Obtaining the correct categorization of something is not social engineering, it's returning a FACTUAL answer. I didn't ask the AI "are men more likely to be doctors" I asked "what is a doctor" Do you understand the difference? I don't expect it to tell me "Doctors are male individuals who...." No where in my original post did I say the AI has to lie about gender ratios, I would expect any AI to tell me also, the socio-historical-cultural perspective of the medical profession, and how it has changed over time. I am simply not interested in a neat little, static, steady state view of something that conveniently leaves out context. Do conservatives want to exist in a bubble where no criticism of the status quo is seen?
If a machine learning algorithm learned a bad definition of conservative, that cast them as crypto-racists, you'd want it corrected wouldn't you? Even if a reading of conservative news sites comment forums gives you exactly that impression is likely true?
> "Quite why this outcome is better than the existing status quo is never explained with any rigour - it's ideology."
Right, progressives are the only ones with ideology, conservative positions are arrived at by cold, hard logic?
Tell me why an African American slave boy, growing up in the 1800s, who learns the existing status quo that black people are property, and white people or not, is a worse outcome? Clearly, it's a better outcome for white people of the era, so any explanation for why it might be preferable to alter it has to argue that the status quo wasn't good for black people, or that it wasn't good for white people for some presumably economic reason.
Maybe just maybe, the status quo isn't good for women? Maybe it would be good to ask them if it's ideology, or if changing cultural attitudes about what women are allowed to do, and capable of doing over the last 200 years has been a positive change in the status quo for them?
BTW, Conservatives don't reject social engineering, they just reject social engineering they disapprove of. Social conservatives around the world, in concert with religion, have sought to engineer human behavior with appeal to cultural and religious piety, and in many cases, winning laws that enforce such behavior. We've had anti-sodomy laws, anti-booze laws, anti-miscegenation laws, all of them enacted by social conservatism. And what do you call religious proselytizing, if not social engineering? Trying to spread memes and infect and convert more people into a new way of thinking.
Sometimes I feel that conservatives are against secular, humanist 'social engineering' the way Scientologists are against Psychotherapy, because it's competing in the same meme space.
Society is a dynamic equilibrium. It is constantly evolving, sometimes it evolves purely organically, in a spontaneous order, and sometimes there are clusters and movements that boil over, and change arrives by deliberate persuasion.
Google is a global, transnational company, that serves the entire world, 7+ billion people. It needs to reflect that diversity. And like I said, it absolutely cannot have AI that does stupid stuff like learn that black faces are gorillas.