AI at Google: our principles • Hacker News Board

Re: AI at Google: our principles

#291

Post by 49bc » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 2:26 AM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #253

killjoywashere wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would your default stance be to believe a company over a leaker? Because Sundar Pichai has a strong public track record. Every CEO ends up with warts, but I have some sense of what he's about. The leaker, I have zero information on. Given known vs unknown, I put more faith in the known. Whether I by default believe or disbelieve depends on who's saying what.

Many of the Googlers involved in the campaign against Project Maven are engineers of high caliber and those I know of are fairly activist in general. While I haven't always agreed with those I've interacted with, they're high quality people with high quality records. The sort of Googlers protesting Maven are the sort of Googlers who made Google the sort of company people loved. And they've put their careers on the li…

> Microsoft didn't even ask their customers for permission. They just automatically switched anyone who installed IE7 to Bing as the default.

Don’t worry everyone it’s different now!

Re: AI at Google: our principles

#292

Post by lev99 » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 2:27 AM UTC

orangecat wrote: post #282

lev99 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The identification of a person wearing a suicide vest isn't a racial or emotional problem. Declaring that a person wearing a suicide vest in an Arab market is inherently bad does play on racial prejudice and emotional appeal. It's impossible to separate that statement from a decade and a half of propaganda, and the trauma caused by the numerous suicide attacks on civilians in the western.

Forget "inherently" good or bad. It's entirely possible that the guy in the vest isn't a morally horrible person; he may have been brainwashed since birth and genuinely believe that his actions will bring about a better world. Still, he intends to kill himself and as many other people as possible, and if I have the ability to cause the only death to be his, I'm doing that every time.

I understand the self defense argument. Law Enforcement and Armies are trained to respond with violence to people with intent to kill. The passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 are heros.

Killing "bad people" to save "good people" is not a self defense argument. The statement is too general. Is it okay to do medical testing on criminals if it speeds the advancement of medicines that saves law abiding citizens lives? We could have limits to only use people found guilty of the worst crimes and increase the legal burden of proof for criminals going into the medical testing program. It would decrease overall harm. It would kill bad guys to save good guys. Still, this practice is illegal for good reason. We need a better reason to kill someone than they are bad.

Re: AI at Google: our principles

#293

Post by erikpukinskis » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 2:27 AM UTC

AtomicOrbital wrote: post #278

Humanity is racing ever faster to craft its own replacement as a species and we need to acknowledge this as our finest gift imaginable ... the cat is out of the bag on AI and no amount of corporate double speak can shed responsibility for any organization who employs armies who then freely spread these skills ... passing the torch to that which runs at light speed and is free of the limits of time which self evolves…

How could something that can easily be added as a plugin replace us?

Re: AI at Google: our principles

#294

Post by erikpukinskis » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 2:29 AM UTC

randcraw wrote: post #191

mtgx wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 antitrust cases in the EU (Shopping, Android, and Adsense), and a couple of FTC antitrust cases im the US (one of which Eric Schmidt lobbied away through Obama) say otherwise. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/18/google_had_obamas_e... If that's supposed to be "our best", we're in trouble.

Antitrust isn't about committing a crime so much as competing so well that the the company sucks the oxygen from the room. Becoming a monopoly isn't evil. It's an excess of success. It's the responsibility of government antitrust law, not Google, to 'un-distort' the playing field and resurrect competition / opportunity. No one expects a corporation to voluntarily give away marketshare to ensure it doesn't run afoul o…

Yes, being a monopoly isn’t evil, leveraging monopoly position is.

Re: AI at Google: our principles

#295

Post by rmk » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 2:32 AM UTC

UncleEntity wrote: post #287

rmk wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please, keep drinking that Kool-Aid of American exceptionalism. Apart from the British, which other country has contributed to more invasions in foreign countries for the sake of purely economic interests? I will! Which country came to the aid of Britain, and all those Western European nations when they were faced with the existential threat of Nazism? Which country has provided refuge and solace to more oppressed…

Well, technically, we didn't fight a violent war to rid ourselves of slavery -- as hard as the history book try to push that view. Slavery died out pretty much everywhere else in the world without bloodshed so it's pretty safe to assume the US wouldn't have been different in that regard, the freeing of the slaves was more of a punitive action against the seceding states than anything else. Anyhoo, my point being that…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFwHQYDqf6c

I couldn't resist :)

Re: AI at Google: our principles

#296

Post by sir_kin » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 2:37 AM UTC

rmk wrote: post #260

joshuamorton wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Hardly confusing. Except that much of what you're saying implies that you do think these companies should be regulated in a way that forces them to do this. Or at least, if that's not what you're saying, then you seem to be insinuating a whole lot for no apparent purpose. This is why I'm confused. Your stated words and actions (ie the rest of your words) don't appear to match up. >Google doesn't just use this techno…

Here we have a difference of opinion. I strongly believe corporations are less accountable to the general public than individuals or (democratic) Government, including the Military. I simply do not believe in corporate personhood. I do think there is a large distinction between individuals and corporations, and corporations, on the whole behave much more unethically and can wreak much more havoc than individuals. The…

> I believe corporations can and should contribute back to the Military if they have benefited financially from military technology.

Do you also believe corporations should contribute to Experimental Particle Physics at CERN if they have benefited financially from the world wide web?

https://home.cern/topics/birth-web

Re: AI at Google: our principles

#297

Post by lev99 » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 2:46 AM UTC

olleromam91 wrote: post #257

lev99 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is evil in the world. The argument here isn't that the people have the right to defend themselves. The argument here is that a person wearing a suicide vest is bad and deserves to die for being bad. They are evil. This argument is used by governments and religions throughout history to justify killing. Often by both sides of a conflict. It's a worn out argument, old and tired. Who is the judge of what is evil…

Ask the question, US or THEM. Those who want to defend the things they love from THEM, will always choose US over THEM. Simple. One can argue that "it doesn't have to be that way" but sadly there are millions of years of biology to prove that incorrect.

The argument that we should defend ourselves or that we should kill our enemies does not require the existence of evil.

Re: AI at Google: our principles

#298

Post by minikites » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 2:58 AM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #267

Several comments don't seem to understand what the "unfair bias" mentioned is. It doesn't have anything to do with censoring your favorite conservative search result. The machine learning "bias", at least the low hanging fruit, is learning things like "doctor == male", or "black face = gorilla". How fair is it that facial recognition or photo algorithms are trained on datasets of white faces or not tested for adversa…

"Machine learning is like money laundering for bias"

https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/744595961217835008

Re: AI at Google: our principles

#299

Post by mrep » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 3:02 AM UTC

rmk wrote: post #284

mrep wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't for the life of me see why Sundar Pichai should be beholden to his (significantly foreign) employees and privilege their interest over that of the nation (his nation). He's beholden to his shareholders and every move they have made is all about that. They knew it would be bad PR but they wanted to make money so they took the contract initially and tried to keep it quite. Then, all the leaks happened causing…

> He's beholden to his shareholders and every move they have made is all about that. That's the real nub. I'd posit that this is also about keeping a small but vocal group of employees happy. However, why did Google effectively disavow all cooperation with the military to appease this group? They could have easily set up a division and staffed it with willing people. Or Alphabet the parent company could have started…

> They could have easily set up a division and staffed it with willing people. Or Alphabet the parent company could have started something else up (how costly is it to incorporate, really?). Looks like none of these things was even given serious consideration.

Did you even read up on this story because that is essentially what they tried to do and it backfired?

Re: AI at Google: our principles

#300

Post by 75dvtwin » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 3:34 AM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #137

As much as I appreciate the conflict of interest here between doing good, making money, helping the US government do its thing, and simply chickening out for PR reasons; I'd like to provide a few sobering thoughts. AI and misappropriation by governments, foreign nations, and worse is going to happen. We might not like it but that cat has long been out of the bag. So, the right attitude is not to decline to do the res…

@jillesvangurp. I am arguing in my post above, that there is a solution.

Solution is in 'fragmentation of power'. Yes it has its costs, but it is just a much better model.

Be it economic fragmentation of power (via de-monopolization), or political (via explicitly enumerating federal powers, and then splitting the rest for states to manage), or moral authority power (by ensuring multi-cultural, multi-view, no-moral-police environment).

Google cannot remain the monopoly it is. And US gov has to accelerate its breakout.