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Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

cnn.com

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Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#41

Post by fatbird »

shoo wrote: post #30

One thing I've wondered: what is the purpose of Google's ethical AI group? What utility does it provide to the corporation? I suspect the primary motivation for funding ethical AI work is _public relations_ (or less kindly, corporate propaganda) - to help mitigate damage to Google's brands and reputation by public concern surrounding artificial intelligence. It is well understood that it can be difficult to get someo…

the primary motivation for funding ethical AI work is _public relations_

Exactly. The secondary motivation is the possibility of benefiting from some basic research. It's ultimately a credibility play, which makes their handling of the whole affair so mind-bogglingly dumb. There would have been no problem at all for Gebru to have presented her supposedly anti-Google paper; zero practical consequence for Google.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#42

Post by fatbird »

spicyramen wrote: post #18
pseudalopex wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In a message sent to Pichai and others that linked to the letter, Alex Hanna, a senior research scientist on the Ethical AI team, said it was sent on behalf of her team. A source familiar with the team said it includes roughly a dozen members."

In my experience teams with little work have time to do this "activism"

Thanks for threadshitting!

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#43

Post by jelliclesfarm »

spicyramen wrote: post #17
tolbish wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same reason "Latino" is spelled with a capital "L".

LatinX. As a native Spanish speaker I never understood the X and now I get it. Anyways is incorrect according to the Real Academy of the Spanish Language

There is also Chicanx [..] Chicano or Chicana is a chosen identity for Mexican Americans in the United States. The identity has also evolved into Xicano or Xicana and, more recently, Xicanx. Chicano/a is sometimes used interchangeably with Mexican American, although the terms have different meanings.[..]

I would think Latino/a applied more to Europe than in the Americas. When I first came to the States, I was surprised that Mexican-Americans were called Latino/a. Hispanic seemed more apt/correct than Latin. I had always associated it with Rome, not Spain.

The Latins https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latins [..] The Latins were originally an Italic tribe in ancient central Italy from Latium. As Roman power and colonization spread Latin culture, during the Roman Empire, Latins came to mean mostly unified Italic Latin-speaking people and the Latin-speaking people of Dacia, Iberia, Illyria, and Gaul whose land was settled by Roman colonists (see Latin peoples). Today, Latin people are those whose languages are derived from Latin; Italians, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanians, etc.

In the late 15th–16th centuries, a millennium after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Portugal and Spain began to create world empires. In consequence, by the mid-19th century, the former American colonies of these nations became known as Latin America and this region's inhabitants as Latin Americans.[..]

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#44

Post by _y5hn »

tomcam wrote: post #24

I have contempt for a lot of the things that Google does, but I have a sincere question about all of this. Why should they employ anyone who criticizes them that way in public? I would say the same about Peter Norvig or Guido van Rossum. If you ran the company, or the department, or owned your own firm where employees aired your dirty laundry like this, why should you be expected to keep them on?

I like that this is in the form of open-ended inquiry.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#45

Post by [deleted] »

fatbird wrote: post #40
tomcam wrote: post #24

I have contempt for a lot of the things that Google does, but I have a sincere question about all of this. Why should they employ anyone who criticizes them that way in public? I would say the same about Peter Norvig or Guido van Rossum. If you ran the company, or the department, or owned your own firm where employees aired your dirty laundry like this, why should you be expected to keep them on?

Because the academic standard for research, and the original motivation for tenure, allows for researchers to criticize anyone, including their own institution, as long as it's done and presented as the proper product of research. In other words, if a researcher is doing their research properly, it shouldn't matter if they're attacking their own institution or even colleagues, because it passes scientific muster and…

[deleted]

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#46

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

thenightcrawler wrote: post #28
tomcam wrote: post #24

I have contempt for a lot of the things that Google does, but I have a sincere question about all of this. Why should they employ anyone who criticizes them that way in public? I would say the same about Peter Norvig or Guido van Rossum. If you ran the company, or the department, or owned your own firm where employees aired your dirty laundry like this, why should you be expected to keep them on?

Was it public before she got fired?

It was, yes. Public statements she made before getting fired include:

> A Black woman can't survive around here doing any type of research let alone research thats designed to make those in the majority uncomfortable. And guess who can apparently unilaterally order you to do things without even thinking you're someone they should converse with. (https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331757629996109824)

> [The VPs in her org] are very useful for gaslighting and marginalizing Black women to eternity. They're very useful for blocking any upstream work that needs to be done to change the status quo. (https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1331772727615602690)

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#47

Post by _y5hn »

fatbird wrote: post #41
shoo wrote: post #30

One thing I've wondered: what is the purpose of Google's ethical AI group? What utility does it provide to the corporation? I suspect the primary motivation for funding ethical AI work is _public relations_ (or less kindly, corporate propaganda) - to help mitigate damage to Google's brands and reputation by public concern surrounding artificial intelligence. It is well understood that it can be difficult to get someo…

the primary motivation for funding ethical AI work is _public relations_ Exactly. The secondary motivation is the possibility of benefiting from some basic research. It's ultimately a credibility play, which makes their handling of the whole affair so mind-bogglingly dumb. There would have been no problem at all for Gebru to have presented her supposedly anti-Google paper; zero practical consequence for Google.

On the contrary: The research paper is evidence of knowingly committing later wrongdoings.

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#49

Post by DoreenMichele »

shoo wrote: post #30

One thing I've wondered: what is the purpose of Google's ethical AI group? What utility does it provide to the corporation? I suspect the primary motivation for funding ethical AI work is _public relations_ (or less kindly, corporate propaganda) - to help mitigate damage to Google's brands and reputation by public concern surrounding artificial intelligence. It is well understood that it can be difficult to get someo…

Without actually knowing the history, I think it's probably stupidly conceived. We seem to generally imagine that the biggest problem or challenge with AI is ethics because we frame ethics as being largely rooted in something emotional, like empathy or compassion, and not logic.

The movie I, Robot explores what happens when "logic" is taken to its logical outcome by an AI. It posits a robot with feelings as the antidote to this issue.

We tend to overlook the fact that humans themselves come in varying flavors with regards to degree of emotional affect, empathy, compassion, etc and how ethical they are. We haven't gotten this sorted for humanity yet and when tech goes sideways and hurts many people, we like to blame it on the tech itself fundamentally lacking "a heart" or ethics instead of blaming it on the character defects of the architects of the tech.

We still haven't really figured out how to do human intelligence well and that's scary and not something we want to admit, so we project our deficiencies onto the tech and this incident is uncomfortably casting light on the fact that it's not really clear cut like that. It's really not the case that you can readily separate the people from the tech when it comes to things we label "ethics."

/Hot take

Re: Tensions in Google's ethical AI group increase as it sends demands to CEO

#50

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

bnjms wrote: post #22
spicyramen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LatinX. As a native Spanish speaker I never understood the X and now I get it. Anyways is incorrect according to the Real Academy of the Spanish Language

It’s ridiculous. It’s completely unnatural and can’t be worked into the language in a day to day way. They should have chosen another vowel like the short ‘e’, latiné.

What's especially ridiculous is that they did - latine and latin@ (pronounced with whichever gender the speaker finds convenient) have a reasonably long history in contexts where people want to be conspicuously gender neutral. "Hispanic" too, although some speakers consider that to have a slightly different meaning.

As far as I can tell, the new coinage of "Latinx" has no purpose except for signaling that you're one of the cool club. The vast majority of Latinos have never heard of it, and most of those who have don't like it.

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