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

Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

platformer.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 466 posts

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#201

Post by dTal »

pixl97 wrote: post #65
qudat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in this case. If intelligence always created intelligent machines that are capable of replacing us, then how is that not intelligence as well? Further, silicon-based lifeforms would be able to spread and travel the universe much easier because what is time to a machine?

I mean, if that's the case let me come over and cannibalize your body for sustenance so I may continue my breeding. Oh right, it's unethical and immoral do to that to other humans (though how much better are we for doing that to animals?). I certainly don't want the paperclip maximizer disassembling me for my involuntary donation to the collective.

>Oh right, it's unethical and immoral do to that to other humans (though how much better are we for doing that to animals?).

This seems like a good juncture to point out that not everyone does do that to animals, and if you truly believe it's unethical and immoral, you can and should join their ranks, and attempt to convince others to as well.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#203

Post by staunton »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #166
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…

Exactly, this is a form of ass coverage and not a genuine desire to do good. The job of ethics, legal, compliance, etc. departments is not necessarily to ensure the company behaves like a boy scout but to ensure that they have plausible deniability when they don't and to prevent companies from making expensive mistakes. The potential damage to the company is substantial and having such departments is a form of insura…

"Genuine desire to do good" doesn't make money and leads to less shareholder value. If "desire to do good" exists in a company, it is necessarily eliminated when the company either gets more efficient or fails.

In order to even allow a company to "try to do good", the only possible measures are to change incentives and the environment in which it operates. Regulation and customer choice can change incentives. The environment (such as how people in the job market value money compared to working environment, "doing good", etc.) evolves naturally and is hard to change with purpose (my definition of environment in this context).

I tend to view things like having such company roles a bit more positive. Yes, in most companies such a role cannot achieve almost anything and is created mainly for PR purposes. However, the people filling that role often really care about making a positive impact. The mere fact that having such a role does serve a PR purpose signals slowly moving in that direction. One just shouldn't expect all the people who didn't care before to have a sudden epiphany and become Mother Theresa.

Change is possible and it often happens quickly, ever more quickly these days than in history. Imagine how abolition of slavery in the US south must have felt like. Moving towards "doing good" is hard, painful and prone to fail. I think incentivizing the creation of these PR roles is a lot better than doing nothing. Pretending to care and not caring is hypocritical but it actually still leads to better outcomes than everyone proudly not caring and constructing an ideology about why they shouldn't.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#204

Post by krisoft »

anonylizard wrote: post #19
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…

This. People should understand AI safety != AI ethics. AI safety has two branches, AI ethics and AI alignment. Those two branches despise each other with intense passion. The alignment branch (responsible for developing RLHF->ChatGPT) believes AI ethics is completely trivial, and distracts attention away from existential risks. The ethics branch (responsible for all the media attention about racist AIs/bias etc) view…

> this has not caused mass social harm despite the tens of millions of users

I'm so glad that you are confident on this. What is the basis of your confidence?

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#205

Post by kramerger »

dmix wrote: post #115

Anyone paying close attention to the output of generic "AI ethics" people (especially on Twitter) should not be surprised that companies that when push comes to shove the businesses getting actually useful AI tools that are being tested by real people for real things generating real data, are starting to question the utility of the bulk of the crowd who skirted off hypotheticals for years to build their reputations a…

I think there is a lot of unjustified hatred for the AI ethics guys. From what I have seen, they have raised manu important issues so far, and led to many improvements both around ethics and AI in genetal.

For example, the cops wanted to arrest people based on input from image recognition systems. Someone demonstrated that the leading system flagged multiple members of Congress as dangerous fugitives and that was the end of that.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#206

Post by ben_w »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #176
Dylan16807 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I supposed to know these terms?

Sorry, yes that wasn't clear. Scott Alexander coined most of them in "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" [1] Red & blue are exactly what a U.S reader would think they are. "Grey" is an attempt by Scott to define something else, loosely hacker-ish / rationalist (you can tell who he thinks the cool people are). "Rainbow tribe" I just made up, but I think you can guess what I mean now based on context. Alignme…

> Red & blue are exactly what a U.S reader would think they are.

As a non-American, only the fact you wrote "American" makes me think democrat-republican; but for that I would've thought of the similarly named TV tropes entry: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMor...

> "Rainbow tribe" I just made up, but I think you can guess what I mean now based on context.

50-50 this is either a LGBT+ reference or a reference to all the other color schemes used by various political parties around the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_colour

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#207

Post by Barrin92 »

pixl97 wrote: post #65
qudat wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in this case. If intelligence always created intelligent machines that are capable of replacing us, then how is that not intelligence as well? Further, silicon-based lifeforms would be able to spread and travel the universe much easier because what is time to a machine?

I mean, if that's the case let me come over and cannibalize your body for sustenance so I may continue my breeding. Oh right, it's unethical and immoral do to that to other humans (though how much better are we for doing that to animals?). I certainly don't want the paperclip maximizer disassembling me for my involuntary donation to the collective.

>Oh right, it's unethical and immoral do to that to other humans

there's a difference between a sort of provincial ethics between individuals and ethics with regards to entire species over aeons. Would the universe be a more interesting place if some animal species had squashed out all other life a billion years ago for self-preservation, including humans?

Of course getting owned by the paperclip maximiser is just as stupid as getting killed by a virus, but future life may be to us what we are to ants.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#208

Post by XorNot »

anonylizard wrote: post #19
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #9

These sorts of adjunct, off-to-the-side "ethics" teams are always corporate window dressing, and when push comes to shove they always get jettisoned when competition demands an increase in speed. I don't mean to start a flame war, but this is a reason why I think "Chief Diversity Officers" are such an ill-conceived notion. It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable, but it's…

This. People should understand AI safety != AI ethics. AI safety has two branches, AI ethics and AI alignment. Those two branches despise each other with intense passion. The alignment branch (responsible for developing RLHF->ChatGPT) believes AI ethics is completely trivial, and distracts attention away from existential risks. The ethics branch (responsible for all the media attention about racist AIs/bias etc) view…

> It seems increasingly that the concerns from the ethics branch have not come to pass at all.

It is literally happening right now in the US justice system: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm...

There's all sorts of problems with this, but the use of "AI" to launder biased data (via IP law no less - these are proprietary blackbox algorithms being used by the justice system, owned by corporations - every part of that is antithetical to open and fair trials for citizens).

The ethics branch have been sounding the alarm for a long time on this, and have been exactly right as to what the problem is.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#209

Post by mkl »

Havoc wrote: post #194

I wish this would be less about woke stuff and more about paperclip maximiser problems

Do you know of anything remotely near that kind of problem in practice? Paperclip maximiser problems seem to me like fantasy at this point. I don't think we're anywhere near close enough to that problem to sensibly work on avoiding it; I think it's a bit like trying to work on the problem of lunar city overcrowding.

Re: Microsoft lays off one of its responsible AI teams

#210

Post by college_physics »

dmix wrote: post #115

Anyone paying close attention to the output of generic "AI ethics" people (especially on Twitter) should not be surprised that companies that when push comes to shove the businesses getting actually useful AI tools that are being tested by real people for real things generating real data, are starting to question the utility of the bulk of the crowd who skirted off hypotheticals for years to build their reputations a…

> Microsoft is very aware

thanks, that is comforting

> the cat is out of the bag even if you don't like it

thanks for bullying us around

> the legitimately talented AI thinkers

who exactly authorised you to project legitimacy in a space that has not seen any regulation?

Post reply on HN