171–180 of 373 posts
Why can’t leadership at Google stand by any of their decisions, instead of caving in to the demands of a small yet vocal group of people.
Engineering at Google objected, and leadership at Google can't do anything without engineering at Google.
So what now? No ethics board at all and it just proceeds without ethics oversight? Isn’t that state worse than having someone you disagree with on some principles but in theory provide constructive criticism where the politics don’t intersect? I mean, making some jobs obsolete or making decisions on recidivism etc I think are distinct from what a panelist thinks about an unrelated issue. Moreover this person didn’t p…
Just curious what do you think ethics oversight would accomplish in an ideal world? Give me some examples.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Engineering at Google objected, and leadership at Google can't do anything without engineering at Google.
They could fire them? They're paid for their labor, not their opinions.
This is a shameful situation. We need to all wake up and take a step back and realize what's happening here: increasingly you can't have a conversation about one issue unless you are a hundred percent pure in the eyes of a frankly self-proclaimed judge jury and executioner for 100% of your other views. I am of the left myself but on a meta-level what we're doing is essentially making it impossible to ever find middle…
I don’t think it’s possible or desirable to find common ground with fascists, personally.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You articulated so well what I've been observing. With the widening political divide, we find ourselves in this weird situation where any decision makers are swarmed with moral outrage attacks unless they're the bastions of politically correct ideology. An increasing number of topics are taboo because merely opening up a discussion around them summons the moral outrage army. Moral outrage has become most effective so…
What I find especially sad is I am a total believer in political correctness as a general courtesy to people and I think it's the right thing to do. However by simply sharing my upthread viewpoint that we need to be careful about this meta-trend I will probably be lumped in as one of these dark web right wing types even though it couldn't be further from the truth.
Yes, but we must recognise the difference between etiquette and ethics. Ethics are the things you must do, but courtesy is a matter of etiquette, behaviour that is optional but culturally polite.
PC culture these days raises etiquette to the level of ethics, and that's simply wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you stack your council with people of entirely one viewpoint, there's little point in having a council at all. Create a board entirely of Muslims and it's going to say we should fast during Ramadan. If Google tries to cite that board as an ethical authority to justify a policy of mandatory fasting, they're not going to convince many people. With a diverse board, the answers to some questions are going to be inconc…
How many conservatives do they have on the board? I feel viewpoint diversity should at least be close to nationwide percentage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This board could have been non-partisan, filled with leading thinkers in the space from academia and industry, and given meaningful access and authority. Google management decided to make it clear the whole thing was a sham by specifying they'll work a whole 8 hours a year and inviting someone who was wholly unqualified. There are many reasons to fear for the future of our political discourse but I don't think this i…
Maybe I'm wrong here, but I think a real challenge is that a group of only leading thinkers from academia and industry has a very good chance of being labeled partisan -- possibly with good reason. The American population's opinions are not well represented among that group. (edit) Maybe what you're getting at is that the mission of the group should be more explicitly non-partisan, and then hopefully politics stays a…
> “It’s become clear that in the current environment, ATEAC can’t function as we wanted. So we’re ending the council and going back to the drawing board,” The current environment is so overly toxic that I doubt it will be possible for any process that might produce reasonably useful results to be run in an open manner. This is particularly troubling given the number of very plausible potential problems posed by AI in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My sources at Google just couldn't see the panelists constructively working together on a panel at this point. Well, that's the point, isn't it? If the AI ethics council is meeting four times a year for a couple hours at most, and and has people who can't even agree on "Which bathroom should this person use," how are they going to produce productive advice for actual hard questions that haven't been well-explored?…
Is "Which bathroom should this person use" an easy question? If it is really easy, why it is so controversial? You may think it is an easy question, in reality it is an actual hard question.
Hard questions, as I mean them, are ones where there's a lot of complexity to even reach a potential answer. Google's trolley problems are those where the decision isn't just "flip the switch," it's "should we gather this data" or "should we conduct this experiment" or "should we participate in the market in this way" where there are unforeseen side effects to doing so, and you want a bunch of smart people in a room to try to figure those out and shake out all the complexity in the problem that you haven't even managed to state clearly.
But if you can't decide whether it's better to kill one person by action or five by inaction in the first place, figuring out whether taking/not taking the action has unexpected ethical implications isn't going to get you closer to any answers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly everyone who hasn't done anything technical but wants to ride AI train chooses to become "AI Ethics" person these days. You can look up vast number of these AI ethics "experts" giving talks on this subject without ever having trained a model for anything. So apparently the bar for this "field" is zero experience in anything technical but great ability to hold a microphone and induce FUD in public.
I would trust an ai ethicist with a PhD in philosophy or ethics of their ideas were coherent. Tech backgrounds are not necessarily required.
I agree, it doesn't require technical AI skills but I would expect a person in this position to have SOMETHING relevant in their background that they could point to as a qualifier.
Honestly, I read the article and it left me feeling quite sympathetic to this lady. It seemed like another clear cut case of political correctness run amok. Then I looked up her bio online and found she has a Bachelors degree in Education from the Hampton Institute and her entire career has consisted of a series of political appointments the highlights of which include Director of the Office of Personnel Management (despite not having any HR related background) and the Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Services (despite not having any public health background). She has neither training nor experience in either AI or Ethics. Politics aside, she was not even remotely qualified to be on an AI Ethics Board for Google.