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Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

newyorker.com

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Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#11

Post by clickok »

Who, whom?

Less tersely: this article is one in a long procession of journalists trying to exert control over tech. The opening example (Speech2Face, which they aver is transphobic) is inflammatory and utterly unrepresentative of the usual topics of AI conferences. The other references are far better, but the choice is revealing-- it's not so much an abstract concern about an unaccountable few exerting control from the shadows, but alarm that someone else might be muscling in on their territory.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#12

Post by iujjkfjdkkdkf »

The more I think about this, the more inclined I am to see this kind of article as a kind of "fake news" that is deliberately (or with willful negligence) misrepresenting facts.

I need to be clear that I don't believe in censorship and it's fine if this is what the author wants to write, but it should be called out how irresponsible it is. On a place like HN, the audience is generally able to read such things critically and form their own opinions, but for an audience that is not tech savvy (like that of the New Yorker) making false or hyperbolic claims about ethics and bias in research is both misleading and has the potential to really interfere with peoples livelihoods, funding, and legitimate research progress.

There needs to be more calling out of this kind of nonsense, the same as if people are posting about vaccine conspiracies or something.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#13

Post by whatshisface »

djoldman wrote: post #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 e…

Without making any kind of statement of whether I agree with this ethical framework, I think it's pretty straightforward to assign more or less blame depending on the specialization of the technology for the purpose of doing something evil. In an ethical framework where manufacturers could be culpable for the uses of their products, iron refiners would have specks of micro-sins on the 0.001% level, whereas torture rack manufacturers would be about as guilty as torture rack users.

The result that most of technological society would have a small amount of ambient guilt is not entirely absurd; the idea that industry is not sharply, but diffusely and slightly evil is common in fiction and many people's intuition.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#14

Post by thedevelopnik »

djoldman wrote: post #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 e…

There are very few, if any, clear cut, night-and-day subjects in ethics. Not wanting to engage with ethics because slippery slopes exist is simply turning from incredibly important work because it’s difficult and not work you want to do.

These technologies can incarcerate people. It’s really important to dive onto the slippery slope and find out where it’s stable.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#15

Post by anigbrowl »

djoldman wrote: post #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 e…

The unstated implication here is that ethicists either don't comment comment on such things (and are therefore hypocrites) or that their critique is so broad as to subsume all utility (and is therefore excessive).

Rather than throw up hypotheticals which this ethicist is probably not around to refute, I think it's be better to look at the person's body of work in this area and if you think they have some sort of intellectual blindspot or bias, point out how you think that might detract from their analysis.

https://alex-hanna.com/?p=publications

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#16

Post by timkam »

iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote: post #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 politic…

I really don't get it. Nobody at an AI conference is alarmed at what they see in terms of AI research progress. Most well-educated people are alarmed about societal issues that _are also relevant to the application of automated decision-making and machine learning_. It's an applied research opportunity to investigate the issues (and as such, it is hyped because it is easy to "sell" to get funding); but it's not that AI research brings "bias" that didn't exist in society before. It's the same as for a rule-based system, or let's say, even a programming language: for sure, it can automate and hence exacerbate "unfair" decisions, but the problem is not in the specification, but in the specifying person/human. However, having a clear specification makes it easier to test/audit/verify and hence we (as a society) should do so. We don't need to burn down academic prototypes just because they make some naive assumptions about the application domain, though.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#17

Post by optimalsolver »

iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote: post #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 politic…

Funny how no one minded when the highly politically-motivated billionaire Peter Thiel was (and still is) pouring enormous amounts of money into AI.

I'm more concerned about billionaires with an agenda than no-name researchers giving a talk on cyber-intersectionality.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#18

Post by djoldman »

djoldman wrote: post #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 e…

Thinking this through a bit more: As I understand it, many published ML papers detail how to train a model, how to predict from the model, and sometimes code that represents a model that has been trained on data that can take new data and predict on it.

I wonder if there is an example of someone objecting to a paper that did not release the training data or software that can predict (aka just the algorithms).

The point I'm trying to get at is: it seems that most ethical objections are to the result of applying algorithms to ("bad") data, not the algorithms themselves.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#19

Post by [deleted] »

nefitty wrote: post #9
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #6

The 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 justi…

[deleted]

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#20

Post by _y5hn »

timkam wrote: post #16
iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote: post #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 politic…

I really don't get it. Nobody at an AI conference is alarmed at what they see in terms of AI research progress. Most well-educated people are alarmed about societal issues that _are also relevant to the application of automated decision-making and machine learning_. It's an applied research opportunity to investigate the issues (and as such, it is hyped because it is easy to "sell" to get funding); but it's not that…

The whole point is that biases are inherent in most models, no matter who the builders are.
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