviously, that was a bad outcome and it’s perfectly reasonable to have expected better from Google, but rather than focusing on how to prevent issues like that in the future (i.e., making sure to have diverse training data sets), the tech industry turned that situation into an emotional virtue-signaling event to pander to black folks and push the narrative that tech is inherently evil and racist. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38592859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38592859