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Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

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Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#51

Post by PeterisP »

at_a_remove wrote: post #7

As 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 ?"

A particular aspect of this ethical discussion is that the attitudes towards social institutions vary throughout the world, but the science is global - so any ethics criteria (or lack of them) for a conference essentially mean a "forced export" of these attitudes from one place to the rest of the world.

For example, right now I personally am considering a particular ML research project in cooperation with our local police agency. I am aware that in many places around the world there is an antagonistic relationship between the local communities or the people and their police system, where helping the police can be reasonably considered unethical or even outright evil in certain areas for totalitarian regimes. But I'm happy (or privileged?) to live in a place where I do trust my law enforcement to be on the side of our community, and I do consider helping our police to be more effective as not only ethically permissible but as a social good, as helping the people and country. With that being said, should I be worried about the research results being tainted and unpublishable? I can certainly imagine a perspective or validation rules that could label this as "line of research that shouldn't exist" simply because it does enhance the power of police that could also be misused against the community - but, as I said, at least for our community I consider improving police capabilities as ethically permissible and even desirable and see no need to import the "government is a threat to us" mentality from places which do have this (sad) problem.

Perhaps the example in the original article about an NSA booth at NeurIPS conference is relevant - like it or not, the voters generally have supported the concept that NSA should exist and should get funded, that their mission in general is ethically justified and necessary. While it has had specific projects and actions that are arguably unethical, it does not mean that it's reasonable to label everyone working for NSA as unethical and treat helping NSA as taboo - the society apparently considers NSA as a whole as net positive, and there is no serious push with widespread support to dismantle it and its functions. Similar arguments apply to military (is it ethical to be a soldier, to train to more effectively kill people at the service of your country?) and arms development. There's also the potential asymmetry of location - perhaps you might consider it ethical for a USA citizen to work for NSA and unethical for them to work for Russian or Chinese intelligence, and vice versa. Which ethics and whose ethics, indeed.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#52

Post by 23iofj »

teddyh wrote: post #29
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…

A Google ethicist? Who critizes something because it could be used for surveillance? The irony is thick .

It's far worse than irony. Google and FB hire AI ethics researchers as a way of laundering their reputation. IMO selling AI Ethics street cred to an ad tech company is a lot more problematic than any particular NeurIPS paper.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#53

Post by eeZah7Ux »

djoldman wrote: post #32
whatshisface wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ra…

In US society/laws, it seems that the vast majority of blame is ascribed to the entity who last causes an event to occur. So the blame in the following sequence: 1. Miner mines iron 2. Manufacturer makes knife 3. Retailer sells knife to person A 4. Person A kills person B with the knife I think most people living in the US would be ok with the general idea that person A should be held responsible for killing person B…

Not so fast. Virtually everywhere there are concepts like "accessory to murder", "criminal organization" and many more.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#54

Post by ad404b8a372f2b9 »

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #4

I 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.

It's to be entirely expected that people who reject the concept of "normal" find themselves at odds with statistical models.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#55

Post by joshuamorton »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #27

Kosinski's argument seems pretty strong to me, and I really wish the article had dedicated more space to discussing it. If NeurIPS instituted the kind of ethics rules Hanna or Hecht are calling for, I don't think it would be feasible for researchers to study e.g. predictive policing algorithms. Doesn't that mean predictive policing firms would become the only source of information on the topic?

No. Sociology conferences and various thinkable still exist. I'd argue the he incentives for an ml conference are far more similar to those of a policing company then a sociology conference or think tank tasked with analyzing the impact of predictive policing on minority communities.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#56

Post by refenestrator »

whatshisface wrote: post #13
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 ra…

In the non-technological society, by contrast, you've got 30% childbirth mortality and a bunch of paralyzed polio survivors.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#57

Post by [deleted] »

klyrs wrote: post #48
Guest42 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the data will shift the results of the model and that some predictors can be proxies for others that are protected, but the claim was that the models themselves were biased (rather globally) and was curious whether that was shown and if so how.

Do you think it's reasonable to expect a model, trained on biased data, to not display a similar degree of bias?

[deleted]

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#58

Post by djoldman »

yesenadam wrote: post #49
djoldman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In US society/laws, it seems that the vast majority of blame is ascribed to the entity who last causes an event to occur. So the blame in the following sequence: 1. Miner mines iron 2. Manufacturer makes knife 3. Retailer sells knife to person A 4. Person A kills person B with the knife I think most people living in the US would be ok with the general idea that person A should be held responsible for killing person B…

> Would you consider the knife retailer equivalent to the torture rack manufacture in your example? Not GP, but doesn't >> 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 answer your question?

I guess I'm saying that it doesn't seem so straightforward to me.

I think that "depending on the specialization of the technology for the purpose of doing something evil" merely shifts the question to multiple questions:

1. What does "specialization of the technology" mean?

2. Can technologies have multiple specializations?

3. What does evil mean?

4. Even if we had a perfect translation between "specialization" and "evil," if a technology has multiple specializations, which controls? The most evil? Does this require us to predict which specializations are most likely to be used?

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#59

Post by refenestrator »

slg wrote: post #46
Guest42 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the data will shift the results of the model and that some predictors can be proxies for others that are protected, but the claim was that the models themselves were biased (rather globally) and was curious whether that was shown and if so how.

I'm not OP, but I don't think the claim was specifically that models themselves are biased. It is that models are inherently biased because the data they are based on is biased. That might sound the same, but there is a nuanced difference. If you are able to strip the bias from the data, the models will work fine. The problem is the data and not the models.

At what point does this stop being AI's fault and start being an accurate observation of things that are society's fault?

Let's say you have a racially-neutral observation of lower income, maybe disability status or a criminal rap in the past. That looks like a bad bet for a loan regardless of color, it just so happens that our society's created a statistical imbalance in those metrics.

Re: Who Should Stop Unethical A.I.?

#60

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

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…

That is a great example, exactly the point I am suggesting. The economist and futurist Robin Hanson wrote really well about this in the article “Inequality Talk Is About Grabbing” [0].

The premise is: why do we care about some forms of inequality (financial inequality among households in one nation, or protected class inequality within employment law in one nation), but we don’t care about other things (inequality between socially lonely people and social butterflies, inequality across country boundaries, inequality of physical attractiveness).

Hanson suggests it just so happens that we develop “morality” around some forms of inequality because it offers easy ways to politically coordinate to grab money or power and punish your rivals.

Other forms of inequality that involve just as much harm, but where it’s not politically easy to drum up support for physically taking money or power, just happen to conveniently not turn out to be big moral concerns, or may even have other competing morals invented over time that make it “wrong” to even treat it as inequality (like the hallowed status of a “right” to control what happens to your body counting for more than inequality based harm of variation in genetic sexual attractiveness outcomes - which is a massive double standard compared with no such “right” to control what happens to the fruits of your labor or intelligence, which undergo forced redistribution via taxes because we just so happen to believe inequality of financial outcomes is not acceptable).

For example, most people don’t give a shit about animal suffering on the scale of agribusiness. Most people don’t give a shit if ugly people suffer loneliness or unhealthy lack of sex or job discrimination from their appearance. Most people don’t care much about structural inequality in countries besides their own.

These are just convenient moral omissions because in each situation it is not easy to see how you could “redistribute” attractiveness, social companionship, or power structures of some other country. Plus animals don’t have any money or status to give you in exchange for allyship, while big agribusiness has plenty of lobbying power to crush you with.

I wish more people appreciated this. We don’t, as a society, advocate for race, gender, or pay equality because it’s “right.” We just know that aging white patriarchy is full of convenient targets we can take money and status from. Conveniently for other domains of inequality, like animal welfare, where no such easy targets exist to take from, it just somehow doesn’t qualify as a moral issue worthy of advocacy.

[0]: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/08/inequality-is-about-g...

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