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Google is investigating the actions of another top AI ethicist

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

#121

Post by freeone3000 »

visarga wrote: post #95
freeone3000 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes; automated approaches amplify bias[0]. Moreover, automated approaches launder bias; in the general population, people view computers and algorithms as "unbiased", so imagine biased results to be more accurate than humans, because a computer did them.

0: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.07842 2: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.07213 also has an overview of our current combative systems.

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

#122

Post by throwawaygulf »

NotPavlovsDog wrote: post #46
nostromo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the people in this field aren’t ethicists, they’re activists.

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…

>A large part of them believe that a researcher has to be an activist, i.e. research=activism.

A large part of them believe in other delusions such as "silence is violence", coming to work on time is "Whiteness", and "objective, rational" thinking is normalized racism.

In their deranged minds, the ends justify their means, so they can be the antithesis of their being because their crusade is holy, and just.

That's the complete opposite of being a researcher.

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

#123

Post by s__s »

thu2111 wrote: post #117
jsinai wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But she didn’t show how this is harming anyone in a concrete way. To roll with the example “man” ~ “doctor”, “woman” ~ “nurse”, the harm is having a giant and widely used search engine reinforce baseless gender biases, ie that there is no underlying reason why women should be nurses and men doctors. What is the harm you may ask? The harm may be subtle, eg being surprised when you find out your next doctor is a woma…

That particular "bias" isn't actually a bias, it's an accurate learning about the distribution of genders between jobs in the real world. Very few professions have an exactly 50:50 balance of men and women. Most are tilted towards one gender or the other. The purpose of a correct search engine is not to reduce my "surprise" at arbitrary events but rather to give me the information I'm looking for, which will more oft…

Indeed. To intentionally skew the data such that, for example, men are over represented as nurses, is in fact introducing bias to the data based on prejudice.

You’ve essentially created a fictional data set because it’s biased due to the underlying prejudice (preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience) that men ought to be nursing more, despite that not being reality.

We’re in a strange situation where we have large concerted efforts by activists to inject fiction in to our facts (whatever the medium) with the aim of distorting perceptions in such a way as to some how correct what they perceive to be injustice in the real world.

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

#124

Post by visarga »

jsinai wrote: post #112
visarga wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of hypothetical effects should be documented in concrete cases by a good ethical scientist instead of just described from imagination. For example, when someone searches for a doctor, let's say a male comes up first - who stops at the first Google result? They would probably need to go deep and read about the doctor's experience and find patient reviews.

Part of the issue is that the harms of gender bias (and other types of bias) should not need to be made explicit, but part of the research canon. Should a security researcher outline the harms of an attacker obtaining user credentials, or is our imagination sufficient because the harms are well known to us? And if you were looking for more in depth studies, then there is a ton of published research, maybe not all of…

At some point imagination has to make touch with reality otherwise it can become unhinged. Yes, security researchers can enumerate concrete cases where "the harms of an attacker obtaining user credentials" caused damage.

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

#125

Post by bergstromm466 »

gonehome wrote: post #18
actuator wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think sending it to external accounts probably triggered this, there is no way this would not have raised a red flag in any company. I mean, Alphabet is the same company where a person took self driving documents with him to start a new company. Hopefully, if it was just normal conversations and after identities had been redacted, their access is restored. Still, analysing this information on their work machine its…

Somewhat related - Levandowski (the crook that stole the self driving docs) was just pardoned by Trump. The pardon was supported by Thiel, Luckey, and other Founders Fund people. I find this pretty irritating, but I guess when you’re in the company of actual war criminals like Eddie Gallagher then the bar is pretty low.[0] —— Separately, from the drama I’ve seen around the recent AI ethics stuff, I’d bet money Google…

> Levandowski (the crook that stole the self driving docs)

Why is your username 'foss user' when you're showing you are for intellectual property rights by calling this person a crook?

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