Google launches an AI contest for social good

Of course it does - "I don't like the look of that guy". "Dodgy looking fellow". "He had an honest face". etc. The basic principle as a first-pass heuristic is tried and tested. Kneejerk reactions to this kind of tech always seem to completely ignore the question of whether it's actually effective.

I must dispute the effective part greatly. Sociopaths know how to play the system and there are many fooled by style over substance - who listen 99% to how it is said and ignore the content. I have found it shocking what complete bullshit people fall for that if repeated verbatim is incredibly stupid.

i thought it was a joke/satire on AI and facial recognition tech. Now i can't tell either!

They managed to revolutionize agriculture and stave off the starvation apocalypse that the people of the '50s and '60s were predicting.

... oh, I misread your question; I thought you asked "How did the food / GMO industry save the world?"

The industry as a whole? I'm not sure I could make that claim. And I'm somewhat well informed having close family that work in agriculture. But take one major player as an example, Monsanto (now owned by Bayer):

- Major producer of DDT. Evidence that DDT was causing widespread environmental damage was clear by the 1960s but it took the US government until the 1970s to finally ban it. Then the industry sued the US government to try to overturn the ban. Who tries to continue selling a product that has caused widespread environmental damage?

- Producer of Agent Orange. Another "perfectly safe" chemical. Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that up to 1 million people are disabled or have health problems as a result of Agent Orange contamination. I'm not sure how many US veterans were affected.

- Major producer of PCBs. Which are later banned due to being highly environmentally toxic, cause cancer in animals and probably humans too.

- Producer of bovine growth hormone, another "perfectly safe chemical". rBST has not been allowed since at least 2000 on the market in Canada, or since 1990 the European Union. Other countries have banned it. I don't think the studies on how it might affect humans are conclusive but there are concerns. For sure the studies on how it can negatively affect cows are more solid.

- They have been convicted of bribery in order to get government approval.

At what point do you stop trusting? And again, I don't mean the science and GMOs themselves. I mean the company who is making claims that GMOs are perfectly safe for both humans and the environment. Scientists are not so bold. Read the studies to see disclaimers and healthy doubt in those studies. Usually specifically spelled out. Disclaimers and doubts that are never mentioned by Monsanto when they publicly speak about their products. If they started being far more careful with their "perfectly safe" rhetoric, I might change my mind about them. So far, that hasn't happened.

I can't say if on the whole Monsanto has been somewhat responsible and well-behaved as a company. But I can say that based on just the list above, I would be very hesitant to trust any claims they make about the safety of any agricultural product, especially those involving chemicals.

I'm sure that someone can / will come in with a defense of Monsanto or arguments about each point above. The devil surely is in the details. But who has time to sort through hundreds of studies and court cases? Fair or not, we will continue using heuristics to decide who we trust. Maybe Facebook does in fact treat my data ethically and each time they get caught with privacy concerns or taken to court it was "just an honest mistake". Are you willing to spend tens or hundreds of hours of your free time trying to figure that out? Or will you use a heuristic and just be cautious with trusting what Facebook will do with your data?

No. Look at what's happening at a meta level and nonlinear effects. Yes, the social good projects will have some small positive effect in the world, but they also end up buying a lot of positive PR for Google, thus allowing them to continue their malpractices in their main business. Skepticism of the kind in this thread informs Google that their positive image right now is actually fragile, and that they should up their ante if they want to continue to be looked at as having a positive impact on the world, which is a critical advantage they use to gather the best talent.

> Given Google is already doing that (collecting anonymized data), wouldn't it be overall better if it also puts that to some good use?

Given Google is already doing surreptitious stuff and is generally anti-privacy, it ought to look at stop doing those first. Stealing from people and doing "good" with that is not an excuse for stealing, especially when most of the victims are common folk (even if one follows a Robin Hood principle).

Also, I didn't get the part about Google "collecting anonymized data". Google collects precise, personally identifiable data because that's what pays the bills for its chosen business model (similar to Facebook, which is far worse). Anonymization may happen down the line for certain purposes and anonymized data may be all that Google is able to get from certain sources.

The analogy for this comment is:

"The defendant is already doing that (committing crimes), wouldn't it be better if we permitted them to continue doing so as long as they're putting a portion of their spoils to good use?"

And don't forget to pat them on the back for their community service.

Even that is a very generous analogy, as it assumes that Google's AI contest will actually result in outcomes that produce some social benefit, rather than a few temporary initiatives that look good, provide near-zero real benefit to society, and really provide Google with technical AI innovations that are of some small use to their business.

You may not consider collecting "anonymised" data to be a bad thing, but you'll note that you inexplicably introduced the "anonymised" descriptor twisting the original commenter's "sensitive data"!?

I disagree. If the goal is to encourage people to build things that benefit everyone rather than just those who built it originally, this is a good way to do that. If it were me I would go a step further and require that it be released under a copyleft license rather than a permissive one, but Google seems fairly averse to copyleft licenses, and they're the ones funding this.

I'm sure there are plenty of VCs out there that would fund the development of proprietary machine learning software. This is something different.

handwaves these are not the ideas you thought of

The ghost of Descartes slightly disagrees ;)

What you just described is called reinforcement learning.