There is no such thing as an "ethical hammer" either.
There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
51–57 of 57 posts
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Find the other, non-racist data points that correlate.
Why should correlations with ethnicity be dismissed? Epidemiological studies tell us some diseases disproportionally affect certain groups. Should doctors dismiss this knowledge as racist and refrain from screening patients in the affected groups because they might come off as racist?
Yes. We know, more specifically, that genes are to blame for diseases like hemochromatosis [0], sickle cell anemia [1], or Tay-Sachs [2]. We also know, from pedigree collapse [3], that humans broadly form one single race.
Therefore we know that correlations with any definition of ethnicity or race are spurious, because those definitions must be socially constructed, because the gene pool simply does not have the shape that race realists claim that it does.
Think in terms of contraposition. Sure, if race were real, then maybe it might make sense to talk about racial demographics. However, since race clearly is not real, any demographic correlations must be bogus. There is a much simpler explanation for why some skin colors seem socioeconomically advantaged: Because our society itself has bigoted opinions about skin colors, and has practices like redlining [4] which systematically oppress folks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereditary_haemochromatosis
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle_cell_disease
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay%E2%80%93Sachs_disease
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
With that logic we shouldn't need clinical trials for drugs or food additives either. Just ship it, if someone gets hurt we'll sort it out later!
At this point it's well known that unfair biases can easily creep into these kind of systems. I don't think it's unreasonable to require products that could potentially cause much harm (e.g. online censoring, scoring CVs, vetting loan applications) to be tested for fairness before letting them loose on the public.
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#54Ethics for AI has roughly the same problems as ethics for corporations. That's not encouraging.
Or ethics for humans, for that matter.
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#55A 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.
I love how William Gibson reveals Eunice in Agency . I'd for sure love to be her friend.
I will need to read that. :)
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Do all your conversations end like this? On you being just clever enough to say nothing?
Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Find the other, non-racist data points that correlate.
Why should correlations with ethnicity be dismissed? Epidemiological studies tell us some diseases disproportionally affect certain groups. Should doctors dismiss this knowledge as racist and refrain from screening patients in the affected groups because they might come off as racist?
Because at some point you have to be human about it and realize it’s not fair to evaluate and treat people based on things they can’t control, regardless of statistics.