Google’s AI ethics board
The folks at Google have made sure that Kay Coles James will not be on an AI ethics board they’re setting up, because she’s from the Heritage Foundation. She may be a black woman, but as a conservative black woman, she has offended.
You can read about the brouhaha here; it’s rather typical of these sorts of fights. But there’s a deeper issue pointed out by the author (I’ve highlighted it in bold):
Neither Google nor anyone else appears actually comfortable with meaningful external oversight. Neither Google nor anyone else seems to have a principled or systematic way to handle the power it has stumbled into. That’s why companies are formulating these panels with goals like “be convincing to society broadly” — as Google aimed for with the inclusion of James — rather than “review the process for approving collaborations with the U.S. military.” The brouhaha has convinced me that Google needs an AI ethics board quite badly — but not the kind it seems to want to try to build.
Science keeps developing technology that outpaces our ability to know how to use it. I’m not suggesting that we not develop it. But I’ve long been very concerned about a sort of Frankenstein’s monster effect.
After 1945, we began to worry that atomic weapon technology would destroy our civilization. But here it is, 74 years later, and we’re grateful to still be alive.
Facebook spawned “social media” in 2004. Fifteen years later, that technology seems far more likely to make life not worth living.
I assume that once the 2020 election is over, Trump will have DOJ move on antitrust with these companies. Until then DOJ will be busy with Democrats being prosecuted for the Trump attempted coup.
The only thing to say for sure about this particular Frankenstein’s Monster is, “It’s alive! ALIVE!”
In a sane organization the management would tell those 1500 letter-signers that they are wasting their time, and accompany it with some information on the value of the diversity of thought. Instead, Google appears to be turning its artificial intelligence project over to the naturally occurring stupidity of the masses.
Good luck with that one.
But Google promised us they won’t be evil.
Leftists will be programming military Ai from Google…. and you conservatives will be using it, does that sound safe to you?
my favorite is that unless you skew it, AI is racist…
oh… forgot to mention, even if you remove all race information and focus completely on other things, its racist… damn reality, it seems to conspire
Deciding whether or not Google “should collaborate with the US military” has nothing to do with AI, even if that is the technology at issue, and framing it in those terms illustrates a philosophical cluelessness on the part of company.
An analogy would be if GE, deciding whether or not to build steam turbines for the US Navy during WWII, had established a “thermodynamics and rotary equipment ethics board.”
David Foster on May 5, 2019 at 9:46 am at 9:46 am said:
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An analogy would be if GE, deciding whether or not to build steam turbines for the US Navy during WWII, had established a “thermodynamics and rotary equipment ethics board.”
* * *
Good analogy.
As much as we decry the protests against Google for “collaborating with the bad govenment ” (which will be forgotten immediately when another Democrat is elected), I do wonder what history would look like if Krupp and other corporations (including non-German companies) had been willing or able to say Nu to Hitler.
The list of those which did not is long, even when restricted to “corporations that were in existence during World War II and that are documented to have profited from participation in the Holocaust.” The definitions of profited and participation are not given, unfortunately, so it is hard to judge the level of complicity for each.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust
Arguably, shutting down such evil collaborations is what the Left is claiming to be doing by bullying banks and retail stores into shunning people and organizations on the Right, in addition to imposing their own suppression on media access.
However, I think I would draw the line of guilt much further down the road of participation in possible evil, which currently seems to be set at “anything that minutely obstructs my side’s narrative or agenda,” because people should make their own moral decisions about buying and selling, but the temptation to “nip things in the bud” is certainly there for every faction that thinks they can do it.
Of course, if there really is a Hitler involved (or Stalin or Mussolini or …), then the distance between being willing to say no, and being able to say no without fatal consequences, gets very short very quickly, and the window of opposition gets shut pretty tightly even for those inclined to object.
The trick is being able to discern which bud is going to bloom on the Dark Side.
I won’t rehearse the many arguments and listicles going around the blogosphere pointing out that most of the fertilizer is on the Left. The simplist point is that if Trump (Bush, Reagan) were Hitler, there would be a lot of people on the left dead and in jail. There aren’t, so he isn’t.
The thing that I’ve noticed is that the MSM and academia know the prominent institutions that hold non-progressive thoughts and formulate their own black list accordingly. For tv news, Fox News has been constantly used as an example of a biased platform, though very little word about CNN. In the same breath Breitbart is mentioned with equal the amount of venom and mockery. When it comes to think tanks, The Heritage Foundation is usually pointed out. For online mags, City Journal was spoken in such a bitter and disgusted manner by a leftist that it caught me by surprised because I was sure that CJ was relatively obscure (which it is to a degree), but a leftist knew of its existence and loathed it.
Dem activists hate the Reps far more strongly, and consistently, than Reps in top positions want to fight against.
I hope Kay sues, but I doubt that she will — but lawsuits, and winning lawsuits, is a huge set of small steps the Dems have been taking for years, for decades. Since before, but including, Roe v Wade.
Reps who are wronged are mostly unwilling to use lawfare to fight back, against the social Injustice they suffer from. Kind of like NOT using tanks because it’s so much more noble to be fighting from horseback — like the wiped out Polish cavalry (WW II).
O.T.:
Probably meant as a pun, but for the record — “nu” doesn’t mean “no.” More a sort of questioning noise, as in “eh,” “so?”, “hm,” even “what do I think of this…,” “so what?”, “so — what?” and even more.
Speaking of which, there are differences of nuance among the English noises (technically, I think they’re classed as interjections) “so?”, “so what?”, “so — what?” And “so?” by itself can be spoken with a sort of combative inflection, or spoken in a sort of dismissive way….
…. Written out of somewhat of an obsession with the meanings of words. :>(
Aesop,
Heh. Excellent point! 😀
Julie – yes, punning on Neo’s post “So nu? So sue me” — also ties into Tom’s comment about Kay suing Google – serendipity rocks.
Aesop, if red wing or blue wing factions wanted to find Nazis, they only have to do one simple thing.
Look at NASA.
But they don’t, because they aren’t looking for Nazis.