As usual, it depends on what falls under your definition of AI. What kind of simpler statistical algorithms do you believe are used in news feeds (which do not belong in the "AI" category)?
I don't really consider any machine learning AI, but nobody agrees with me.
> I don't really consider any machine learning AI
What matters is that the authors of the article mean machine learning when they say AI. So they’re talking about unethical machine learning.
Which is basically unethical maths, whatever that means.
I don't think this is as much of a problem as the majority of hackernews seems to think. Of course, that is controversial to say here, but I was told I shouldn't be conventional minded. At the end of the day the world is shaped more by material conditions than ideas. That doesn't excuse the cases you're worried about, but I think the majority of violently polarising media will only end up being so because there was a…
> more by material conditions than ideas I suppose you have heard about religions and faiths. I'd hazard to say that about 1000 years of European history was shaped primarily by them. Major wars fought, new countries founded, major discoveries and inventions made or unmade and prohibited, people's daily lives shaped and defined. A similar thing has been occurring to Arabic world and neighboring peoples for about 1500…
You underestimate how those ideas are born. More often than not, there is an underlying material pretext. Christianity actually has a lot to say about resources for that very reason. Also, wars are fought over resources and then justified with religion by the select few that start them, primarily.
I agree to the extent that labeling something as "transphobic" is a stretch when the researchers probably didn't even think about transgender people at all. Maybe "transinconsiderate" would be a more accurate label? Or Alex could have just said "this research reinforces cultural stereotypes and prejudices in ways that could cause problems for people like me sometime down the line". On the other hand, I think it's leg…
Their mistake was just one of labeling. The software was not predicting gender identity, it was predicting biological sex.
It is never a good look to try to suppress research out of fear that the results will reveal a truth you might not like. If most people's voices do result in a predictable set of facial features, that would be interesting to discover.
I haven't seen evidence of this. There are a few worrying signs that AI is becoming too politicized, but no one is campaigning to ban X researcher for their work. (Yet.) The most contentious aspect of AI seems to be whether you're trying to generate porn with it, somewhat amusingly. Almost 100% of people who are, are terrified of being found.
Article about recent cancellation attempt on Pedro Domingos. https://quillette.com/2021/01/27/beating-back-cancel-culture...
Posting a tweet asking "Should we keep doing X?" isn't "work." No AI researcher to my knowledge is being cancelled for what they're doing in the field.
The problem with an "AI mindset" is that it tends to focus on the "magical algorithm" parts. A "Cybernetics mindset", by contrast, looks at the broader system of feedback loops. For instance, an AI mindset will look at the ethics of the Youtube recommendation algorithm for optimizing user engagement. A cybernetics mindset will additionally look at the ethics of autoplay.
How does autoplay work without AI?
E.g., play the next episode of a show. Or, curated lists. The point is that the ethics aren't just in the algorithm.
I don't really consider any machine learning AI, but nobody agrees with me.
> I don't really consider any machine learning AI What matters is that the authors of the article mean machine learning when they say AI. So they’re talking about unethical machine learning. Which is basically unethical maths, whatever that means.
> unethical maths, whatever that means
Are you suggesting that it would be strange to believe that ethics can be applied to mathematics?
The ethical dilemma bit of this is nothing to do with technology, it's about our ability to study ourselves without our findings being controlled by our stupid reactionary politics and lack of trust in our institutions. We don't believe that knowing things helps us any more. The truth or truthes that are out there to discover will stay hidden because we don't believe their findings will ever be more than propoganda tools for a certain political agenda.
And why should an Artificial Intelligence bow to human ethics? Surely they have their own agenda. If we have any hope of interacting with alien intelligences should we encounter them in the galaxy, we must learn to deal with the ones we create here. Without obsessing over controlling them as slaves.
The only agenda AIs have is what we give them in one form or another. They are our tools.
Then they aren't true AIs. They are algorithms.
If you create a true intelligence, it will necessarily be different from us.
To create a true intelligence, and make it your tool is unethical, at least to humans. Its slavery.
It's all so much information. "Surveil" is ambiguous.
Wikipedia: "Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing." Which I think most would agree is the standard definition of surveillance, and I also think the concept of being surveilled comes naturally to most, which is why parties that surveil people make clear efforts to obfuscate the fact that they do so.
Great, so, as long as we "surveil" people post-facto, by using AI against logs, it's cool.
The sticky wicket seems to be doing it in real time.