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Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

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Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#171

Post by manux »

tinyhouse wrote: post #170
tinyhouse wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systemic discrimination is indeed a real world problem. That's exactly the problem. AI ethics doesn't help solving systemic discrimination for the simple reason that AI is not causing systemic discrimination. AI systems are trained on data. There's an abundance of English data which is why systems are often biased to work better on English. Similarly, an image recognition system might be biased if you don't provide i…

> Identifying which ML models _actually running in production_ cause systemic discrimination (e.g. as you mentioned poor image recognition, bail predictions, etc.) is exactly focusing on real issues that... cause systemic discrimination. There's nothing systemic about these issues. I already mentioned it's a data problem. Nothing new. It's very easy to build a fair image recognition system by representing all demogra…

> It's very easy to build a fair image recognition system by representing all demographics.

I wish it was easy. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated, as it tends to be [1,2,3,4].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.03058

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05248

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.11600

[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.12101

> Some AI ethics researchers cherry pick on those mistakes to justify their entire research.

This is a weird statement. This is like saying police cherry pick on criminals to justify their existence.

Do you not believe in harm reduction? Don't you think some part of AI research should be dedicated to minimizing how many "AI systems will continue to make mistakes"?

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#172

Post by [deleted] »

tinyhouse wrote: post #167
fock wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, could you tell me for example, what this relatively often cited paper solves or where it's actually applied to solve a real world problem? https://openreview.net/forum?id=Sy2fzU9gl

I don't know this paper but it doesn't matter. I didn't say only ethics in AI research doesn't solve real world problems. It's a research field mostly for academia not industry IMHO. Obv many ethics researchers would disagree with me on this and that's OK. Partly because they would rather have the option to work at Google with FAANG salary vs a middle tier university in the middle of nowhere.

[deleted]

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#173

Post by marshmallow_12 »

manux wrote: post #169
marshmallow_12 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why on earth should i care any more or less about systemic racism just because some charlie tells me it's unethical? Inventing ethics for machines helps cure exactly nothing. Only that i may be deemed by a machine to be an inferior human and less worthy than a "superior" being. Pushing technology that enforces your ideology is a horrible idea.

> Pushing technology that enforces your ideology is a horrible idea. But that's what we're all doing. By being "against AI ethics", you are effectively pushing technology that enforces _your_ ideology. Your ideology seems to happen to be different than mine, but you would be naive to think that the status quo is somehow "ideology-free". Do you still think it's a horrible idea? Try being a bit less deontological and a…

>Your ideology seems to happen to be different than mine.

if you're saying i'm a racist, i'm not. Is everything that some people say are racist actually racist? No. Is racism a problem? absolutely!

The status quo, however, should be changed by people,not people with machines. Doing nothing, that involves not using obscure algorithms to force people to think a certain way is better, in my opinion. You can't call something ethical just because you think it should be; it must be argued out. Using AI to shut out some more of that argument will only create a universal standard, not necessarily the correct one.

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#174

Post by manux »

marshmallow_12 wrote: post #173
manux wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pushing technology that enforces your ideology is a horrible idea. But that's what we're all doing. By being "against AI ethics", you are effectively pushing technology that enforces _your_ ideology. Your ideology seems to happen to be different than mine, but you would be naive to think that the status quo is somehow "ideology-free". Do you still think it's a horrible idea? Try being a bit less deontological and a…

>Your ideology seems to happen to be different than mine. if you're saying i'm a racist, i'm not. Is everything that some people say are racist actually racist? No. Is racism a problem? absolutely! The status quo, however, should be changed by people,not people with machines. Doing nothing, that involves not using obscure algorithms to force people to think a certain way is better, in my opinion. You can't call somet…

> if you're saying i'm a racist

I wasn't, sorry if that's what you interpreted.

> The status quo however should be changed by people,not people with machines

I'm not sure I understand what this means. People/companies own machines (and ML models) and use them. So shouldn't we make sure that the machines' decisions align with what people/companies _want_ them to do? (i.e. that the people's ethics align with the ML model's ethical consequences; I'm 100% sure that people who deploy "racist models" don't do it on purpose or out of malice)

> You can't call something ethical just because you think it should be; it must be argued out

On one hand this sounds like a strawman. No one thinks that something is ethical because someone randomly declared it so.

On the other hand... ethics are a human construct, and will continue to evolve as our culture evolves over decades and centuries. Shouldn't we construct ML models which are flexible in that they can align themselves with the ethics we collectively decide? We don't know how to do that yet!

> Using AI to shut out some more of that argument will only create a universal standard, not necessarily the correct one.

You seem to be under the impression that the fields of AI ethics is dedicated to brainwashing people into some particular unpopular moral philosophy. This is simply untrue. Within the field of AI ethics there is a lot of diversity of thought and disagreement on how human morals should be "encoded" so that AI can "align" with these morals. And I'm using the plural of morals because obviously there will never be a humanity-wide consensus on ethics, and if AI is to be deployed in the world it needs to reflect this diversity.

Here's an example of AI people disagreeing if you don't believe me: https://jacobbuckman.com/2021-02-15-fair-ml-tools-require-pr...

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#175

Post by tinyhouse »

manux wrote: post #171
tinyhouse wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Identifying which ML models _actually running in production_ cause systemic discrimination (e.g. as you mentioned poor image recognition, bail predictions, etc.) is exactly focusing on real issues that... cause systemic discrimination. There's nothing systemic about these issues. I already mentioned it's a data problem. Nothing new. It's very easy to build a fair image recognition system by representing all demogra…

> It's very easy to build a fair image recognition system by representing all demographics. I wish it was easy. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated, as it tends to be [1,2,3,4]. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.03058 [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05248 [3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.11600 [4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.12101 > Some AI ethics researchers cherry pick on those mistakes to justify their entire rese…

Thanks for the references. I will check them out once I get a chance. I do know one of these papers and from my understanding the modeling bias is on underrepresented features or the long tail, which again can be thought as a data problem that can be solved with better data collection.

I do agree that in the real world datasets are often biased because they represent the real world... and there are indeed modeling approaches to address such issues. (e.g., designing a loss function to up/down weight of certain types of examples). There's nothing new about this, it's been known in ML for decades.

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#176

Post by marshmallow_12 »

manux wrote: post #174
marshmallow_12 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Your ideology seems to happen to be different than mine. if you're saying i'm a racist, i'm not. Is everything that some people say are racist actually racist? No. Is racism a problem? absolutely! The status quo, however, should be changed by people,not people with machines. Doing nothing, that involves not using obscure algorithms to force people to think a certain way is better, in my opinion. You can't call somet…

> if you're saying i'm a racist I wasn't, sorry if that's what you interpreted. > The status quo however should be changed by people,not people with machines I'm not sure I understand what this means. People/companies own machines (and ML models) and use them. So shouldn't we make sure that the machines' decisions align with what people/companies _want_ them to do? (i.e. that the people's ethics align with the ML mod…

Ethics and morals don't exist. Full stop.

Codifying ethics perpetuates falsehood. Every single generation in history believed that the "had it" only to be denigrated as hopelessly misguided by the next generation. We are making the same mistake, only less people are killed right now, so it looks like we are more successful. Remember the Pacifism of the inter-war years? it bred fascism. The pendulum swings.

AI ethics cannot hope to remain in style for long, while they will almost certainly exist for far too long. Accepted standards of 2 years ago, are already out of date.

I'm lost for a solution.

I do think that the less AI is claimed to be ethical, the less it will be trusted, which is the best cure i can think of. Honesty is the basis of the whole of scientific inquiry, and is probably scarcer in google's ethics research department than anywhere else in the building. (programs don't run if the math's wrong, economics as well)

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#177

Post by Rochus »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #67
Rochus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of us are replaceable That's a management illusion. Try to replace e.g. someone like Fabrice Bellard, Mike Pall or Claude Shannon. Of course such things happen in big companies, but mostly because management is too limited to properly assess the true value of certain individuals. But the article is actually about a different topic.

That's an ego illusion. It hurts to admit that we're not replaceable, but we are. The job might not get done as well, or done in a different way than we'd do it, but it'll still get done.

>> It hurts to admit that we're not replaceable, but we are

The more people, the less the individual is valued. But that does not make the individual less valuable. Unfortunately, for a few years now, respect for the performance and qualifications of others has been declining more and more. This increases the illusion that everyone could be replaceable. Just ask your family if they see it that way in relation to you; the illusion of replaceability definitely ends here.

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#178

Post by skinkestek »

Traster wrote: post #161
jl2718 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what would drive someone to do this. Anger? Loneliness? Work pressure? Imposter syndrome? Her prior work seemed more observational than theoretical, and the she got thrown into a top-level leadership position in a theoretical research organization with almost zero experience. Is there a single person that would have defended decision if that person was a straight able christian white or north asian male? (No…

I don't know where you get these ridiculous ideas about imposter syndrome. Take one look at her career. She's written signal processing algorithms at Apple, won awards at conferences, got a PhD and worked for Microsoft in their AI ethics lab. She was more than qualified for her position and the research paper she was publishing passed peer review. You're right, this wouldn't have happened if she were a straight white…

> You're right, this wouldn't have happened if she were a straight white male

If anything, straight white males are trashed harder around here.

That's the only problem I've ever had with having a woman on the team: the fear of saying something that offends someone, her or other.

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#179

Post by manux »

marshmallow_12 wrote: post #176
manux wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you're saying i'm a racist I wasn't, sorry if that's what you interpreted. > The status quo however should be changed by people,not people with machines I'm not sure I understand what this means. People/companies own machines (and ML models) and use them. So shouldn't we make sure that the machines' decisions align with what people/companies _want_ them to do? (i.e. that the people's ethics align with the ML mod…

Ethics and morals don't exist. Full stop. Codifying ethics perpetuates falsehood. Every single generation in history believed that the "had it" only to be denigrated as hopelessly misguided by the next generation. We are making the same mistake, only less people are killed right now, so it looks like we are more successful. Remember the Pacifism of the inter-war years? it bred fascism. The pendulum swings. AI ethics…

No, you're wrong. Ethics and morals do exist. Money exists. Ideas exist in our brain, functionally.

Are all these things _ideas_? Human creations? Sure. The universe is absolutely indifferent to us. But these _ideas_ have real-world impact, and I'm not indifferent to my own suffering.

Societies function at the scale they do right now because there is enough overlap in how I perceive the world and how another random human perceives the world so that even though we don't know each other, we can still cooperate [see e.g. 1 for great discussions on this] e.g. exchange money for goods.

[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/02/01/132-...

> AI ethics cannot hope to remain in style for long

Again, you seem to be conflating "AI ethics" with a particular ethical stance, let's call it woke humanism, and you seem to think that the people who work on AI ethics work to enforce this belief on others. This is wrong. We're perfectly aware that humans have a variety of ethical preferences, see my previous post. Lots of people who work in "AI ethics" are definitely not woke humanists.

> Accepted standards of 2 years ago, are already out of date.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Um, sure we keep finding better algorithms... no one ever, ever, ever, has claimed that their paper is the ultimate algorithm and no no one will find better. But 2 years ago, killing a random person in the street was wrong. It's still wrong today, it was wrong 2000 years ago, and it's going to stay this way for the foreseeable future.

> I'm lost for a solution

The research field of AI ethics exists because we don't know what the solution is!!! Come join us if you're so concerned.

> Honesty is the basis of the whole of scientific inquiry

If you value honesty, then you should value research that tries to make ML models "honest", by revealing how they make the predictions they do and where that fails. I don't understand your antagonism towards ML FATE (fairness accountability transparency and ethics) research

Re: Is Google’s AI research about to implode?

#180

Post by marshmallow_12 »

manux wrote: post #179
marshmallow_12 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethics and morals don't exist. Full stop. Codifying ethics perpetuates falsehood. Every single generation in history believed that the "had it" only to be denigrated as hopelessly misguided by the next generation. We are making the same mistake, only less people are killed right now, so it looks like we are more successful. Remember the Pacifism of the inter-war years? it bred fascism. The pendulum swings. AI ethics…

No, you're wrong. Ethics and morals do exist. Money exists. Ideas exist in our brain, functionally. Are all these things _ideas_? Human creations? Sure. The universe is absolutely indifferent to us. But these _ideas_ have real-world impact, and I'm not indifferent to my own suffering. Societies function at the scale they do right now because there is enough overlap in how I perceive the world and how another random h…

my points still stand. History has shown us that defining ethics and writing them down merely spreads falsehood. I don't think we are actually better off morally now then 50 years ago. In some areas yes, in others we have regressed. (look at addiction rates now) Now to categorically state that ai ethics is as diverse as "traditional" ethics can't be true by definition. (mine, if you ask)

As for killing random people on the street never being socially acceptable... ...Just look at europe 80 years ago.

AI Ethical research can never be an accurate representation of the majority of humanity - or even the majority of its users! If it can it is not sustainable for any long period of time.

What about far more stable principles, such as murder and racism, you ask?

They are prone to being overplayed or downplayed, are state executions murder, or justice? What if the victim/ hangman happens to be black? Why should it matter? Just ignore some issues? That's misleading by omission.

It would be better to just admit "yes, we at Giant Tech know our ethics are bs, but we had to put something down or our machines won't work. Maybe we are not ready for advanced ai. Maybe there's a limit on what programmers can do. Yea. We know. turns out computers DO have limits. We'll have to find other ways to make money."

"But why should we say that!" cry all the executives when this speech is proposed to them.

"because it's true, and if we don't act now the company is screwed. And our clients will also get screwed" is the answer of the timid executive who first suggested this.

"how will the truth help us?" respond all the execs in unision.

"if we can keep up the lie for long enough, we shall all long be millionaires and retired before it implodes! We shall long be out of danger! who cares if some people lose money?"

"Yes, but don't you feel bad for all the shareholders? And how can we possibly fool people for decades to come that our ai isn't bs?" Responds the poor executive weakly.

"By creating a fake team and telling everyone they are ethics researchers" they say. "Really they are just pawns to help us earn more money. Fish get eaten by bigger fish you know?"

"can you just help me change a few lines on my press statement?" Asks the first executive.

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