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There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’

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Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’

#41

Post by smegma2 »

coddle-hark wrote: post #25
whymauri wrote: post #6

>This is the belief that A.I. codes are recipes for automating ethics itself; and that once a broad consensus around such codes has been achieved, the problem of determining an ethically positive future direction for computer code will have begun to be solved. I can think of literally nobody who believes this. I don't think anyone working in ethical AI would pretend that ethics can be "solved."

Not sure what the author meant there but we do have a problem of offloading the ethical burden of our systems onto the algorithms themselves and it should be taken more seriously. Like when Google shipped an AI for moderating hate speech which turned out to be biased against minorities [1]. Google would have been sued if that bias had been coded in procedurally, but because they used "AI" their response was basically…

Forgive me for only reading the abstract.

> The results show evidence of systematic racial bias in all datasets, as classifiers trained on them tend to predict that tweets written in African-American English are abusive at substantially higher rates.

Wouldn't we need to know the true rate of abusive tweets by race in order to conclude this? Is this addressed at all, e.g. with human labelled data, or am I mistaken in thinking this is necessary?

Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’

#42

Post by scollet »

Animats wrote: post #21

Ethics for AI has roughly the same problems as ethics for corporations. That's not encouraging.

Not to mention fuzzy ownership interpretations. If it (the "AI") does something like incorrectly target a hospital instead of a bunker, who is responsible?

Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’

#43

Post by behnamoh »

kijin wrote: post #35
behnamoh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few points: 1. I mean I'm all in favor of ethics, but it's like saying "I believe in God/god". Everyone seems to have their own interpretation of it. When people are talking about ethics/God/etc., how can they be sure that they're talking about the same thing? Centuries of debating over what is "ethical" has got us no where. Kant got close, but then there are caveats to his definition of ethics, too. 2. Who says AI…

> we'll have to accept the superior form of consciousness the ASI is. On what definition of "have to"? Large numbers of people will not only refuse to accept the ASI's interpretation of ethics, they will also refuse to acknowledge that the purported ASI is any better than ourselves/themselves when it comes to ethics. If you try to settle the matter by giving the ASI the force of law, there will be armed revolts and v…

No need for revolts and crackdowns; the ASI will take care of everything on its own. By "have to" I meant more like "there's no other option for us", just like chimps "had to" deal with our superiority millions of years ago.

Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’

#44

Post by mirimir »

scollet wrote: post #34
nine_k wrote: post #12

If you need a refresher on the perils of ethical AI, Asimov's "Three laws of robotics" stories are as fresh as 60 years ago [1]. I'd like to remind that humans themselves are not that good at ethics, both in philosophy and in daily life; they are worse yet on agreeing what ethics to adhere to. You can imagine how well it could be automated then. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

Good reference. I think "I Have No Mouth and Must Scream" is also standard material for futurist "AI" engineers. Edit: on the contrary

That is an extremely disturbing story.

Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’

#45

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Animats wrote: post #21

Ethics for AI has roughly the same problems as ethics for corporations. That's not encouraging.

It kinda seems encouraging to me. Corporations are hardly perfect, but even the worst modern corporations don't go around committing genocide, in the way that bad corporations used to and modern governments still do from time to time. I think there's reason for optimism that we can learn better control strategies.

Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’

#46

Post by kijin »

yamrzou wrote: post #22
curiousgal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There always seems to be a disconnect between tech philosophers and the technology they write about. Maybe they should try to actually work on 'AI' before preaching about it. To confirm your point a simple example is when working on an automated classifier for loan applications. One way to make the system more ethical, that is less descriminating based on certain features like race or gender, is to often lower the th…

What if it turns out there is reason people discriminate using those features (for example that people of race X tend to fail repaying their loans), and the classifier just learned that reason from the data. Why should we be expected to "fix" the reality for the classifier?

Because we're talking about ethics here, not just optimization. Ethics involves finding out what's wrong with reality and working to fix it, no matter how hard it may seem.

We need AI that doesn't simply accept reality "as is", but can also help us fix it. Otherwise AI will be little more than hyper-optimized reflections of our own failures and prejudices. We've had plenty of that already, we don't really need more of it.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’

#47

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

smegma2 wrote: post #41
coddle-hark wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what the author meant there but we do have a problem of offloading the ethical burden of our systems onto the algorithms themselves and it should be taken more seriously. Like when Google shipped an AI for moderating hate speech which turned out to be biased against minorities [1]. Google would have been sued if that bias had been coded in procedurally, but because they used "AI" their response was basically…

Forgive me for only reading the abstract. > The results show evidence of systematic racial bias in all datasets, as classifiers trained on them tend to predict that tweets written in African-American English are abusive at substantially higher rates. Wouldn't we need to know the true rate of abusive tweets by race in order to conclude this? Is this addressed at all, e.g. with human labelled data, or am I mistaken in…

Your core idea is true, but such analyses are typically not done because the answer isn't considered relevant. An advocate would argue that the concept of "abusive" is culturally relative, so we must draw the line of abusiveness in a way that avoids disparate impact.

Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’

#48

Post by matheusmoreira »

stanmancan wrote: post #39
yamrzou wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that it is generally wrong, i.e. that other factors should come first. But what if the data suggests it? For example if is known that if you lend to someone from race X, there is 80% chance he would not pay back. Would you not incorporate that factor into your decision?

No. Find the other, non-racist data points that correlate.

Why should correlations with ethnicity be dismissed?

Epidemiological studies tell us some diseases disproportionally affect certain groups. Should doctors dismiss this knowledge as racist and refrain from screening patients in the affected groups because they might come off as racist?

Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’

#49

Post by yamrzou »

ekianjo wrote: post #33
stanmancan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because now people start to get rejected for loans because of their race, and that’s wrong for many obvious reasons.

It should be pretty easy for anyone out there working on such algorithms to remove features that are race-related, or even not collecting such features in the first place. Treat people as individuals, not as representatives of some kind of meaningless tribe.

> Treat people as individuals, not as representatives of some kind of meaningless tribe

I dont't think that's how we make our day to day decisions. I usually treat people as individuals because I expect to be treated the same, but it doesn't make the "tribe" features meaningless. For example I would not live in given neighborhood if its tribe is knwon for [something bad] (this also applies to my own tribe). If I have an object of value, the tribe of a person would certainly be a factor to decide whether to entrust him with it or not. I'm sure a lot of people would do the same. It's just how probabilities are tranlated by the brain.

Re: There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’

#50

Post by lone_haxx0r »

At this point, each time I read "ethics" I think of someone proselytizing their political ideology in the most obnoxious way possible.

I do have ethics, they're the product of my own analysis and are consistent with my world view in other issues not related to my job. I don't go around telling everyone else how to conduct their lives. If they have their own ethics, good for them. If they don't, I don't care, it's their life.

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