Ethics for AI has roughly the same problems as ethics for corporations. That's not encouraging.
There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#22>This is the belief that A.I. codes are recipes for automating ethics itself; and that once a broad consensus around such codes has been achieved, the problem of determining an ethically positive future direction for computer code will have begun to be solved. I can think of literally nobody who believes this. I don't think anyone working in ethical AI would pretend that ethics can be "solved."
There always seems to be a disconnect between tech philosophers and the technology they write about. Maybe they should try to actually work on 'AI' before preaching about it. To confirm your point a simple example is when working on an automated classifier for loan applications. One way to make the system more ethical, that is less descriminating based on certain features like race or gender, is to often lower the th…
What if it turns out there is reason people discriminate using those features (for example that people of race X tend to fail repaying their loans), and the classifier just learned that reason from the data. Why should we be expected to "fix" the reality for the classifier?
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#23"Ethical AI" is just another buzzword. Companies are not ethical entities. They exist only to create profit and they will create the maximum amount of profit. Even laws and regulations only factor into it as numbers on a spreadsheet, and any profitable activity will continue as long as it generates maximum profit.
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#24A univeraally useful question: What does it take to make it work?
In this case the AI will need to convince all of us to follow the ethical code it designs. It can do this by suppressing information or by making morally defensible decisions.
Having a good track-record of moral decisions key, so AIs need to be public persons and not subject to corporate secrecy.
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#25>This is the belief that A.I. codes are recipes for automating ethics itself; and that once a broad consensus around such codes has been achieved, the problem of determining an ethically positive future direction for computer code will have begun to be solved. I can think of literally nobody who believes this. I don't think anyone working in ethical AI would pretend that ethics can be "solved."
Not sure what the author meant there but we do have a problem of offloading the ethical burden of our systems onto the algorithms themselves and it should be taken more seriously. Like when Google shipped an AI for moderating hate speech which turned out to be biased against minorities [1]. Google would have been sued if that bias had been coded in procedurally, but because they used "AI" their response was basically "we'll take another look at the training data". The damage caused is the same in both cases though, and it shouldn't take a team of independent researchers to prevent Google from shipping racist products.
[1] https://fortune.com/2019/08/16/google-jigsaw-perspective-rac...
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#26> Depending upon your priorities, your ethical views will inevitably be incompatible with those of some other people in a manner no amount of reasoning will resolve. Believers in a strong central state will find little common ground with libertarians; advocates of radical redistribution will never agree with defenders of private property; relativists won’t suddenly persuade religious fundamentalists that they’re being silly. Who, then, gets to say what an optimal balance between privacy and security looks like — or what’s meant by a socially beneficial purpose? And if we can’t agree on this among ourselves, how can we teach a machine to embody “human” values?
Those who build the machine will embody it "their" ethical values. Problem solved.
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
There always seems to be a disconnect between tech philosophers and the technology they write about. Maybe they should try to actually work on 'AI' before preaching about it. To confirm your point a simple example is when working on an automated classifier for loan applications. One way to make the system more ethical, that is less descriminating based on certain features like race or gender, is to often lower the th…
What if it turns out there is reason people discriminate using those features (for example that people of race X tend to fail repaying their loans), and the classifier just learned that reason from the data. Why should we be expected to "fix" the reality for the classifier?
Because now people start to get rejected for loans because of their race, and that’s wrong for many obvious reasons.
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#28Whenever I hear this, I ask, "Whose ethics?"
When people say that we ought to or should or make some other pronouncement about how we must make AI "ethical," I ask again, "Whose ethics?"
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#29https://archive.fo/tbGNL But it quotes Evgeny Morozov as if he were something other than a notorious troll, so don't bother reading it.
Why? The article is fine. > This is the fact that there is no such thing as ethical A.I, any more than there’s a single set of instructions spelling how to be good — and that our current fascinated focus on the “inside” of automated processes only takes us further away from the contested human contexts within which values and consequences actually exist. This rings true. A.I. is just another tool in the computational…
There are ways to interpret the statement you've quoted in which it's obvious (if by "AI" we just mean "deep learning" or something), and ways to interpret it in which it's just wrong (if by "AI" we mean what people usually mean by "AI", namely AGI). You seem to be interpreting it in the first sense, and additionally you have a considerably more jaundiced view of how widely applicable deep learning is likely to turn out to be than some of its prominent practitioners — Karpathy famously called it "Software 2.0," which to me seems perhaps a bit optimistic.
As far as I can tell, though, the article doesn't say anything both true and nonobvious, which to me is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for it being worth reading. Reliance on Morozov was just a particularly glaring sign of this.
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#30>This is the belief that A.I. codes are recipes for automating ethics itself; and that once a broad consensus around such codes has been achieved, the problem of determining an ethically positive future direction for computer code will have begun to be solved. I can think of literally nobody who believes this. I don't think anyone working in ethical AI would pretend that ethics can be "solved."
Not sure what the author meant there but we do have a problem of offloading the ethical burden of our systems onto the algorithms themselves and it should be taken more seriously. Like when Google shipped an AI for moderating hate speech which turned out to be biased against minorities [1]. Google would have been sued if that bias had been coded in procedurally, but because they used "AI" their response was basically…
> The damage caused is the same in both cases though, and it shouldn't take a team of independent researchers to prevent Google from shipping racist products.
Your comment reads like "company X should not be shipping products with issues affecting users" - as long as it was not intentional and they take corrective actions, things are working as well as they can.