371–380 of 466 posts
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> Most computers from 20+ years ago are inoperable today Mostly because they were dismantled or destroyed. Most computers that old that were left unmolested still work just fine.
Capacitors just don’t work after a while. To get most old computers working, you have to surgically replace all capacitors first.
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I don't see it as an implicit assumption that the teams are wrong, but a recognition that the teams have a fairly narrow goal that can easily blind them to larger implications of design decisions as they "move fast and break things". Having some sort of outside check on that seems wise to me.
Google, Microsoft and Facebook had those teams, all they achieved is to get a new competitor by slowing down the natural pace of getting things into production by dumbing things totally down instead of finding technical solutions to ethical problems that keep most of the power of the AI systems.
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Except that lead's toxicity has been known for thousands of years.
I would argue social media has at least 10 years of known toxicity, it is so addictive and harmful to young people i dont get why its not prohibited like gambling or smoking..
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…
> It's not that I don't think diversity in corporate environments is extremely valuable The fact that you pre-emptively accept the idea that maximizing diversity to its limits is beneficial to corporations shows that people just take these things at heart because "the people in charge said so". It is not a coincidence that much of the research of the supposed benefits of diversity in businesses comes from business sc…
I literally never said that, nor do I believe it, nor do I quite understand what "maximizing diversity to its limits" means.
My belief primarily comes from working in a range of companies and environments, some that were quite diverse, and some that were really lacking in diversity (and by "lacking in diversity" I mean cases where, in just one example, we had a sizable team with only a single woman), and I've seen that the environments that were lacking in diversity had very specific problems that were a detriment to the business (in addition to just generally sucking for some folks specifically due to that lack of diversity).
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…
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We don't have the clairvoyant ability to know that AGI will exist in any future near enough to worry about. It might or it might not - and even if it exists we could get its nature wrong and worry about the wrong things.
This isn't congruent with the AI research community consensus. There's debate over many points, but that we will develop AGI is seen as a forgone conclusion almost universally. The most pessimistic place it closer to 2100, others say 5 years, most say Notably the people closest to the fire, those advancing SOTA AI capabilities and those deepest into alignment/existential risk research, both say it is coming this deca…
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Chief Diversity Officer also help increase the ratio of underrepresented populations in company officers without having to change any existing officers. If the goal is to increase minority positions, then you can do this by hiring new officers to replace attrition. This takes a long time and constraining available candidates for key positions is probably frowned upon. Or you can add a new position, increasing the den…
And doing so always relies on sexist discrimination in the hiring process, which is definitely not a "non-zero positive" effect.
The position costs money so it could have negative impact. It is interesting that every CDO I’ve met has been in an underrepresented population, most women, but not all. I doubt it’s a fair hiring system, but I still prefer it over the olden days when the diversity council was a bunch of old people all of the same race and gender. I know that shouldn’t matter as long as they delivered on increasing diversity, but it always seemed funny to me.
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…
Almost entirely, the existence of Chief Diversity Officers - and to a lesser but still prevalent extent, this "off-to-the-side" teams you mention - are just jobs programs with an identity politics twist. CDOs exist so that the "right" people can have a high-power (even if only via public perception), well-paid C-suite role. These ethics teams exist so that a group of the "right" people can level up their resumes. Ins…
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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…
> Someone demonstrated that the leading system flagged multiple members of Congress as dangerous fugitives and that was the end of that. That's not a question of ethics, it's a question of the model performance.
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…
The need for maximization of profits will pretty much always trump any sort of ethics team in place. LLM have been selected as the "new frontier" for a lot of these companies an in turn any sort of "fat" that can be trimmed from the system will be.