[HN Gopher] Google no longer wanted to sponsor the AI ethics c...
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Google no longer wanted to sponsor the AI ethics conference
Author : imagine99
Score : 272 points
Date : 2021-03-03 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.heise.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.heise.de)
| nullifidian wrote:
| Considering that "AI ethics" basically means we shouldn't have AI
| until we can guarantee that AI doesn't commit thought
| crimes(according to the current groupthink morality prevalent
| among the educated class), it's not surprising.
| ausbah wrote:
| that's disingenuous at best. AI systems are already deployed in
| the judicial system, surveillance systems, healthcare, and who
| knows how many other domains that effect people's lives - with
| many instances to suggest that a large % of systems treat
| people differently along undesirable features like race or
| gender due to encoding negative biases or whatever the cause
| may be
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This title is confusing in English. It makes it sound like
| _Google_ is the entity that made the decision not to sponsor,
| instead of the conference organizers. A better title would be
| "AI ethics conference organizers no longer want Google as
| sponsors".
| tantalor wrote:
| It's confusing because passive voice is used.
| Tomte wrote:
| No, it's confusing, because the sentence (which isn't
| actually in the passive voice) is word-by-word identical to
| another sentence, but with with a totally different meaning.
| So that many people will parse it as the other sentence.
|
| (The German sentence doesn't have that ambiguity)
| imagine99 wrote:
| I believe whoever changed the headline to this abomination
| doesn't understand any German - or it was done
| automatically by something like GPT-3 (wouldn't put it past
| HN ;-)).
|
| Why? Because it's the exact result that Google Translator
| spits out if you translate the original page in Chrome
| ("Google no longer wanted to sponsor the AI ethics
| conference"). That's of course just plain incorrect on
| several levels. I put a lot of effort into finding a
| suitable and exact translation when I originally submitted
| it but apparently we are now at the point where well-
| thought-through and correct work can simply be erased and
| overwritten with the result of a stupid Google AI. How
| fitting for this topic ;-))
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| It's not really "incorrect", it's just ambiguous to the
| point that an average native English speaker would
| interpret it incorrectly.
|
| The problem is the word "wanted" in that sentence can
| either signify present tense passive voice (e.g. "Google
| (is) no longer wanted to sponsor..."), which is actually
| the desired interpretation here, or past tense active
| voice (which is how I think most native speakers would
| interpret it).
| tester34 wrote:
| I think adding "is" - "Google is no longer wanted..." would be
| enough
| imagine99 wrote:
| I did submit it under a completely different title but
| unfortunately someone changed it to this abomination. I don't
| know what if anything I can do about it because I also thought
| it can now be construed as the exact opposite.
|
| I think Google declared "persona non grata" as
| sponsor of AI ethics conference by ACM
|
| was my original title.
|
| "Persona non grata" to me was the best translation of
| "unerwunscht" in the original German headline. There might have
| been other options but "wanted" certainly is extremely awkward
| and ambiguous in comparison. But stuff like that keeps
| happening on HN, it has certainly been a "known bug" for many
| years, which sometimes leads me to just not visiting or
| commenting/submitting for a couple of weeks until I've stopped
| fuming over the unappealable, authoritative actions by someone
| who doesn't know their limits... ;-)
| monkeyingaround wrote:
| I think this pretty much tells me everything I suspected
| about HN.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Since google doesn't need ethicists but vice versa I think they
| will be fine after this crushing blow.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| So I have to accept all of Heise's cookies or I have to pay?
|
| Wow. Heise had a better reputation than that in my mind.
| croes wrote:
| It's even worse. The new cookie banner reads "USA Consent: By
| clicking on "Accept", you consent to your data being processed
| by providers in the USA in accordance with Art. 49 (1) DSGVO.
| The USA is considered to be a country with an insufficient
| level of data protection according to EU standards. There is a
| risk that your data may also be passed on to US authorities."
| motohagiography wrote:
| I've written here once before that AI ethics researchers are like
| hiring hackers working in security, where they hold your products
| to an exogenous standard or ideal, which can add value, but has
| risks.
|
| I've worked for companies who hired and then had to fire hackers
| for publishing vulnerabilities in their own and in customer
| products. Security is fundamentally a technology governance
| function, and AI ethics piece is also a technology governance
| function, where both hackers and AI ethics researchers are in-
| effect activists to create awareness for change, but aren't
| typically who you would put in the actual governance role.
|
| An AI ethics conference has analogies to Defcon or Blackhat, in
| that shunning vendors because the attendees perceived that some
| prominent hackers were treated unfairly may have some precedents.
| Microsoft's relationship with Defcon in the 90's vs. post 2000 is
| an example of how this both happened and changed.
|
| Extending that analogy, the disconnect in the relationship
| between researchers and vendors was a symptom of what a
| disadvantage the vendors were at to the asymmetric risk that
| activists/hackers posed because the media story of the conflict
| between giant corporations being vulnerable to scrappy hackers
| writes itself. In terms of how to handle it, google can probably
| use precedents from MSFT vs. defcon, and AI ethics researchers
| can look at how hackers both succeeded and failed to change
| security and tech governance.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _AI ethics researchers are like hiring hackers working in
| security_
|
| One of these can be objectively evaluated for skill. There may
| be unwanted side effects. But the skill is there or it isn't.
| That does not apply to the other, which makes their hiring and
| firing fundamentally different.
| jjaammee wrote:
| Hacked or not hacked is easier to say than ethical or not.
| Your ethical standards maybe racism to others, everyone have
| their own interpretation of ethics.
| KMag wrote:
| Expanding on this, if you had a machine that let you see
| 100 years in the future, you could nearly perfectly and
| objectively evaluate your security team's performance by
| looking at the number/severity/value lost through data
| breaches over that period.
|
| With AI ethicists... if you could look 100 years in the
| future.. there's not an objective measure of ethical
| outcomes you could use to evaluate the performance of your
| AI Ethics team. I suppose a cynic would look at the total
| cost spent defending and paying settlements / judgements in
| ethics-related lawsuits. As far as a non-cynical objective
| metric for AI Ethics performance, I can't think of any.
| 8note wrote:
| An "objective" metric would be customers and dollars lost
| due to losing trust.
|
| You could also look at compliance costs?
| ncann wrote:
| > But the skill is there or it isn't
|
| If I understand what you saying correctly, you're saying AI
| ethics researchers have no skill?
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Charitably, I think what they are trying to say is that the
| output of an AI ethics researcher is not directly related
| to the application of a measurably skill.
|
| It is instead related much more closely to a person's sense
| of right and wrong.
|
| Of course AI ethics researchers have skills. They have
| skill in researching, they have knowledge of AI, and
| presumably education in formal logic and ethics. They have
| skill in writing and communicating the results of their
| findings.
|
| However the product they produce is not writing and it's
| not research. It's the commentary on the research, the
| recommendations based on the results they have found. It's
| very subjective.
|
| It's very different than a skilled hacker applying their
| skill and knowledge to uncover a zero-day exploit in your
| software that needs to be fixed. That's a much more
| objective process.
| 8note wrote:
| So their product is peer review? That sounds like they're
| incredibly valuable
| angrais wrote:
| That depends ... Peer review is known to be a "lottery"
| because it is so subjective. Also known to be gained by
| writing papers about hot topics, etc.
| nightowl_games wrote:
| I agree that his statement is inflammatory, but we can
| steel man the statement into something truthful and
| palatable:
|
| It is far easier to evaluate a security researcher's output
| than an ethics researcher.
|
| I think many of us are familiar with this concept, as many
| of us likely preferred math over english in school as we
| preferred being deterministically evaluated.
| mcguire wrote:
| Is it? If the security researchers don't find
| vulnerabilities, does that mean they don't exist? If the
| AI ethics researchers embarrass you, aren't they doing
| their jobs?
| keypusher wrote:
| Just as a security researcher's job is to find
| vulnerabilities and promote best practices, it's not to
| hack and then publicly shame their employer. Ethics
| researchers should be the same, no? Find ethical issues
| and promote best practices, embarrassing your employer
| seems counterproductive except perhaps as a last resort.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| This depends. Google project zero routinely discovers
| vulns in Google products.
|
| However they're empowered to fix them, essentially no
| questions asked. So you don't often get p0 posts about
| unfixed bugs in Google products.
| 8note wrote:
| I imagine that depends on your contract?
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| Since you, the employer, decide what the job is, maybe or
| maybe not. If you define the job as, "develop ideas and
| frameworks where we can accomplish our goals in the most
| ethical way possible," then publicly embarrassing the
| company might not be doing your job.
| frenchy wrote:
| A good ethicist & communicator will probably be able to
| embarrass you if you're doing something wrong, but so
| will a comedian.
|
| I don't think OP is claiming that there ethicists have no
| skill, but rather that it's fundamentally a lot more
| difficult to evaluate.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| So there is an objective measure for deciding how good a
| programmer is? Why don't we just adopt that measure in
| interviews?
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Because an interview only lasts for a few hours.
| Guest42 wrote:
| I'd say a better measure is whether the person can
| currently handle most of what will be asked and how quickly
| they can get up to speed on new things. It's easier to
| figure out and more useful for the company. It also de-
| prioritizes those that create a buzzword salad (sometimes
| out of necessity) on their resume.
| 8note wrote:
| Ok, so what's the unit of this number, so I can rank all
| the members of my team?
| currymj wrote:
| AI Ethics isn't a non-technical field. See the accepted
| papers at the conference in question:
|
| https://facctconference.org/2021/acceptedpapers.html
|
| it's a mix of "soft" humanities, applied ML, methodology,
| algorithms/theory, and HCI.
|
| it's not any harder to evaluate an AI ethics researcher than
| it is any other kind of researcher.
| Eridrus wrote:
| Yeah, the firing of Timnit Gebru strongly reminded me of the
| Michael Lynn saga:
| https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/07/cisco_harasse...
|
| I think the analogy breaks down a little since hackers were
| generally outsiders to the companies (even Michael Lynn), and
| hiring them and starting programs around them was the thing
| Microsoft did to fix their relationship to the community,
| whereas the folks here were already insiders at Google, but
| maybe that was the problem, that they were explicitly hired as
| academics with the expectation that they would keep doing the
| same work, rather than internally focussed researchers working
| on improving the products and systems being created.
| astrange wrote:
| She was fired because she threatened to quit, and Google is
| just as incapable of stopping themselves from firing people
| as they are of not deleting all the Terraria guy's accounts.
| It's all robots and business processes, it doesn't matter
| what "the problem" was or if there was one.
| jcims wrote:
| >I've written here once before that AI ethics researchers are
| like hiring hackers working in security
|
| Exactly, PoC or GTFO!
|
| (i'll be here all week...)
|
| (edit: maybe)
| JPKab wrote:
| The problem with AI ethics as a field is that it attracts a
| whole lot of activists, most of whom have mediocre
| contributions to the field at best, zero contributions at
| worst. Watching highly entitled, and often narcissistic people
| with no tangible accomplishments attack Yan LeCun is pretty
| insane.
|
| The head of AI at Nvidia, who is very aggressive in her AI
| Ethics activism, recently put a screenshot of a list of names,
| which included mine, on a public tweet. In the tweet, she
| described the list as containing "fan boys" of an academic
| critical of "wokeness" as he calls it. I didn't know anything
| about the academic. I was added to the list because I commented
| on her tweet attacking him and asked her if she had engaged in
| any verbal discussions with him. That's it. I asked a question,
| and was put on a list proclaiming everyone in it as alt-right
| bigots. I found out about this because a former colleague
| called me and told me I was on the list. I didn't follow the
| guy she was attacking or anything like that. Not that it would
| have been justified if I had.
|
| It should be noted that I was a leading advocate at a large
| enterprise software company for getting CUDA integration and
| helping NVIDIA sell more hardware in the enterprise. NVIDIA
| didn't fire her, and they should have.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| I agree with this - "ethicists" without much experience in
| the field tend to be the worst people.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > it attracts a whole lot of activists, most of whom have
| mediocre contributions to the field at best, [ _]zero
| contributions at worst.[_ ]
|
| That is absurdly, unjustifiably optimistic. The _worst_
| activists have larger negative contributions than the best
| contributors have positive contributions. And as you yourself
| have observed, even typical activists often have worse-than-
| zero contributions.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Claiming that Gebru has no tangible accomplishments is
| factually wrong. She's lead author on multiple highly
| impactful papers.
|
| > I asked a question, and was put on a list proclaiming
| everyone in it as alt-right bigots.
|
| Were you, or are you editorializing her actions? Because what
| you actually described is that she put you on a list
|
| > of "fan boys" of an academic critical of "wokeness" as he
| calls it
|
| That's not calling you alt-right. I believe the stated
| purpose of the list was to have a set of people that allies
| could engage with constructively if they wanted to. In other
| words, it was a list of people whom might be good to engage
| in verbal discussions with. Because of that, you're calling
| for her to be fired. Why?
| JPKab wrote:
| Edit: I was mistaken in my response, since the commenter
| named Gebru. The head of AI at Nvidia is not Gebru, it's
| Anima Anandkumar. Gebru had nothing to do with this.
|
| She specifically said the things I stated, in a now deleted
| tweet. I know the cognitive dissonance is causing you to
| question my account, but that's what she did.
|
| Look up articles where screenshots are posted.
|
| I wasn't claiming Gebru has no accomplishments either. Many
| of her fellow ethicists fall into that category. She's not
| an ethicist, just won't shut up about it, along with race
| stuff, and has nasty, unprofessional habit of attacking
| people publicly. She's a bully, and I'm sick of people like
| you defending her because you've bought into her idiotic
| religion.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > She specifically said the things I stated, in a now
| deleted tweet. I know the cognitive dissonance is causing
| you to question my account, but that's what she did.
|
| I agree that she said the specific things you quoted. I'm
| not debating what she actually said. However when you say
| she characterized you as a member of the alt-right, that
| is your editorializing, and not something she said (nor
| did you claim it was). I'm simply clarifying that she
| never accused you of being a member of the alt-right, and
| that you're projecting that accusation.
|
| > Edit: I was mistaken in my response, since the
| commenter named Gebru. The head of AI at Nvidia is not
| Gebru, it's Anima Anandkumar. Gebru had nothing to do
| with this.
|
| Right, but Gebru had a highly discussed disagreement with
| Yann, so when you said
|
| > Watching highly entitled, and often narcissistic people
| with no tangible accomplishments attack Yan LeCun is
| pretty insane.
|
| You were saying "Gebru is a narcissistic person with no
| tangible accomplishments". Either that, or you're making
| up generic events and hypotheticals, but that would be a
| really strangely specific hypothetical. Anandkumar also
| has very significant achievements, so there's no one you
| could be directing that comment at that wouldn't be
| belittling.
| JPKab wrote:
| Ok, now I get why you were pissed. Gebru was in conflict
| with LeCun, but the mob of other ethicists that went all
| in on him were who I was talking about.
|
| And let's be clear:
|
| Gebru's accomplishments aren't shit compared to LeCun's,
| and everyone knows that in the AI field. Doesn't mean
| she's not accomplished, because she's a hell of a lot
| more accomplished than I am.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| > Gebru was in conflict with LeCun, but the mob of other
| ethicists that went all in on him were who I was talking
| about.
|
| Which ones? I followed things at the time, most of the
| other people who disagreed with Yann were...also PhDs,
| many of whom have significant accomplishments in their
| own right. I mean there are certainly random twitter
| people saying things, but that wasn't unique to the sides
| of the ethicists. Random twitter people also attacked and
| insulted Gebru and co too. So saying "Watching highly
| entitled, and often narcissistic people with no tangible
| accomplishments attack Timnit Gebru is pretty insane." is
| equally correct, but you didn't say that. That's
| suspicious and perhaps revealing of your biases on the
| subject.
|
| > Gebru's accomplishments aren't shit compared to LeCun's
|
| Of course. She's also had her PhD for 3 years, as opposed
| to 30. Its no surprise LeCun has accomplished more in a
| career 10x as long.
| JPKab wrote:
| Fair point on her being young in the field and her
| career. I think the reason it bothered me so much is that
| people act like LeCun just cruised on easy street for 30
| years.
|
| He went through hell. He was rejected from conferences
| despite having algorithms that exceeded all others, just
| because neural nets had fallen out of fashion. Meanwhile,
| the folks who attacked him have cushy jobs earning
| massive salaries, working on technology that he
| popularized.
| b0rat wrote:
| It's magical to see you sidestepping the personal attacks
| from OP joshua.. strangely unique.
|
| The op has accused of `cognitive dissonance` and being
| `pissed`.. Waiting to see the 3rd tag they come up with.
| ausbah wrote:
| most researchers have mediocre, marginal, or straight up "un-
| sexy" contributions to a field, that's just how most research
| happens. it doesn't make anyone "less of a researcher" though
|
| I also would also everyone look at Gebru's work [1] -
| certainly seems like they're an established research who
| comes from a top university, has published in top
| conferences, and has a good understanding of the technical
| parts of the field
|
| one's past experiences with something they are criticizing or
| defending is probably a good prior to have, but also
| shouldn't be the sole criterion. "leading" scientists are
| more often than not wrong on plenty of things
|
| http://ai.stanford.edu/~tgebru/
| jeremysalwen wrote:
| > NVIDIA didn't fire her, and they should have.
|
| Talk about cancel culture.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Perhaps if she makes wild accusations like that she should
| be cancelled?
| dmatech wrote:
| Not at all. The way she acted created serious risks to her
| employer, and anyone seeing her postings could reasonably
| conclude that she was conducting personal attacks on others
| and doing it on behalf of NVIDIA.
|
| When you declare your employer in your bio and talk about
| your field of work, it becomes relevant to your continued
| employment.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Forcing its advocates to play by their own rules is
| probably the best way to beat it.
| waterhouse wrote:
| Cancel culture is when a mob of people, usually on Twitter,
| most of whom have no direct relation to the institutions in
| question, try to create a bunch of bad publicity for a
| target at an institution for the purposes of making that
| institution decide to cut ties with the target.
|
| I think JPKab is saying that an NVIDIA employee mistreated
| someone who is effectively a prospective customer for
| NVIDIA (or who is working to create prospective customers),
| and that this by itself should lead NVIDIA management to
| fire that employee even in the absence of public attention
| to the event.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > It should be noted that I was a leading advocate at a large
| enterprise software company for getting CUDA integration and
| helping NVIDIA sell more hardware in the enterprise.
|
| Should have paused the project and reached out to the sales
| team responsible for your company's corporate account. Would
| have been interesting to see who pulls more weight (sales and
| paying customers or ethics "researchers").
| JPKab wrote:
| I was already contemplating leaving it for a startup, and
| frankly my response to her behavior was to become even less
| motivated about pushing that rock up the hill in the large
| organization I was in. I've since departed for the startup.
| tester34 wrote:
| >I've written here once before that AI ethics researchers are
| like hiring hackers working in security
|
| Except that afaik game studio actually hire people that worked
| on cheats - e.g Riot Games.
|
| In order to be defender you also need to know how to attack.
| specialist wrote:
| We need something like ombudsmans. Roles with true
| independence. Built in checks and balances.
|
| I have no idea how to make that work.
|
| Maybe something like legal codification, so that publicly
| traded companies and the various parties are granted some
| temporary liability armor when vulnerabilities (or equiv) are
| identified.
|
| PS- Just had a notion. Probably dumb: Maybe the liability
| (re)insurer gets a seat on the board of directors.
| scsilver wrote:
| Set up a regulatory project on github and allow people to
| post annonymous "issues" to be addressed in a public forum?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| The real problem with ethics is that it's not a science nor a
| rigorous discipline: it's a trend. It's whatever is trendy to
| say and think at the moment. You certainly don't have to
| understand the tech to practice "ethics" (if any technical
| knowledge was required the field would be pretty much empty).
|
| The way it works is you basically shame people and tech. You
| don't need to make a strong or valid case against a behavior or
| a tech, like a law would, because it's not legally binding.
| It's not real engineering regulations like a building or fire
| code. At best it's a mob made of folks who convinced other
| ethics PhDs to grant them a PhD that will rally against you and
| shame you [0].
|
| Great move from Google to stop feeding the ethics racket.
|
| [0] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-
| twitter...
| motohagiography wrote:
| While I could agree to a point, it's hard to separate the
| flavour of ethics from the need for reflection itself.
|
| A thorny ethics example from my own role was a decade+ ago I
| was hired to do a privacy impact assessment (PIA) on an ML
| solution for detecting benefits fraud. It had all the
| ingredients for a complete debacle: "artificial
| intelligence"(?!), a vulnerable population, credit reporting
| companies, arms length government agencies, highly paid
| consulting firms, etc. What we delivered was modifications to
| the system to solve their core fraud risk problem without
| making peoples lives (more of) a dystopian hell.
|
| Privacy is the currently the technology ethics department in
| large institutions, and I really see the AI ethics people as
| fancy privacy people with more math. Privacy has moved on
| from being a technical discipline that old hacker dudes like
| me did to being one largely done by women with law degrees.
| The tension between the security architect competency and the
| privacy policy analyst is still there in the field, but now
| we all see how they add a lot of value without needing the
| bottom-up view of a technologist.
|
| The flavour of ethics in the privacy field has evolved, and I
| was absolutely suspicious of the change, as if you weren't a
| cypherpunk in privacy in 2005, you were a 5th column
| infiltrator looking to co-opt it for corporate ends - but of
| course, that's not true. Anyway a lot of text to say don't
| throw out babies with bathwater on AI ethics, but I'm saying
| they're not as new as anyone thinks, and if you think privacy
| is important, then you will probably recognize ethics in AI
| is important as well.
| manux wrote:
| > The real problem with ethics is that it's not a science
|
| This is simply untrue. The goal of AI ethics research is
| (also) to build algorithms where one of the _inputs_ is a set
| of ethics. It doesn't matter what those ethics are. It just
| so happens that the "set of ethics" currently fed in tends to
| have a particular flavor ("woke liberal" ethics), which you
| seem to disagree with. Finding the algorithms matters, and
| it's likely that the standard ethics put in are going to come
| from some dominant ideology, but we still need the algorithms
| if we are to understand how to make AI that aligns with
| humanity's interests (however they are defined).
|
| I'd call that computer science.
| LunaSea wrote:
| As you pointed out, people don't agree on a set of rules,
| so what's the point of the algorithm and field?
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > It's not real engineering regulations like a building or
| fire code
|
| AI or Data Science ethicists tend to be qualified data
| scientists who have a better understanding of concepts like
| differential privacy than the vast majority of software
| developers. Don't dismiss them all because you disagree with
| some of them.
| astrea wrote:
| While you both take two sides of the argument, the truth,
| as it tends to be, lies somewhere in the middle. While I
| agree that there are some qualified scientists, etc. that
| have taken up this issue, there is still a sort of
| extension of cancel culture of "LinkedInfluencers" and such
| that just hop on the bandwagon of hating anything vaguely
| AI adjacent. I think the playground dismissal of his point:
| "Don't dismiss them all because you disagree with some of
| them." was rather thoughtless.
| [deleted]
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > "Don't dismiss them all because you disagree with some
| of them." was rather thoughtless.
|
| Th OP refered to them as a back scratching "mob", but
| when I say don't dismiss them all you accuse me of being
| "rather thoughtless" and using a "playground dismissal"
| when I gave specific reasons why they are qualified for
| the job.
| rav wrote:
| > Great move from Google to stop feeding the ethics racket.
|
| Read the article again - it's Google being uninvited as a
| sponsor. The title is poorly translated from German and
| should probably be changed to something like "Google no
| longer wanted as a sponsor of AI ethics conference".
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| It's a nice way for the conference to make it seem they are
| the ones who decided to terminate the relationship. That's
| like quitting right before getting fired to save face.
| currymj wrote:
| this just isn't true; if you skim some abstracts of papers in
| the field, you will see that in fact there is a lot of
| technical content.
|
| a lot of the big famous names in AI ethics (e.g. Moritz
| Hardt, Cynthia Dwork) also have very strong contributions
| outside this field.
| wwww4all wrote:
| Google hired these researchers to give them some basic facade
| of having concerns about AI ethics. They were supposed to write
| some nonsense papers and just act as shields when questions
| about AI ethics were raised.
|
| When these people bit Google on the hand, Google got rid of
| them. Simple story.
|
| Google is a monopoly and needs to be broken up under anti trust
| rules.
| likelyunlikely wrote:
| As sad as I think this reasoning is, I think it's true.
| Google wanted someone to shield them from scrutiny with some
| hand wavy papers, making them feel good about what they are
| doing (disrupting the market!11!1!), just as pharma pays
| studies to prove what they want. Those researched probably
| just didn't get the implicit agreement or requirement, that
| Google already did everything right and well. And obviously
| Google isn't racist or biased, and if they are, they are
| doing everything they can to combat that /s.
| [deleted]
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| In that case, let's look at the differences. In the case of ML
| researchers, careers are built on publications. I imagine a
| hacker who discovers a big vulnerability in their employer
| probably would be burning bridges if they published the
| vulnerability before the employer could fix it. In AI ethics,
| or at least the most notorious recent case, it seemed like
| publishing was the primary function and change was secondary.
|
| Then there's the ease of changing things. In security, I'd
| imagine fixing a vulnerability might require lots of work, but
| rarely novel research. In ML that's not the case. and after all
| that research, the finding might be a way to improve the worst
| cases by worsening the average cases, lowering revenue. And
| then there's the clarity of what even is an issue. If someone
| shouldn't be able to access a file, but they can, it's clear.
| The goal then is convincing stakeholders that the problem
| should be prioritized. In AI ethics, you have to convince them
| that the problem even is a problem, convince them to allocate
| research, then convince them that the technique is worth
| lowering revenue for, and only then get to the question of
| allocating resources to implement the fix. Convincing
| stakeholders to prioritize fixes is a wholly different game.
|
| I like your analogy, and there are surely lessons to be learned
| (e.g. maybe the ethics researchers' primary job shouldn't be
| publishing papers), but the differences are strong enough that
| the lessons might not extend too far.
| JarlUlvi wrote:
| > Security is fundamentally a technology governance function
|
| Could not disagree more.
|
| Viewing security as a governance function is part of the
| problem.
| [deleted]
| higerordermap wrote:
| Except these "Ethics" researchers don't have the same level of
| skills. And involve in virtue signalling.
| bitdizzy wrote:
| Do you have an axe to grind?
| higerordermap wrote:
| Against diversity hiring of sociology idiots.
| mcguire wrote:
| Is the phrase "virtue signalling" a form of virtue
| signalling?
| medecau wrote:
| Oh, it's definitely signalling...
| ska wrote:
| The use of the phrase "virtue signalling" has ironically
| mostly become reduced to signalling.
| [deleted]
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| No. Accusing somebody expressing an ethical concern as
| "virtue signalling" it's often used to signal cynicism.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Which is actually a virtue in the sense of the term in
| "virtue signaling".
| forgetfulness wrote:
| I know one in a position so high at a company big enough that
| you could narrow who I'm talking about to a just a few people
| with this level of detail, so I'll give no more.
|
| Nuh huh. She was hired at her megacorp precisely because she
| was a researcher with an illustrious trajectory who had been
| involved in these circles for years, herself frustrated by
| the low technical level of the discussion.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I think it's worth addressing this even if it's going to get
| flagged.
|
| Hacker skills are a really long tailed distribution and the
| best are brilliant, the worst are just riding coattails. The
| ability to form an opinion about the implementation scope of
| a given variable for one of the many complicated functions
| required in ML puts you in some pretty rare air.
|
| I work in security, where I need the breadth to argue the
| merits of the entropy of a diversification component or the
| choice of an elliptic curve in a protocol design and balance
| it with state level attackers - and regulatory policy and
| legislation, with the tedious compliance aspects as a theme.
|
| The _shape_ of the skills is weird. Where you need breadth
| first in a lot of areas, and depth first in ones that are not
| valuable outside very limited contexts. I can 't vouch for
| where on the long tail the people involved in this
| controversy might be, but I don't like the odds on being
| dismissive of them.
| higerordermap wrote:
| I respect breadth and depth of skills. What I don't respect
| is tonnes of virtue signalling and politics for the work
| which is comparatively trivial. And the virtue signalling
| increases when it's women / PoC in tech. This overly
| political crowd ends up doing nothing but damaging the
| reputation of women / PoC in the field.
| medecau wrote:
| here's some virtue signalling for you:
|
| your shit is disgusting
| [deleted]
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| The people who complain about virtue signaling are themselves
| engaging in virtue signaling, just to a different audience.
| karmasimida wrote:
| > hiring hackers working in security
|
| Hackers offer solution to your loophole, AI ethnics researchers
| only call you out and hijacking the narrative for their own
| benefits.
| bo1024 wrote:
| This is not generally true.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| What's the value of an AI ethics conference if the largest AI
| powerhouse is not allowed to take part?
| gambler wrote:
| Google's push to participate in AI ethics discussions has always
| been about controlling the narrative. The fact that it took them
| firing two people for ACM to notice is rather hilarious. Just
| read the papers they promote. The meta-narrative is rather clear.
| They want to present AI/ML as something that is dangerous in the
| hands of individuals or smaller companies and that requires
| constant and direct control from experts with tons of data and
| resources. So they're perfectly happy to talk about stuff like
| model bias, but the moment you start asking uncomfortable
| questions about ML in general you better watch out.
|
| These topics should be handled by people without corporate ties.
| Period. The conflict of interests is so in-your-face, it's mind-
| boggling more people don't speak about it.
| naebother wrote:
| Good. Imagining a world where Lockheed no longer wants to sponsor
| the cluster-munitions ethics conference and that's viewed as a
| negative.
| rexreed wrote:
| Now that sounds like a fun conference to attend. I'd be curious
| about the positive impacts of cluster munitions, altho I'd be
| hard pressed to find any. I would imagine an ethics conference
| on this topic would have one session: "do not use".
| ausbah wrote:
| "build bigger cluster munitions to deter our enemies"?
| eqvinox wrote:
| Well, there's at least 2 perspectives here.
|
| If the two people were fired due to race, gender, or even ethical
| opinion, this reaction is more than appropriate.
|
| If the two people were fired due to breaking established rules
| and processes, exfiltrating files or similar -- this can very
| well backfire on minorities. It indirectly creates another hurdle
| to hiring a minority member if the company needs to consider that
| they can't viably fire them for breaking rules.
|
| I'm unaware of good public information supporting either
| perspective. And both the ex-employees and Google may be
| restricted from publishing sensitive information to support their
| cause. I'm not sure how to form an informed opinion on this,
| honestly.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I'm not following your second perspective.
|
| If I read you comment correctly, your second perspective would
| be "Gebru and Mitchell were fired with good cause, but people
| are rushing to their defense only because they are members of a
| minority".
|
| If that's what you meant, I would counterargue: I haven't seen
| anything in this saga that implies anything of the sort.
| Simplified, it is my understanding that people either defend
| the firing claiming that Gebru and Mitchell acted in bad faith
| or object to it claiming that their only fault was speaking the
| truth back to Google (who hired them to do so).
| panic wrote:
| The idea of something "backfiring on minorities" as an entire
| group is part of the problem here. The fact that there was a
| backlash after someone was fired can't be used as a
| justification for not hiring other people whose only
| relationship to the original person is "also some kind of
| minority".
| Causality1 wrote:
| Legally, no. From a practical standpoint, people do whatever
| they think they can get away with.
| imbnwa wrote:
| We have to resort to legal solutions because the sad truth
| is that you can't at all trust entire demographics to alter
| or even reflect on their ethical stance.
|
| I mean, there are enough people on this very board whose
| response to Black diversity initiatives in particular, is
| that they're too low IQ on average and therefore will be
| disruptive to team productivity and cohesion, despite
| people like Naseem Taleb going after IQ measurements.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Reasonably, no. It's not a reasonable conclusion to make.
| _Most people_ are minorities.
| imbnwa wrote:
| In America? Are we cutting up the European-American
| demographic by gender and sexuality, cause that'd be the
| most immediate way for me to grasp this idea?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Gender, sexuality, neurodivergence, "race" (however you
| define it), "caste" (however you define it), disabilities
| (however you define _them_ , tbh, though it _generally_
| makes more sense than "race" or "caste")... Either I just
| have a really skewed social circle, or most people are
| minorities in at least one category.
| eqvinox wrote:
| Of course it's part of the problem. But it's also a somewhat
| unavoidable side effect of supporting minorities.
|
| In a very weird way, anti-discriminative behaviour itself
| _needs_ to be discriminative, because it needs to support
| minorities. And rightfully so, there needs to be a positive
| bias for minorities who were historically disenfranchised.
| Otherwise the historical disadvantage will propagate itself
| further. But then when you look at firings like this, it
| becomes very hard to distinguish whether it 's discrimination
| or rightful. These two _are_ members of minority groups.
| Their firing is, rightfully, examined to fine detail. But
| that same magnification lens has that chilling effect for the
| decision of hiring minority members.
|
| It's really a have-your-cake-and-eat-it problem. It f_cking
| sucks. And I don't know how to do better. I absolutely think
| we need affirmative action to relieve historic deficits, but
| at the same time this affirmative support is in itself
| discriminatory and can have negative effects. What to do? :(
| higerordermap wrote:
| You know who is at the end disadvantaged by affirmative
| action? Minorities / women.
|
| Even if a PoC / woman is actually talented, people will
| subconsciously perceive them as diversity hires.
|
| There were plenty of instances of people telling on this
| forum that they don't want to be seen as diversity person,
| but actual engineer.
| xenihn wrote:
| I think we've officially reached the point where you can
| stomp lumping all women together. Some companies are now
| prioritizing interns and junior devs from HBCUs, because
| they ended up with a new problem where the overwhelming
| majority of non-male hires for those roles were Asian.
| panic wrote:
| Yeah, I don't know what the answer is. It feels like any
| attempt to design a solution ends up having to work around
| racism or, as you said in another comment, having to "take
| the devil's (racist's) advocate position". And sometimes
| the racism even takes the form of someone playing devil's
| advocate, in an honest attempt to make sure the solution is
| "realistic", but actually advancing the racists' position
| for them. The goal ultimately has to be to get to a place
| where we never have to think about what the racists will do
| because they don't have power any more.
| noofen wrote:
| "I have a dream that my four little children will one day
| live in a nation where they will not be judged by the
| color of their skin but by the content of their
| character."
|
| Oh, how far we have strayed.
| Veelox wrote:
| >there needs to be a positive bias for minorities who were
| historically disenfranchised
|
| >I absolutely think we need affirmative action to relieve
| historic deficits, but at the same time this affirmative
| support is in itself discriminatory and can have negative
| effects. What to do?
|
| Quit affirmative action at anything above the high school
| level and poor resources into fixing the issues before high
| school. Personally I reject the framing that we need it and
| fully agree with you about the negative effects. The long
| term effects of people "being given" jobs or school
| placement I think are more negative than positive and you
| are seeing that. The Irish, Italian, Jews, Chinese, and
| Koreans were all able to get to parity or better without
| affirmative action.
| noofen wrote:
| > The Irish, Italian, Jews, Chinese, and Koreans were all
| able to get to parity or better without affirmative
| action.
|
| This of course assumes that genetic (racial) differences
| in intellectual (and physical, for that matter) ability
| do not exist. This has never been proven to be the case
| [1], and never will.
|
| We all know dog breeds have different intellectual and
| physical characteristics. Why are humans supposedly
| immune from this? Because it is a morbid reality that
| throws a wrench in the "all men are created equal"
| liberal lie.
|
| This is not me advocating for gross eugenics or even
| discrimination. I just want to point out something
| frequently missing from these conversations.
|
| "The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal
| things equal." - Aristotle
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
| skannamalai wrote:
| Biologist with a background in genetics here- there is no
| compelling evidence for statistically valid differences
| in measured intelligence on a racial genotypic basis.
| Most attempts to sort races by intelligence (e.g. The
| Bell Curve) end up being poorly designed junk science.
|
| Dr. Adam Rutherford is a great pop science presence for
| debunking, or at the very least, addressing the claims
| that intelligence tracks with race on a genetic basis if
| you're truly interested in this topic.
|
| https://youtu.be/3F0YSyeQavU
| skannamalai wrote:
| BTW your own linked source, the Wikipedia article states
| clearly:
|
| "The current scientific consensus is that there is no
| evidence for a genetic component behind IQ differences
| between racial groups."
| shard972 wrote:
| What if it wasn't all just historic deficits? If it was,
| Liberia would be a rival to america
| [deleted]
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't think this is an example of "can't viably be fired".
| They don't seem to be saying Google or its employees are banned
| from the conference; they just don't want Google's money. (And
| Gebru used to be on the executive committee for this
| conference, so it can't be a surprise to Google that they might
| be on her side.)
| eqvinox wrote:
| I wish you were right, but IMHO you need to take the devil's
| (racist's) advocate position here. Even an average not-
| really-racist but-slightly-prejudiced ("non-woke") HR manager
| can look at this and go "oh, Google got f_cked so hard for
| firing these two minority members... I really don't want to
| possibly end up in that situation"... and, even if that's
| certainly discriminatory thinking, it's not "wrong" on the
| pure logical level. And even worse, it's unlikely to be
| noticed and very hard to fight. The decision not to hire
| someone won't come with an explainer why, and proving
| discriminatory practice there is quite hard.
|
| ... and the HR manager may even do this subconsciously! In
| that case _noone_ is even aware discrimination is happening.
| (Which is why blanking applications is so important!)
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I have no doubt that there are bad consequences to the
| attitude that anything which happens to anyone is about
| their race. I just don't think that this particular
| happening is an example.
| [deleted]
| geofft wrote:
| It is, unfortunately, a pretty common thing in our society to
| have rules that are selectively enforced. How often did the
| NYPD stop-and-frisk a trader walking down Wall Street?
|
| In that case, the pressure isn't so much "don't hire
| minorities" as "don't be more stringent about enforcing your
| established rules and processes on certain groups of people,"
| which is a great pressure.
|
| Gebru has spoken publicly about the allegation that she broke
| processes. See this thread:
| https://twitter.com/timnitgebru/status/1335017526112227329
|
| Notably, the official description of the process includes the
| sentence, "There is no such thing as the perfect policy.
| Fortunately Googlers like to do the right thing. Please do that
| here--read the policy and do what makes sense."
| ihsw wrote:
| Just like the #MeToo movement, such predatory behavior sets
| equality back years. Equity is ultimately a regressive
| ideology, both in practice and in theory.
| pmontra wrote:
| Google translation of the original German text:
|
| Google is not allowed to sponsor the Conference of Fairness,
| Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) this year. This has been
| announced by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The
| reason for this is the dismissal of two AI researchers and
| allegations of racism. The business relationship is considered
| paused, but not ended. The British company DeepMind, which
| belongs to the Google group, is still allowed to participate -
| the break does not affect relationships with other big tech
| companies.
|
| Michael Ekstrand, co-chair of the conference sponsors, justifies
| the decision with the layoffs of Timnit Gebru and Margaret
| Mitchell, former leaders of the ethics and artificial
| intelligence (AI) team at Google. Layoffs reason for a break
|
| Google had made headlines with the dismissal of the two employees
| in the past few months. The trigger was the planned publication
| of a paper. Together with colleagues, Gebru criticized the
| dangers posed by large AI language models. As a result, Google
| spoke out against publication of the paper as long as Gebru is
| mentioned as a co-author. Officially, the paper "did not meet the
| requirements for a publication", but there was suspicion that the
| company was just trying to get rid of an unpleasant critic. This
| approach caused unrest among Google employees, and accusations of
| racism were also loud.
|
| Margaret Mitchel, founder and co-head of the ethical AI team, was
| fired a short time later for attempting to use automated scripts
| to find evidence of the discriminatory treatment of her colleague
| in emails. Google's mail system did not escape this and locked
| the AI researcher out of the system. Recently, the company
| announced some internal changes in how it handles its AI teams
| and their employees, as well as the research results. Suresh
| Venkatasubramanian, member of the FAccT program committee,
| announced on Twitter last Friday that he would like to re-examine
| the framework conditions for sponsorship in the coming year.
| nkurz wrote:
| https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=de&tl=en&u=htt...
| andyxor wrote:
| Gebru was fired for throwing tantrums and ultimatums to doxx
| her colleagues or she would resign, then blasting group email
| literally calling for sabotage.
|
| her colleagues were 'walking on eggshells' around her for the
| fear of retaliation for any minor criticism
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...
|
| Mitchell was fired for exfiltrating thousands of files and
| sending to external accounts.
| https://venturebeat.com/2021/01/20/google-targets-ai-ethics-...
| dt123 wrote:
| one for /r/nottheonion
| kelvin0 wrote:
| Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Google should have never started hiring ethical AI researchers.
| They should have hired AI researchers and made their stuff
| available to independent ethics researchers.
|
| These independent researchers should be employed by i.e. a
| university and funded by government funds, maybe even
| additionally with an AI regulation fee (i.e. like car makers have
| to pay to certify their cars).
|
| It makes no sense for them to hire their critics and then think
| they can stay independent. You are basically paying people to
| shit on your own products. Makes no sense.
| jariel wrote:
| And what qualifies anyone to be an 'AI ethicist' anyhow?
|
| This is a heavy question - it's problematically like elevating
| an individuals personal moral position, with all their little
| trivial baggage to something more than it is.
|
| The challenge with these roles is very real: self awareness,
| objectivity, and processes for arriving at that are probably
| key. I suggest it would require a lot of engagement, feedback,
| possibly legal knowledge, reference etc..
|
| AI credibility aside, the individuals chosen by Google
| previously were not remotely up for the job on a professional
| level, this was apparent from their public posture and even
| writing skills, and that's not slander, it's hard job.
|
| As the OP indicates, some degree of objectivity as well, which
| may be difficult from within the company.
|
| Finally, I would say it's entirely doubtful if AI requires it's
| own special branch of ethics. Everything Google does touches on
| ethical issues, and 'plain old search' much more so than
| perhaps anything else - certainly more than any of their core
| AI. It's a business and technology issue, not an AI issue. It
| just may require some insight from those familiar with the
| company.
|
| All of that said, Google may lose the 'PR cover' of having a
| woman or PoC in the driver's seat.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| While I don't personally think her race or gender should
| matter, the new head of their AI ethics org is Marion Croak,
| so they'll retain the PR cover you're describing.
| titzer wrote:
| > You are basically paying people to shit on your own products.
| Makes no sense.
|
| They hired them to control them. And it's a diversion to keep
| people thinking about the wrong things.
| KvanteKat wrote:
| Another useful (to Google) aspect of hiring an ethical AI
| team is also that is allows Google to shut down ethical
| concerns raised in other parts of its own organization by
| going "we agree that ethics is an important, but please focus
| on your own job", i.e. an internal AI team can act as a sort
| of "controlled opposition". The fact that the ethical AI team
| is now being undermined within the company after trying to do
| their job and making clear that they are not content to be
| relegated to such a role is pretty consistent with this
| motive.
| titzer wrote:
| Yes, and just to expand on what I meant with "thinking
| about the wrong things", they've got everyone thinking
| about killer robots and automated weapons systems and
| surveillance (by government entities). When in reality
| Google's AI is, and has long been, vastly deployed to
| understand human behavior for the express purpose of
| maximizing advertising revenue and modification of behavior
| through pervasive messaging, recommendations, addictive
| dark patterns, etc. They've basically built a completely
| automated real distortion system designed to trap people
| into spending their time staring at whatever the highest
| (fully automated) bidder thinks they should see. It's
| dystopian and all the local incentives are wrong now.
| They've got a crapton of money, computational power, and
| self-justification. The reality distortion field is
| powerful. We should be very wary.
| Theizestooke wrote:
| Yeah, it was a PR move.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > You are basically paying people to shit on your own products.
| Makes no sense.
|
| Self regulation is preferable (to a private company) to
| industry-wide regulation, which in turn is preferable to
| government regulation.
|
| If you want to avoid government oversight, either have internal
| oversight with the appearance of independence. Alternatively,
| have an "independent" overseeing body for your industry (whose
| behavior you may still indirectly control via nominations,
| seats on boards, funding, etc). Having an actual independent
| body providing oversight, appointed and controlled by an arm of
| government body is the worst outcome, yet it is inevitable when
| lapses arise, and voters demand "something be done" and you
| failed to provide a veneer of oversight, like Google is doing
| here.
| jonstewart wrote:
| No, Google should never have messed with their researchers'
| publications; it's always the coverup that becomes the story.
| Contrast Google Research with Microsoft Research, which enjoys
| a stellar reputation and independence.
| Aunche wrote:
| How do you know that the publication wasn't pulled because
| they genuinely thought it didn't meet their quality
| standards? When this happens at Microsoft research, the
| author makes a few revisions and moves on rather than accuse
| Microsoft of racism.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Review of the quality of publications should never be made
| by your indirect superiors. If you want to have an internal
| quality review process, fine, but the people have to be
| peers or immediate superiors, and the criticism must be
| public and must not be related to the company's bottom
| line, in order to allow for revisions to increase the
| quality before peer review.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Gebru and Mitchell were both previously employed by MSR in
| the same context without issue.
|
| Google didn't allow the team to make revisions. They stated
| the paper couldn't be published, period. The difference
| here is very clearly the management, not the researchers.
| tryonenow wrote:
| Timnit went on a woke shaming crusade against google and
| her management. She embodied the toxic, progressive,
| self-serving, sanctimonious entryism that has infested so
| many of our institutions, and they were right to get rid
| of her.
| crumbshot wrote:
| Exactly this. Indeed, looking at Timnit Gebru as an example
| of someone who worked at both, I'd be very surprised if her
| paper that was censored at Google would have had any issues
| in being published if she were still working for Microsoft.
| Despite the research being, by implication, critical of a
| growing market segment in Azure, regarding its environmental
| impact and so on.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Absolutely, that's the only sane stance towards it. The
| original poster seems to imply that it's impossible to do
| sustainable ethical business because of conflicts of
| interests, but there are many ways to deal with such
| conflicts of interests without firing researchers or
| suppressing papers.
|
| This case was really just mismanagement by Google. They could
| have just as well taken those researchers seriously, allow
| them to investigate whether there is systemic discrimination
| and then try to correct it, as was the whole point of hiring
| them in the first place. AI ethics researchers all over the
| world are publishing articles about the dangers of serious
| discrimination by large language models. Not addressing this
| and firing researchers who were working on it on their behalf
| is not going to help Google in the long run at all.
| jariel wrote:
| This is upside down.
|
| There is no reason for Google to pay researchers and to not
| have some ownership over the process or outcome in some
| manner, in fact, it's unreasonable to contemplate otherwise.
|
| Google was exceedingly gracious by sponsoring the work and
| having it make public in the first place.
|
| The demands made of the researchers in question were quite
| minor, and completely appropriate, and frankly immaterial to
| the thrust of concerns anyhow.
|
| To boot, accusations of 'racism' are vicious and repulsive.
|
| If researchers want to be completely independent in the terms
| they might expect in academia - that's entirely
| understandable - perfectly fine - but they'll have to find
| jobs elsewhere.
|
| Google has a Search Engine and bunch of other products, and
| to suggest that their major investment in research should
| entitle them to some kind of fair parameterize of the process
| is very reasonable.
|
| To remedy the situation, and an obvious failure on Google's
| part, they should spend some time thinking about where that
| line is drawn, and what kind of expectations should be in
| place. In retrospect, it seems like a management failure for
| there to have been any misunderstanding on that front. But
| the point is -> there is a line. Researchers that don't want
| to with those parameters can make the choice not to. That's
| why we have both private and publicly funded research.
| pfortuny wrote:
| > You are basically paying people to shit on your own products.
|
| In reality, if you want them to fulfill their true role, they
| are preventing you from producing wrong products (which should
| be good for the Company).
|
| But Google understood that as you say (which is not what I
| think but this is beside the point), and that was their
| mistake.
| jimbokun wrote:
| That makes sense to pay someone to perform that function
| privately and internally.
|
| It's been a disaster for Google to have that happen in
| public.
| mcguire wrote:
| I think you will find that hiring skilled researchers and
| telling them that they cannot say anything publicly is a
| hard row to hoe.
| izacus wrote:
| Apple seems to be doing that just fine and with huge
| success. They are exceedingly good at silencing every
| single employee to not speak about any kind of internal
| dissent or HR issues like this.
| jariel wrote:
| This is the most curious part: hiring those two individual
| researchers, who clearly didn't have an understanding of
| the nature of public communication, was incredibly naive
| and asking for disaster. There is no other outcome. It kind
| of implies a total lack of understanding of human nature on
| the part of those doing the hiring. "What were they
| thinking?" is the only thing that comes to mind.
|
| It's a very, very tricky thing to do to hire your own
| public critics, that has to be done very carefully and with
| a lot of parameters.
| [deleted]
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > You are basically paying people to shit on your own products.
| Makes no sense.
|
| It's good to be critical of your own products to make them
| better. But you have to actually be willing to do that for it
| all to work.
| evilpotatoes wrote:
| The criticism would need to be constructive to be useful, or
| at least specific enough to act on. Also, you can't go
| embarrassing the parent company, especially one as image-
| conscious as google.
| the_duke wrote:
| Any kind of public criticism is embarrassing from a PR
| perspective.
|
| Either you accept that, or you don't.
|
| "Ethics researches" that can't publish public criticism ,
| with minimal oversight restricted to preventing IP leaks,
| are a pointless exercise in fake responsibility posturing.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Which is why it's idiotic to hire people whose entire job
| is to create bad publicity for the company.
| bitcurious wrote:
| Agree to disagree. One of the main "enforcement arms" of
| ethics research is to say the unsaid things out loud.
| Saying them introduces legal liability onto the company
| in future lawsuits.
|
| I.e. "Google knew that X would result in Y and they still
| released X; they should pay for the damages of Y."
|
| The PR side of ethics research barely matters in
| comparison.
| mcguire wrote:
| Humanity has a fair history of introducing products that
| are later shown to have large externalized costs:
| tetraethyl lead, PVC, etc.
|
| I interpret your point to be that publicly investigating
| the harm of future products---by the only people who can
| do so---is a bad idea. What is the alternative?
| Regulation? (Gasp!)
|
| Perhaps we should start the disinformation campaigns
| before the products are developed. "If you are arrested
| on AI-provided evidence, you are guilty. Period."
| minot wrote:
| > Saying them introduces legal liability onto the company
| in future lawsuits.
|
| My first thought was ExxonMobil when I read this comment.
|
| > In July 1977, a senior scientist of Exxon James Black
| reported to the company's executives that there was a
| general scientific agreement at that time that the
| burning of fossil fuels was the most likely manner in
| which mankind was influencing global climate change.
|
| > According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, "The
| funding of academic research activity has provided the
| corporation legitimacy, while it actively funds
| ideological and advocacy organizations to conduct a
| disinformation campaign."
|
| Nothing has happened to Exxon Mobile. None of the
| executives are in prison as far as I know. You'd think
| the company would be bankrupt by now...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_c
| ont...
| marcinzm wrote:
| Few (none?) companies would be happy to pay someone to be
| publicly and loudly critical of their products. Especially if
| it wasn't constructive criticism that they could act on.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It's a great resource to pay people to do that internally.
|
| It's a complete disaster to hire people who see their job
| description as shitting on the company publicly, with no
| constructive proposals for improvement.
| nindalf wrote:
| One of the criticisms in that paper was that training AI
| used a lot of electricity. That's technically true, but
| what's the proposal there? The power efficiency of hardware
| is already being increased.
| clankyclanker wrote:
| > what's the proposal there?
|
| That's what Google was afraid of: the alternative is to
| decide that the cost of the model isn't worth the effort
| (externalities < benefit) and to abandon it. Which might
| be the correct decision, but one that loses Google a lot
| of _potential_ money.
| nindalf wrote:
| The paper didn't attempt to examine if the benefits of
| the model outweighed the costs. They calculated the total
| energy used and called it a day.
| [deleted]
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Correct. It left it up to the model creators to
| potentially evaluate those tradeoffs for future models.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I find the conclusions ludicrous. Should we also abandon
| particle accelerators because they use too much electrity
| for ill-defined benefits?
|
| Really the claim is toxic academia style knife fighting
| for tenure at best.
| paganel wrote:
| Do less AI training, so less AI could be a valid
| alternative.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The proposal is not to continue the trend of simply
| adding titanic amounts of parameters to models and
| develop more efficient ones.
| klipt wrote:
| I bet all the big tech companies spend way more
| electricity on things other than training big models.
|
| "You use too much electricity" is tantamount to "tech is
| a flawed business model". Arguably solvable with
| increased green energy sources but that's more a job for
| society in general than just tech companies.
| 8note wrote:
| How often is the electricity use considered a constraint
| in algorithm design for AI models?
|
| Moore's law isn't the only way to gain efficiency, and
| even if the available compute goes up, doesn't mean the
| total power usage will go down
| jeffbee wrote:
| Part of the issue in these events is that the paper that
| was written by Google's own ethics researchers simply
| repeats estimates of AI energy consumption from outside
| academic papers, instead of examining them. The reality
| is that Google's ML infrastructure is dramatically more
| energy efficient than the rest of the industry. A person
| with access to these facts who chooses to ignore them
| isn't really doing their best as a researcher, they're
| just grinding an ax.
|
| There are other examples against the meme of AI using "a
| lot of electricity", for example a recent paper from
| Google where they show that a learned computational fluid
| dynamics technique uses only 2% the energy of standard
| techniques.
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.01010.pdf
| dekhn wrote:
| Not only are ML techniques finding ways to do physics
| with less energy, the amount of waste by non-ML computing
| absolutely swamps ML computing. I don't care if training
| a model uses the amount of CO2 that a translatlanic
| flight uses, because those flights are flying constantly,
| some of them not filled to the max. The whole criticism
| about energy in the paper seemed to miss major details
| that I'd expect top researchers to get right.
|
| BTW, I ran a large scale computing platform at Google for
| several years. It made absolutely enormous, stunningly
| huge amounts of CPU available to scientists and we used
| it to make several important breakthroughs. However,
| after a few years, I finally was shown what the power
| cost implications were, and I shut down the project
| because the costs were not justified by the scientific
| benefits. Compared to what I was doing, ML is relatively
| skimpy on CPU.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I'm not sure that your scientific facilities cumulatively
| spent as much CPU time as DeepMind spent playing
| StarCraft. If we want to talk about energy and ethics in
| machine learning I guess that's where I would start.
| visarga wrote:
| > I'm not sure that your scientific facilities
| cumulatively spent as much CPU time as DeepMind spent
| playing StarCraft.
|
| You gotta pay if you wanna play. Humans are the result of
| a much longer and more expensive evolutionary process.
| It's only normal to have to pay a little to do the same
| for AI.
| dekhn wrote:
| Yes, my calculations used far more time than DM, with the
| caveat that my jobs ran on CPUs while most of their
| training is on accelerators.
|
| I believe we reported that Exacycle provided 700K high
| speed Xeon cores for over a year, and the actual number
| is far higher (I can't share it because you'd be able to
| make a reasonable estimate on how many computers Google
| has).
| vr46 wrote:
| The last sentence here makes no sense - this is Google RESEARCH
| we're talking about, and the issue is around the suppression of
| research, the sneaky modification of the papers by lawyers and
| then doubling down on the ensuing shitshow of recriminations,
| dirty-laundry-airing and anger of 2700 employees by firing
| people. Including the founder of the AI ethics unit.
|
| What's their top priority?
|
| Optics? Or better AI? People doing research are not
| automatically critics, but it is their literal job in this area
| to ask the hard, hard questions, this is not Harry and Megan go
| Oprah, this is technology with far-reaching consequences.
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Well, Google says they didn't surpress research, but that the
| researchers didn't follow process. Now we are all having an
| argument - we wouldn't have that if the researchers were
| truly independent.
| andyxor wrote:
| not just that, they fired a toxic employee who was bullying
| her colleagues on social media and even tried to bully her
| bosses by throwing ultimatums.
|
| This whole drama has nothing to do with neither AI nor
| ethics.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| - You are basically paying people to shit on your own products.
| Makes no sense.
|
| They aren't really researching ethics. This is what i think is
| going on there. recycling an old comment.
|
| { AI Ethical research can never be an accurate representation
| of the majority of humanity - or even the majority of its
| users! If it can it is not sustainable for any long period of
| time.
|
| What about far more stable principles, such as murder and
| racism, you ask?
|
| They are prone to being overplayed or downplayed, are state
| executions murder, or justice? What if the victim/ hangman
| happens to be black? Why should it matter? Just ignore some
| issues? That's misleading by omission.
|
| It would be better to just admit "yes, we at Giant Tech know
| our ethics are bs, but we had to put something down or our
| machines won't work. Maybe we are not ready for advanced ai.
| Maybe there's a limit on what programmers can do. Yea. We know.
| turns out computers DO have limits. We'll have to find other
| ways to make money."
|
| "But why should we say that!" cry all the executives when this
| speech is proposed to them.
|
| "because it's true, and if we don't act now the company is
| screwed. And our clients will also get screwed" is the answer
| of the timid executive who first suggested this.
|
| "how will the truth help us?" respond all the execs in unison.
|
| "if we can keep up the lie for long enough, we shall all long
| be millionaires and retired before it implodes! We shall long
| be out of danger! who cares if some people lose money?"
|
| "Yes, but don't you feel bad for all the shareholders? And how
| can we possibly fool people for decades to come that our ai
| isn't bs?" Responds the poor executive weakly.
|
| "By creating a fake team and telling everyone they are ethics
| researchers" they say. "Really they are just pawns to help us
| earn more money. Fish get eaten by bigger fish you know?"
|
| "can you just help me change a few lines on my press
| statement?" Asks the first executive.}
| nullifidian wrote:
| >and racism
|
| Excuse me, but the definition of racism in the west is
| anything but stable. The definition has changed dramatically
| in the last decade, and it could change again.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| that merely reinforces my point. Though i accept it was
| inaccurate of me.
| jseliger wrote:
| It may also be that Google didn't realize the extent to which
| they were inviting some of the more organizationally
| destructive and divisive elements of modern politically
| correct culture into their organization:
| https://jakeseliger.com/2020/12/03/dissent-insiders-and-
| outs.... It may be that we're going to see a trend towards
| "Leave politics and religion at the door."
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| -It may be that we're going to see a trend towards "Leave
| politics and religion at the door."
|
| what are you left with? misinformation is far more prolific
| than truth. it needs to be held in check, somehow. ignoring
| it will make it waorse
| swayvil wrote:
| The bigger the company, the stronger the motive to
| control politics and religion (for profit etc.)
|
| I imagine that the conversation beneath that umbrella
| will be flattened in a day.
| izacus wrote:
| To be honest pretty much any bigger professional
| organization already operates under "Leave politics and
| religion at the door." umbrella. It's pretty much the only
| way how you can have an organization filled with mixed
| political viewpoints function in the same direction.
|
| For some reason however, Google and their employees kinda
| fail to understand this basic tenement of work culture.
| They're not a scrappy 10 people startup anymore which can
| be both a workplace and a political party fully agreeing on
| political issues.
| MrScruff wrote:
| > It may be that we're going to see a trend towards "Leave
| politics and religion at the door."
|
| Don't get my hopes up.
| aabhay wrote:
| Yup, exactly. This is also the stance taken in the book Lingua
| Franca:
|
| > Ethics in AI should not be so convoluted as to require a
| separate profession; ethics should be distributed across an
| organization, flowing through and between individuals so that
| conversations of design naturally arrive at ethical questions.
| More crucially, everyone should have the tools to speak up and
| suggest improvements, so that no one person or set of people
| hold the keys to building ethical technology.
|
| https://linguafranca.polytopal.ai/handbook/agency
| madhadron wrote:
| If we look at biology and medicine, there's both. The NIH
| requires everyone funded on their training grants to be given
| instruction in basic bioethics, and at the same time there is
| a profession of bioethics that is involved in grant review
| and oversight committees because a lot of cases aren't simple
| and covered by the basics. Bioethics enters the picture from
| regulation rather the way independent financial auditing
| does.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Also even with CS you have this. To use security as the
| comparable system, everyone involved in an application
| should be engaged and aware of security as a component and
| goal. Anyone should feel empowered to raise security
| concerns. You still have security experts who are more
| knowledgeable than the average developer who build (or
| collaborate on) security critical subcomponents and who
| audit/red-team the system to ensure security.
|
| The same can be true of ethics.
| StargazyPi wrote:
| That's a great resource (that links to even more great
| resources) - thanks for posting it.
|
| I disagree that professional ethicists aren't needed in an
| organisation like Google though. Just as security should be
| lived and breathed by every developer, you still need some
| experts to consult when things get gnarly, light the way when
| you need many years of study to understand the concepts, and
| spot things that laypeople would miss.
|
| The large language models Timnit was studying are a great
| example of this; people like her were (and are) needed to
| help the engineers understand the breadth and scope of the
| issues. Everyone in the org having their hearts in the right
| place doesn't replace expertise.
| 8note wrote:
| I don't think these two agree? The go suggests keeping a
| separation between who's doing the researching and who's
| checking its ethics. Like, the ethics researchers should not
| be accountable to people who are incentivized to ignore them.
|
| Instead, the quote suggests that the separation is
| unnecessary, and that elevating some people to specifically
| look at ethics is bad since it's everyone's job
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Completely agree with independent auditing. If automotive
| safety had been deregulated, the body count would be orders of
| magnitude higher. This chart says it all:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
|
| The regulation of automotive safety in the 60's/70's had a huge
| impact.
|
| > It makes no sense for them to hire their critics and then
| think they can stay independent. You are basically paying
| people to shit on your own products. Makes no sense.
|
| Shit on your own products?
|
| So if I'm a good engineer and fix mistakes, I'm "shitting on my
| company's product?"
|
| There's this belief in this post that un-examined AI is some
| shiny golden award, and ethics researchers are tarnishing it.
| It's the other way around.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| Does that not depend on your perspective? There might not be
| an alignment between what Google's executives and
| shareholders want out of the company, and what an ethics
| researcher might consider ethical behavior.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| > Does that not depend on your perspective?
|
| Well, it depends on your breadth of understanding of the
| issue. If you have a limited scope, it doesn't seem like a
| big problem. And it also assumes that we all agree on
| certain basic human rights. If we don't then yes, it is a
| matter of perspective.
|
| Read "Weapons of Math Destruction". It discusses how
| existing algorithms discriminate in the following case-
| studies:
|
| - courtroom sentencing (and recidivism prediction)
|
| - mortgage and loan rate determination
|
| - educator performance
|
| - job applications that use 3rd party screening tools
|
| The book looks at specific examples of where these black-
| box algorithms are deployed that have ruined people's lives
| with no accountability. The ethics concerns that are being
| raised were needed a decade ago, or more, but it is only
| getting worse with the ad-hoc deployment of this un-baked
| technology to almost every industry.
|
| I have to stress again that these black-box algorithms are
| ALREADY IN USE and cannot be subpoenaed by courts because
| it is considered intellectual property.
|
| So yes, it is urgent to crack open this technology because
| it is all too easily being sold without any investigation,
| accountability, or thought to the consequences. "Move fast
| and break things" doesn't work if it ruins peoples lives by
| landing them in jail, or pushing them into poverty.
|
| The book demonstrates this is not a what-if strawman, but
| reality.
| visarga wrote:
| > it is urgent to crack open this technology
|
| Just as easy as putting the baby back in. It would be
| more constructive to work on ways to detect and reduce
| harm.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Bullshit. It is literally being made right now.
| Legislation can help solve this pretty quick. No audit?
| No sell.
|
| To follow your analogy, it is more like, "wear a damn
| condom and take a sex-ed class before having an unwanted
| baby."
| Cederfjard wrote:
| Thanks, I definitely understand the human rights
| implications and the importance. I mostly expect a large
| corporation to make decisions based on profits over
| ethics though, unless the former depends on the latter
| (through pressure from the public/PR, legislation and so
| on). From that perspective, I could see Google regarding
| an employee remarking negatively on the ethical aspects
| of an otherwise popular product as "shitting on it".
| nerdkid93 wrote:
| "Weapons of Math Destruction" was our textbook for CS
| 6603 at Georgia Tech. It was a fascinating/terrifying
| look into some of the systems that seem to silently
| impact the lives of millions in the U.S. Cannot recommend
| it enough.
| jedimastert wrote:
| > You are basically paying people to shit on your own products.
|
| I mean, the only way to fix bad stuff is to find it?
| turbinerneiter wrote:
| Sure, but who is going to have a fair look? Someone who is
| employed by the company or someone who is independent?
|
| VW faked their emissions - EPA uncovered it. Google is
| harming people with bad AI models - Google is uncovering it?
|
| This works if the company is actually interested in finding
| the mistakes (i.e. MS finding security bugs in Windows), but
| not if the findings threaten your business.
|
| MS has an interest in fixing security bugs, because it makes
| their product better.
|
| No big corp has an interest in fixing their ethics, it's
| usually bad for their profit margins.
| caturopath wrote:
| > Google should have never started hiring ethical AI
| researchers. They should have hired AI researchers and made
| their stuff available to independent ethics researchers.
|
| If you're going to submit your work to an external, independent
| review board, it's even more important that you have internal
| people working to address related concerns.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > funded by government funds, maybe even additionally with an
| AI regulation fee
|
| Ahh, rent-seeking at it's finest. Do we really want to use the
| tax payer's money to fund this type of behaviors[0]?
|
| [0] https://syncedreview.com/2020/06/30/yann-lecun-quits-
| twitter...
| astrange wrote:
| It's good for Yann LeCun to quit Twitter if he's going to say
| silly things like "AI bias can always be fixed by collecting
| data" which is not true and not how his own employees fix
| issues - it's certainly not how the other FAANGs solve
| problems involving bias. Problems are perfectly capable of
| happening even if your data is the best it can be!
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > he's going to say silly things like "AI bias can always
| be fixed by collecting data"
|
| Except he never said that. He pointed out one algorithm was
| lazily trained on a non-representative dataset and that it
| was, therefore, producing biased results.
| astrange wrote:
| The model was also new, so you can't be sure improving
| the data without doing anything else would fix it. You
| have to actually try it first.
| [deleted]
| tiahura wrote:
| This will further marginalize AI ethics and can only be seen as a
| good thing.
|
| NPR did yet another piece on the topic last weekend and
| interviewed an AI ethics expert. When, once again, I'm being told
| that the reason a system has a hard time identifying the features
| of black faces is systemic racism, and doesn't even mention the
| optic and sensor issues, I think the field needs a reboot.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The reason why we don't care and still use passive optics to do
| face recognition when people with black skin exist is literally
| systematic racism.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Or maybe it's just one of the simpler and least
| computationally expensive ways to do it? No systemic racism
| needed (unless you're stretching the meaning of the word
| beyond all recognition)
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I'm not stretching the word beyond anything past it's
| intended meaning. If passive optical image based image
| recognition was as performant for most people as it is in
| general for black people it wouldn't be acceptable. The
| fact that this trade-off is accepted is systematic racism -
| the systematic incentives of implementing facial
| recognition leads to discrimination.
| hntrader wrote:
| Do you know what the classification error is for
| different ethnicities?
|
| Or are you just basing this on a small handful of
| misclassifications that you've seen in the news?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| We're talking specifically about passive vision based
| facial recognition, right?
|
| I've personally seen such systems that simply do not have
| the dynamic range to be able to, in the same exposure,
| extract a sufficient amount of detail from black skinned
| faces and white skinned faces.
|
| I'm sure there are systems that can, at a much higher
| cost. But largely there are many that simply fail.
| nerdponx wrote:
| It is precisely systemic racism.
|
| People who do not have dark skin make a system. It turns out
| that the system performs poorly on people with dark skin, and
| possibly causes discriminatory outcomes.
|
| Perhaps the training data didn't have enough dark-skinned
| people. Or perhaps the optics and sensors didn't work well.
|
| The point is that _the outcome is biased against a certain
| group of people_ , and it's (edit: partly) because that
| affected group of people lacks representation in the group of
| people developing the system (edit: , because if they were
| represented they would have flagged the issue and it would have
| all been presented and handled differently).
|
| No, it does not imply that the individual researchers are
| racist as such.
| sprayk wrote:
| Is there a way to prove that it is not caused by systemic
| racism? Having some unfalsifiable quality is pretty useless,
| and if it is the sort of thing that's never meant to end then
| that feels more like religion.
| themolecularman wrote:
| Agreed, but I've found that when discussing these things
| logic isn't often taken into account anymore due to matters
| of sensitivity and bias. It's frustrating.
| nerdponx wrote:
| It would depend on the details of the particular situation
| (was there a specific news story associated with the GP?),
| but you'd have to show that people with the skin color in
| question signed off on the product.
|
| It's one thing if you produce a new model and present it at
| a conference, and one of the conclusion of your paper is
| that "this model does great on light-skinned faces but
| performs poorly on dark-skinned faces, we need to make
| improvements in optics and low-light sensing to bring up
| the accuracy on dark-skinned people." That's not racist,
| that's doing science.
|
| It's another if you are a for-profit image recognition
| company, or if you otherwise deploy that model in
| production without so much as checking to see if your model
| generalized well to dark-skinned faces, or without
| attempting to add some post-hoc bias correction, etc.
|
| We are currently in a world where the latter happens quite
| often. It's not just a race thing; there all kinds of
| inadequate "AI" systems being pushed on people that don't
| really work as advertised, to the detriment of some group
| or another (sometimes to everyone). But when it becomes a
| race thing, it's especially distressing to a lot of people,
| because Europe and the USA have long and grim histories of
| racism that extend up to and including the present day.
| sprayk wrote:
| > ... people with the skin color in question signed off
| on the product.
|
| > ... if you otherwise deploy that model in production
| without so much as checking to see if your model
| generalized well to dark-skinned faces, or without
| attempting to add some post-hoc bias correction, etc
|
| Neither of these would rule out systemic racism in either
| case, though, since, as you said, the problem is that _"
| the outcome is biased against a certain group of
| people"_. Regardless of whether there were BIPOC people
| signing off or whether you had a perfect training
| set/etc, the only thing that matters is the outcome.
| nerdponx wrote:
| That's right. My example stated two very different
| outcomes. One outcome: an academic result is published.
| Other outcomes: something is put into production.
| sprayk wrote:
| so you agree that attributing an outcome to systemic
| racism is unfalsifiable?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Alternative take:
|
| Computers can most easily pick out facial features when there
| is significant color contrast, shadows cast on white skin
| create greater contrast than it can with darker skin, and the
| systems end up inherently working better on people with
| lighter skin due to _basic math and physics_.
|
| Why hasn't some company out there designed a powerful system
| that works well with darker skinned people? It would be
| trumpeted by the tech press all over if they did, instead we
| just see articles about companies like Google manually
| tweaking the outcomes to appease the people complaining about
| racism.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I understand what you're saying, but it sounds like you're
| aware of how prone this term is to misinterpretation.
| Virtually everyone outside of a particular small subculture
| understands "systemic racism" to be an accusation of racism.
| It would be like calling a correctness bug "systemic fraud" -
| how are the authors of the system supposed to avoid taking
| that as a personal attack?
| [deleted]
| DenisM wrote:
| > It would be like calling a correctness bug "systemic
| fraud" - how are the authors of the system supposed to
| avoid taking that as a personal attack?
|
| Perhaps they aren't.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Anecdata:
|
| At work one time I created a machine learning "algorithm"
| that turned out to be systemically biased in a way that
| was both unintended and distasteful.
|
| I'm sure I've done it other times, but this is the one
| time that we actually realized it.
|
| The issue was flagged internally and the model was
| improved until we felt like we were no longer producing
| bigoted results.
|
| I certainly did _not_ take offense at the suggestion that
| my model might be racist. On the contrary, I considered
| it a very important and serious problem that needed to be
| resolved.
|
| It's worth mentioning that part of the reason we even
| caught the problem is that some of my colleagues at the
| time would have been affected by the adverse outcome, had
| they been subject to the judgement of the model. If I
| didn't personally work with people who fell into the
| affected group, I might never have noticed the problem in
| the first place.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| > The point is that the outcome is biased against a certain
| group of people, and it's because that affected group of
| people lacks representation in the group of people developing
| the system.
|
| Arguably the real reason is that dark skinned people look
| more like gorillas than light skinned people, and
| distinguishing the two is a non-trivial technical problem.
| Would you still call it racist if an entirely dark skinned
| team of researchers built the system? If it were anything
| else, we would just call it "buggy new technology" and move
| on; but because this touches a sensitive race issue, it
| imports all the nonsense on that issue and then hampers
| innovation in the field.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| "It's not racism, dark skinned people just look like
| gorillas."
|
| When your "bugs" are consistently found to be
| discriminatory, then maybe there's an underlying issue.
| Bias affects all of us, devs need to stop being so
| defensive about it.
| Udik wrote:
| > When your "bugs" are consistently found to be
| discriminatory
|
| Unreliable automatic face recognition is a bug or a
| feature? I'm not sure.
|
| If the parts were inverted, I' pretty sure someone would
| say "Hey, whites are privileged as the face recognition
| systems are unreliable on them, so they cannot be tracked
| by the surveillance state- this is systemic racism!"
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| uniqueid wrote:
| This will further marginalize AI ethics and can only be
| seen as a good thing.
|
| I don't think marginalizing AI ethics 'can only' be seen as a
| good thing. Surely a few people don't want to be turned into
| paperclips.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| In recent years, "AI ethics" generally refers to the problem
| of building regression models whose mechanics and outputs
| follow a certain set of political sensibilities. People
| investigating the problem you're describing typically
| identify their work as "AI safety".
| prepend wrote:
| I wish ACM would act ethically in regards to SciHub.
| finnthehuman wrote:
| >For the avoidance of doubt, an example of a site ACM authors
| may post all versions of their work to, with the exception of
| the final published "Version of Record", is ArXiv.
|
| >Examples of sites ACM authors may not post their work to are
| ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Mendeley, or Sci-Hub, as these
| sites are all either commercial or in some instances utilize
| predatory practices that violate copyright
|
| https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess
|
| Not exactly an onerous policy, nor one that makes content hard
| to obtain.
| prepend wrote:
| They take sponsorship from for profit journals and that's way
| worse for their field than anything Google does.
|
| I find them hypocritical for cancelling this one sponsorship
| for "ethical" reasons but not addressing the actual problem
| that is the relationship of their professional society and
| for profit publishing.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| Ah, the sweet irony of accusing a free distributor of
| academic papers of "predatory practices", as opposed to the
| bloodsucking leeches at Elsevier & co.
| shitpostbot wrote:
| At the risk of sounding "euphoric", it always felt to me that
| most of the "AI ethics" field was just hacks trying to hitch
| their wagon to a fast growing field without needing the
| discriminating credentials.
|
| At least from time to time I would have liked to see an article
| or two about how it would be unethical to allow humans to do
| something that AI was better at. Instead it's all FUD about
| creating a complex framework for evaluating who self driving cars
| should choose to kill in emergencies, when the obvious answer
| from an engineering perspective is to just hit the brakes.
|
| I can imagine Google was getting tired of paying out the nose for
| what was mostly drivel
| [deleted]
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| Bold move from ACM but good for them!
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| This is an ambiguous, and therefore bad, title.
| purerandomness wrote:
| The title is misleading. It's confusing because the German
| original title make clear that ACM does not want Google to be a
| sponsor anymore, whereas the English title adds the possibility
| that it might be _Google_ who wanted to sponsor the conference,
| but then decided not to.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Google had it coming when they supported autonomous warfare AI
| Bluestein wrote:
| Big G sponsoring an AI ethics conference would be like Bonnie
| Parker sponsoring an ethical banking committee ...
| Bluestein wrote:
| (Apparently somebody -did- remember who Parker was :)
| refraincomment wrote:
| Hopefully nobody writes Google and ethics together again
| geswit2x wrote:
| It's ironic how one of the biggest ban-hammers on earth got
| banned
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