Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?
newyorker.com
Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?
1–10 of 163 posts
Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?
#2Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?
#3> At artificial-intelligence conferences, researchers are increasingly alarmed by what they see.
This is because there is an increasing proportion of people that is not going to the conferences for the science and instead to try to hijack the conferences with their own agenda. It's of course their right to make a fuss, but it would be nice to still have venues that are focused on the science and not the other political stuff.
Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?
#4I find Alex’s comments pretty openly inflammatory and sensationalist. It’s a pretty far throw from a system that predicts a face from a voice to transphobia.
Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?
#5[deleted]
Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?
#6The real problem with AI ethics and fairness is that nobody actually listens to ethicists or philosophers. Nobody takes the subject seriously.
It’s just a hype vehicle to cram in whatever social justice outrage du jour that some liberal source wants to push as an agenda. I say this as a liberal who is sympathetic to most of those issues, but finds their representation in AI ethics or fairness debates to be ignorant and juvenile power grabs.
The whole Timnit Gebru affair is a direct example. The paper Google didn’t want to approve for publication was really poor. Lots of specious arguments. Lots of declarations of opinions as if they were fact (eg. nobody is required to agree with or accept woke vocabulary, let alone ensure NLP models are kept updated with it), and lots of sanctimonious assertions about various agendas that nobody has to agree “are right” and have zero appropriateness within a science publication.
Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?
#7As always when these topics are brought up with that sense of urgency, I will raise my hand and ask "Whose ethics? Unethical according to who?"
Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?
#8>Alex Hanna, the Google ethicist who criticized the Neurips speech-to-face paper, told me, over the phone, that she had four objections to the project. First, ...Second, ....Third, ....Finally, the system could be used for surveillance.
I'm curious about this. As I understand it, an ethicist is objecting to the publication of software that could be used for surveillance. If that is correct, does it follow that this ethicist would object to all software that could be used for surveillance? If so:
1. How does one distinguish between software that can be used for surveillance and software that cannot?
2. Presumably the ethicist would object to the dissemination of software that can be used for surveillance whether published openly or sold. If so, would they not object to the sale of iPhones, as iPhones contain software that can record video, and therefore surveil people?
It seems like whenever morality or ethics come into play, the slippery slopes start popping up like weeds.
Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?
#9The real problem with AI ethics and fairness is that nobody actually listens to ethicists or philosophers. Nobody takes the subject seriously. It’s just a hype vehicle to cram in whatever social justice outrage du jour that some liberal source wants to push as an agenda. I say this as a liberal who is sympathetic to most of those issues, but finds their representation in AI ethics or fairness debates to be ignorant a…
This makes sense to me. For example, there are other farther-left viewpoints that I haven’t heard represented or being advocated for, specifically thinking of animal rights. When I can pick out viewpoints like that so easily, it makes me wonder if the ideas being pushed are not historically arbitrary. Will we one day need to make AI take on ideas of animal liberation because, as you stated, that becomes “social justice outrage du jour”? What makes that less pressing at this moment in time?
Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?
#10> At artificial-intelligence conferences, researchers are increasingly alarmed by what they see. This is because there is an increasing proportion of people that is not going to the conferences for the science and instead to try to hijack the conferences with their own agenda. It's of course their right to make a fuss, but it would be nice to still have venues that are focused on the science and not the other politic…
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