Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist • Hacker News Board

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#91

Post by hikingsimulator » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 9:28 AM UTC

pr_nik2 wrote: post #80

hikingsimulator wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope they are. You would not want a fire brigade that's only theoretical about putting fires out. It seems that the occurrence of people who bemoan that social scientists are activists, that they are not supposed to actually develop solutions to what they study, has increased in recent years. It's bad logic. A sociologist studying the effects of poverty shouldn't be interested in solving poverty is a mind-boggling…

Yes, a fire brigade needs to put out the fire. The analog to that in the social realm are non-profits, democratic policies, and grassroots activism. But fire brigades would be really bad at putting out fires if we hadn't studied them scientifically since about the 17th century. We would not know the difference between electrical fires, fires involving oil, and bush fires. Today, woke academics declare some social 'fi…

Fire brigades didn't stand by idly studying from the 17th century until now to act against fires.

Ethics is an old field, and also one that's been applied for a long time. It changed too. For the better even -- since social Darwinism was seen as ethical to some extent at the start of the 20th century.

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#92

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 9:36 AM UTC

throwawaysea wrote: post #87

dragonwriter wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is doing something unethical, even if Google wasn’t doing something unethical before they decided to name and blame an employee on a personnel matter before completing an internal investigation to establish the facts. There’s a good reason why even under direct questioning with the most serious internal indications but an ongoing internal investigation, companies simply decline comment on personnel matters. Of…

Isn’t that a one sided expectation though? Timnit Gebru publicly tweeted about this second activist losing email access. By calling Google out in such a public manner, I feel like Google is forced to respond publicly, to set the record and prevent the early viral spread of these activists’ one sided take/misinformation. Otherwise what happens is journalists like Kara Swisher source entire stories from these activists…

> Isn’t that a one sided expectation though?

Yes, Google’s ethical responsibility in a current employer/employee relationship with Mitchell is different than Gebru’s ethical obligation to her former employer with whom she is already in a public, contentious battle.

And even if the ethical obligations were identical, Gebru’s violation toward Google wouldn’t excuse Google’s toward Mitchell.

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#93

Post by visarga » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 9:36 AM UTC

cauthon wrote: post #71

ALittleLight wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gebru's (and co-author's) work on racial error in facial recognition was done while they were academics at Stanford and MIT respectively and not while a Google AI ethicist to my knowledge. Roko's Basilisk is a banned comment from Less Wrong (though interesting) and doesn't really represent the totality of that site or the associated ideas. https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-finds-gender-skin-type-bias-...

I’m not sure which Google AI paper you’re referencing. The recent paper at the center of the controversy did have actionable suggestions regarding model training costs (financial and environmental), appropriate training sets, and generally incorporating domain expertise to avoid misinformation or mistranslations. [1] That’s fair, I haven’t visited LW in a while. I did thoroughly enjoy HPMOR, but thought that most of…

Apparently not. Regarding energy usage, which has been discussed at length on HN and reddit, and is actively being researched in thousands of papers on efficient, scalable, edge-capable AI.

> “It is past time for researchers to prioritize energy efficiency and cost to reduce negative environmental impact and inequitable access to resources,”

What? She should read previous work on the topic first - quantization, sparsification, distillation, fine-tuning pre-trained models, etc. I couldn't find her actionable ideas because she doesn't have any original ones. It's a hard topic which requires a complete rethinking of both algorithm and hardware. And she doesn't recognize that Google is investing in both to do that - TPUs on the hardware side, and improved algorithms such as the Reformer - a variant of the Transformer, reducing complexity from O(n^2) to O(n).

Then regarding dataset bias - I couldn't find their actionable ideas. I mean, except telling people to be careful about how they select training data, but nothing about how to replace the model they criticize with an unbiased model that works just as well in the general case.

It's easy to point out problems while not providing any solutions and making yourself the critic of those who are doing the hard work. See how she treated Yann LeCun on Twitter - she basically told him to go educate himself on her papers and fuck off because she doesn't have time for debating him, that after denouncing his tweets.

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#94

Post by NotPavlovsDog » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 9:41 AM UTC

n4r9 wrote: post #85

NotPavlovsDog wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large part of them believe that a researcher has to be an activist, i.e. research=activism. Many recent textbooks on social science see the following as credible resarch: "Emancipatory research: Research that exposes underlying ideologies in order to liberate those oppressed by them." (Zina O'Leary textbook, used by many schools, over 2K citations for multiple editions) So if a corporate behemoth such as Google wan…

I feel like your first two sentences are conflating the belief that research has to involve activism, and the belief that activist pursuits are worthy research. Why is the aim of exposing ideology not worthy of being researched in your opinion?

Some concerns for social science involve the lack of replicability, publications thus becoming literature, with "credibility" often established by in-clique circular citations. Emotional and political coloring also come to mind. There is a position in social science that all research is political (Frankfurt school and those that oppose it, among others).

The belief that research has to involve activism has been demonstrated by the individuals under discussion. I cite that this is taught as a valid position in the field.

Political motivation of scientific activity is worthy of research. Both sides involved in the conflict at google may be described as demonstrating political, and apparently opposing, viewpoints.

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#95

Post by visarga » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 10:17 AM UTC

freeone3000 wrote: post #11

firebaze wrote: post #4

Another perspective on this drama to me is what the official expectation of a team labelled "Ethical AI" is/was. I doubt the only focus was to prevent discrimination by sex or race, For example, there's also prevention of mass manipulation (AI learns human psychology, $BAD_ACTOR uses that to manipulates masses) and AI based profile generation of individuals with the goal of creating leverage for blackmail/extortion/w…

Those things are bad, and are worth thinking about, but right now we have more immediate concerns. AI systems are currently being used for bail eligibility, likelihood of recurrence, mortgage approval, and hiring. These are things that literally change people's lives on an individual level, and the systems being used are currently indecipherable black boxes that return a result with no possibility of meaningful appea…

> AI systems are currently being used for bail eligibility, likelihood of recurrence, mortgage approval, and hiring.

Is there an analysis comparing the automated to manual approaches? I mean, people are biased, too. The models are more systematically biased, but can also be more systematically evaluated and de-biased. Which is better, the old or the imperfect new?

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#96

Post by visarga » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 10:19 AM UTC

longtom wrote: post #6

firebaze wrote: post #4

Another perspective on this drama to me is what the official expectation of a team labelled "Ethical AI" is/was. I doubt the only focus was to prevent discrimination by sex or race, For example, there's also prevention of mass manipulation (AI learns human psychology, $BAD_ACTOR uses that to manipulates masses) and AI based profile generation of individuals with the goal of creating leverage for blackmail/extortion/w…

Politics is a means to an end. Investigating power abuse through one's own technology would be self-harm from the POV of a mega cooperation.

Maybe the ethics research department should be paid by the state, and empowered with full access to the corporate databases. Google and co shouldn't be left to their devices.

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#97

Post by visarga » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 10:22 AM UTC

thishit wrote: post #88

visarga wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people who bemoan that social scientists are activists I'd prefer they label themselves as partizan ethicists or activists. > , that they are not supposed to actually develop solutions to what they study On the contrary, they should develop solutions, not just scandals. The problem is with activists who just want to criticize without contributing a solution. I suspect they are more interested in making a name for t…

Dismissing researchers as mere activists is a criticism made from a place of ignorance. Maybe you should learn a bit more about the topic before spouting off?

I read her paper, her Tweets, the press and almost all the conversations on this topic and that is the conclusion I ended up with. She's making a career out of trashing people who have made real contributions to the field, while she has generated mostly critique without any actionable insight, new breakthrough or solution.

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#98

Post by TomSwirly » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #75

hikingsimulator wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope they are. You would not want a fire brigade that's only theoretical about putting fires out. It seems that the occurrence of people who bemoan that social scientists are activists, that they are not supposed to actually develop solutions to what they study, has increased in recent years. It's bad logic. A sociologist studying the effects of poverty shouldn't be interested in solving poverty is a mind-boggling…

> people who bemoan that social scientists are activists I'd prefer they label themselves as partizan ethicists or activists. > , that they are not supposed to actually develop solutions to what they study On the contrary, they should develop solutions, not just scandals. The problem is with activists who just want to criticize without contributing a solution. I suspect they are more interested in making a name for t…

> The problem is with activists who just want to criticize without contributing a solution.

Pointing out a serious problem is a good thing to do, even if you don't have a solution.

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#99

Post by visarga » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 10:28 AM UTC

thishit wrote: post #86

visarga wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was clearly a mistake. They don't act in a constructive way. Let's take Timnit's paper for example. She found out that Google had been using a biased language model in search. The bias was like - 'male' association with 'doctor' as opposed to 'woman' association to 'nurse'. But she didn't show how this is harming anyone in a concrete way. Just theoretical. And then she offered no solution, just blaming the work of…

Just shows that you didn't understand their paper then, if that's your disingenuous take on it.

Can you please enlighten me about her best constructive idea from this paper? No critique, just one original idea.

Re: Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

#100

Post by gillesjacobs » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 10:31 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #67

NotPavlovsDog wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large part of them believe that a researcher has to be an activist, i.e. research=activism. Many recent textbooks on social science see the following as credible resarch: "Emancipatory research: Research that exposes underlying ideologies in order to liberate those oppressed by them." (Zina O'Leary textbook, used by many schools, over 2K citations for multiple editions) So if a corporate behemoth such as Google wan…

It was clearly a mistake. They don't act in a constructive way. Let's take Timnit's paper for example. She found out that Google had been using a biased language model in search. The bias was like - 'male' association with 'doctor' as opposed to 'woman' association to 'nurse'. But she didn't show how this is harming anyone in a concrete way. Just theoretical. And then she offered no solution, just blaming the work of…

While I am not a fan of Gebru's handling of her own firing, this is a mischaracterization of her work.

She routinely offered suggested methods, experiments, and even new datasets [1] that fixed what she saw as wrong. She does have a fair bit of practical ML experience as shown in the computer vision papers in her publication list.

1. Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. "Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification." Conference on fairness, accountability and transparency. 2018.