AI at Google: our principles

I'm afraid you're obfuscating. The most important paper in question is this one:

http://papers.nips.cc/paper/6228-man-is-to-computer-programm...

It documents the researcher's "discovery" that word embeddings trained on all available text learn that most doctors are male and most nurses are female, along with many other relationships, like volleyball / football being a female / male analogy.

Word embeddings can't answer a question like "what is a doctor", even people would struggle to give a good answer to such a vague question. So they asked it specific questions about gender, namely, "if you ask for a gender relationship starting from doctor what do you get" (answer: nurse). And then they decided this was bias, and wrong, and should be edited out of the model.

So yes - if you asked such a model "are men more likely to be doctors" it would answer "no" although the correct answer is "yes".

I wonder if that changes your views?

Right, progressives are the only ones with ideology, conservative positions are arrived at by cold, hard logic?

Both positions arrive at their conclusions via logic, but working forward from different assumptions and premises.

The difference is progressives are much more likely to try and impose change on the world top down, whereas conservatives are much more likely to leave the world be (note: attempts to remove top-down imposition of progressive views is often cast by progressives as equally equivalent "change", but it's not, likewise, not attempting to change old traditions is often cast as inherent support for them rather than a general aversion to imposing top-down change).

Your post is a great example of the dangers of this attitude:

Maybe just maybe, the status quo isn't good for women?

I happen to think the status quo, where women are routinely handed jobs and money simply for being women (e.g. the whole 'women in tech' movement), is excellent for women!

But our views on this are both irrelevant because it's not what the argument is about.

The point is, do we want to build AIs that understand the world as it is today or which have been given an understanding of the world as Googlers believe it should be.

You are very clearly arguing for the latter, here, to the extent that earlier in your post, you argued a good answer to the question "what is a doctor" would actually involve a lecture on the "socio-historical-cultural perspective". Who says users of AI give a crap about any of that? Maybe they just want to get a definition of the word doctor, without some AI trying to change their kids ideas about what job they'd like to do along the way?

A Google AI that is constantly engaging in proxy social advocacy with me would be annoying as hell. A Google AI that doesn't but has a warped and distorted view of reality because its creators feel they're towering moral actors with a mandate to change the world on behalf of billions of people they never met? Even worse! I'd rather it was at least open about it.

Look at it this way. If Google AI was constantly subtly suggesting that all progressives were naive, hated America, that government intervention always failed and markets were the best way to do things, , you wouldn't be very happy about it, would you? Especially not if the AI hadn't actually learned such things but such beliefs had been added later by libertarian programmers convinced that they'd make the world a better place by doing so.

We've had anti-sodomy laws, anti-booze laws, anti-miscegenation laws, all of them enacted by social conservatism

I suspect there's a slight terminological difference here between libertarianism and conservatism (I've been meaning primarily the former).

But regardless, are you sure you aren't assuming that?

Let's take anti-booze laws. Prohibition in the USA was a bipartisan issue at the time and both Democrats and Republicans voted in favour of it, in fact more Democrats voted in favour than Republicans did.

The constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote was introduced by a Republican. It took a long time to get passed (decades), but this was partly because - just like the UK - the woman's suffrage movement hurt its popularity through aggressive tactics and association with unrelated social policies, in particular with pacifism and refusal to join World War 1.

And as for religion, I'd note that the USA is probably the most conservative (or libertarian) country in the world and it's also famous for separation of church and state.

Politicians follow Hotelling's Law. It doesn't actually matter who you vote for as long as you vote. The only thing that changes is the flavour, and that's a matter of personal preference.