Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 154 posts

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#141

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

visarga wrote: post #136
ncallaway wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to algorithms that notice true but politically inconvenient I don't know that I agree that there exists an algorithm that can determine what is factually true, so I'm not sure I agree that an algorithm can "notice a true thing". Do you have an example of when an algorithm noticed something that was objectively true but was shut down? Can you explain how the algorithm took notice of the fact that was objectively tru…

For example gender stereotyping for jobs or personal traits, that is politically incorrect but nevertheless reflects the corpus of training data. (He is smart. She is beautiful. He is a doctor. She is a homemaker.)

I think you're assuming that if it's in the data, it's "factually true" as the OP puts it. It doesn't work that way. There is such a thing as sampling error, for example.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#142

Post by goatcode »

joe_the_user wrote: post #101
modeless wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with government regulation of AI is that the biggest threat is government use of AI. Rules for thee but not for me!

Government does regulate itself, sometimes. The proposal seems to be concerned with regulating the government, for example limiting "crime prediction". Also, the private institutions it's talking about are things like credit bureaus and employers large enough to use AI for screening employees.

>for example limiting "crime prediction"

I saw that too, and ended up wondering if it'll be ignored if it's seen that crime prediction falls under the "public safety" exception, from time to time (or eventually, altogether). That's the problem with vague things like "public safety" being tied to regulation, imo.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#144

Post by mc32 »

visarga wrote: post #77
mc32 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, what good is technology for the sake of technology if it’s detrimental to people’s well-being? Technology to conquer ills, yes. Technology which alienates people, no. It’s kind of like the goths vs the romans or the inuit vs europeans. Is the value of progress more than the value of self-worth?

> Is the value of progress more than the value of self-worth? Why is self worth put in antithesis with progress? Was past progress a cause of loss of self worth?

Progress brings good: vaccines, decreased infant mortality, etc. But we also get to live in cities, disconnected from some realities, like food and self sufficiency. In civilization you are counting on other people doing things for you. Farming, housing, transportation, care, education, etc. Yes it’s fancy and advanced and most of us will choose modern life, but not everyone has gone that route (goths in roman times, inuit in present times). Some people see value in being connected to nature, not necessarily in some artificial romantic way, but more visceral ways and forgoing modern progressive life.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#146

Post by livueta »

watwut wrote: post #134
livueta wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lethality of weaponry has a significant impact on how battles are fought, where increasing lethality generally means fewer participants and, counterintuitively, fewer deaths: https://acoup.blog/2021/02/26/fireside-friday-february-26-20... is a decent discussion. There's obviously some lag (the bloodiness of WWI) but overall yes, in a weird way, the Gatling gun and other weapons like it are part of why you're a lot le…

WWII was even bloodier then WWI. The obvious difference between current draftee and Napoleon one is that Napoleon set up to conquer other coutries. The peace time draftee is going to have lower mortality. Napoleon was literally the aggressor.

WWII's civilian/military casualty ratio was way higher than WWI's (~2:1 vs. very very roughly 1:1 or lower), which would affect how the lethality hypothesis affects casualties. When more of the dead are civilians and civilians predominantly die from famine and disease, higher overall death counts in a more-global conflict don't necessarily mean that conflict killed more soldiers per-capita, though some nations definitely suffered higher per-capita military losses due to factors beyond increasing weapon lethality - mostly thinking of Russia there. For instance, furiously crunches Wikipedia numbers in the UK it looks like WWI had a higher proportion of military deaths to population (~2% vs. ~.8%) even though it also suffered significantly more civilian deaths in II, though not enough to outweigh the decrease in military losses as a function of total population.

There might be an argument that increasing weapon lethality can decrease the number of battlefield combatant deaths but also could increase the likelihood of mass civilian atrocity. That said, high-lethality weapons definitely aren't necessary for mass civilian atrocities either.

And sure, I intended a wartime/wartime comparison regarding draftees: even if we go back to WWII as the last real great-power hot war, a French Napoleonic draftee (looking at France as Britain apparently didn't actually conscript in the Napoleonic wars) is significantly more likely to die in battle than a French WWII (or even WWI!) draftee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars_casualties#cit...

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#147

Post by ncallaway »

visarga wrote: post #136
ncallaway wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to algorithms that notice true but politically inconvenient I don't know that I agree that there exists an algorithm that can determine what is factually true, so I'm not sure I agree that an algorithm can "notice a true thing". Do you have an example of when an algorithm noticed something that was objectively true but was shut down? Can you explain how the algorithm took notice of the fact that was objectively tru…

For example gender stereotyping for jobs or personal traits, that is politically incorrect but nevertheless reflects the corpus of training data. (He is smart. She is beautiful. He is a doctor. She is a homemaker.)

> nevertheless reflects the corpus of training data

I don't think "reflects the corpus of training data" gets entails "is therefore an objectively true fact". In fact, I think a lot of people that complain about AI gender stereotyping for jobs or personal traits would _exactly describe the problem_ as AI is "reflecting the corpus of training data".

I don't think anyone disagrees that the AI/ML learns things reflected in the corpus of training data.

My request for an example is one where the AI/ML is reflecting an "objective truth" about reality and people then object to that output. But "the AI/ML is reflecting an objective truth about the training data" fails to satisfy my request for an example, because it falls short of demonstrating that the training data was an accurate and objective reflection of reality.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#148

Post by [deleted] »

tablespoon wrote: post #116
tomp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we've seen ways AI can allow discrimination through the back door. Do you have any concrete examples of these, in particular where the use of statistics or AI enables more discrimination than using human decisions?

>>> we've seen ways AI can allow discrimination through the back door. >> we've seen ways AI can allow discrimination through the back door. > Do you have any concrete examples of these, in particular where the use of statistics or AI enables more discrimination than using human decisions? Here's a concrete example: https://towardsdatascience.com/racist-data-human-bias-is-inf... > An AI program called COMPAS has been…

[deleted]

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#149

Post by visarga »

ncallaway wrote: post #147
visarga wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example gender stereotyping for jobs or personal traits, that is politically incorrect but nevertheless reflects the corpus of training data. (He is smart. She is beautiful. He is a doctor. She is a homemaker.)

> nevertheless reflects the corpus of training data I don't think "reflects the corpus of training data" gets entails "is therefore an objectively true fact". In fact, I think a lot of people that complain about AI gender stereotyping for jobs or personal traits would _exactly describe the problem_ as AI is "reflecting the corpus of training data". I don't think anyone disagrees that the AI/ML learns things reflected…

"Handsome lady/woman/girl" vs "Beautiful gentleman/man/boy". Try in Google Search.

We're just using different adjectives based on gender.

Re: Europe seeks to limit use of AI in society

#150

Post by lostmsu »

joe_the_user wrote: post #94

The listed examples seem reasonably good. * systems which establish priority in the dispatching of emergency services * systems determining access to or assigning people to educational institutes * recruitment algorithms * those that evaluate credit worthiness * those for making individual risk assessments * crime-predicting algorithms While I'd also like to see autonomous military devices banned, banned AI that make…

Good? This list is basically a rehash of popular sci-fi dystopias. I bet setting it up did not involve much thought beyond "Oh yeah, I remember this was the premise behind Minority Report. Let's ban it"
Post reply on HN