181–190 of 373 posts
This is a shameful situation. We need to all wake up and take a step back and realize what's happening here: increasingly you can't have a conversation about one issue unless you are a hundred percent pure in the eyes of a frankly self-proclaimed judge jury and executioner for 100% of your other views. I am of the left myself but on a meta-level what we're doing is essentially making it impossible to ever find middle…
This board could have been non-partisan, filled with leading thinkers in the space from academia and industry, and given meaningful access and authority. Google management decided to make it clear the whole thing was a sham by specifying they'll work a whole 8 hours a year and inviting someone who was wholly unqualified. There are many reasons to fear for the future of our political discourse but I don't think this i…
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What I find especially sad is I am a total believer in political correctness as a general courtesy to people and I think it's the right thing to do. However by simply sharing my upthread viewpoint that we need to be careful about this meta-trend I will probably be lumped in as one of these dark web right wing types even though it couldn't be further from the truth.
> What I find especially sad is I am a total believer in political correctness as a general courtesy to people Yes, but we must recognise the difference between etiquette and ethics. Ethics are the things you must do, but courtesy is a matter of etiquette, behaviour that is optional but culturally polite. PC culture these days raises etiquette to the level of ethics, and that's simply wrong.
This article is a little light on details, but there's a more in depth article here: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/4/18295933/google-... The initial complaint was around comments from 1 of the 8 board members: Kay Coles James The complaint was published Apr. 1 in a Medium post: https://medium.com/@against.transphobia/googlers-against-tra... As evidence the post lists 3 tweets from Kay Cole James: https://…
The two last links are the same.
https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1100488434500685824
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I don’t think it’s possible or desirable to find common ground with fascists, personally.
The rise of fascist in pre-WW2 Germany has to be seen in its cultural context. The country was a mess after WW1 and the attitude of neighboring countries which amounted to let's kick 'm while they are laying down. The German population was desperate enough to welcome everybody promising some kind of solution. At that time that was the communists or the fascists. If you're hungry and the fascists promise bread, you're…
Is it? What problem is that? Isn't part of the problem that the public is heavily mired in fake news such as the claim that Sandy Hook was fake?
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Engineering at Google objected, and leadership at Google can't do anything without engineering at Google.
as an engineer, no we didn't. maybe like 1 pct that are SJW's did but not the silent majority. we're tired of them speaking for us.
- Google leadership is, themselves, SJWs. They're just SJWs who are bad at things but once something problematic is brought to their attention they take actions of their own volition.
- Google leadership is a bunch of pushovers who listen to the most vocal faction even if it's a tiny minority and chase PR over getting things done. This means Google absolutely should not have AIs taking actions in an ethical framework decided upon by Google leadership, and certainly shouldn't have an outside council to legitimize their actions, because it isn't always the SJWs who will be loudest. (And in particular, there was a legitimate risk of the Heritage Foundation injecting its worldview into Google through James, because there's also a loud strain in American conservatism.) Google should be broken up and someone else should try.
- Actually, the SJWs are disproportionately responsible for Google's engineering success, despite being a minority, and if you're tired of them speaking for you, you need to prove that Google can survive without them. (Or they're not a minority, and there's a silent majority of people who stay quiet but are actually aligned with the SJWs, or something else equivalent.)
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Literally there are no such tweets.
They may be referring to tweets such as this, linked elsewhere in the comments: https://mobile.twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/110836523877...
> Today @heritage will critique gender identity @UN_CSW because powerful nations are pressing for the radical redefining of sex. If they can change the definition of women to include men, they can erase efforts to empower women economically, socially, and politically. #CSW63
That tweet does not say anything like "trans people don't exist", or that they should be harmed in any way, or that they aren't human. That tweet expresses a perfectly reasonable sentiment that many others share: that human beings are sexually dimorphic and cannot change sex. This sort of hyperbole on the part of transactivists is very frustrating: anyone who doesn't agree with extremist gender ideology is painted as a "bigot".
This is more important than one AI ethics panel with questionable authority. Google is in a position to censor and influence a huge amount of speech on the internet, and the fact that they were targeted by and arguably caved to a small extremist group is very troubling.
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The central example of AI ethics is a self-driving car deciding whom to run over. That example is perfectly possible to occure even with today’s technology. I don’t know what this continuation of playing-chess-doesn’t-take-Intelligence griping is supposed to accomplish, except as posturing of people conflating perpetual contrarianism with insight.
See, that exact example is why I look askew at a lot of the field of 'AI ethics' I mean, human drivers' education doesn't cover choosing who to kill in unavoidable crashes. Isn't that because we believe crashes where the driver can't avoid the crash, but can choose who to kill, are so rare as to be negligible? IMHO much more realistic and pressing AI ethics questions surround e.g. neural networks for setting insuranc…
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The central example of AI ethics is a self-driving car deciding whom to run over. That example is perfectly possible to occure even with today’s technology. I don’t know what this continuation of playing-chess-doesn’t-take-Intelligence griping is supposed to accomplish, except as posturing of people conflating perpetual contrarianism with insight.
See, that exact example is why I look askew at a lot of the field of 'AI ethics' I mean, human drivers' education doesn't cover choosing who to kill in unavoidable crashes. Isn't that because we believe crashes where the driver can't avoid the crash, but can choose who to kill, are so rare as to be negligible? IMHO much more realistic and pressing AI ethics questions surround e.g. neural networks for setting insuranc…
The main focus of "AI ethics" needs to be on model bias and how to counter it through transparency and governance. More and more decisions, from mortgage applications to job applications are being automated based on the output of some machine learning model. The person being "scored" has no insight into how they were scored, often has no recourse to appeal the decision, and in many cases isn't even aware that they were scored by a model in the first place. THIS is what AI Ethics needs to focus on, not navel gazing about who self-driving cars should choose to kill or how to implement kill switches for runaway robots.
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Engineering at Google objected, and leadership at Google can't do anything without engineering at Google.
They could fire them? They're paid for their labor, not their opinions.