Google’s new AI ethics board is already falling apart | Hacker News Reader

Google’s new AI ethics board is already falling apart

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157 pointscpeterso239 comments

It's bizarre to me that people can't seem to understand that any such panel requires vehement disagreement to make real and meaningful progress. You need people whose opinions are diametrically opposed to constantly challenge each other. Even people who hate each other or each other's opinions.

What you don't need is another echo chamber. Go debate on Twitter, Facebook or Reddit if that's what you're looking for.

Really, or is it just about where you'd place the Overton window? Should they include a white supremacist, pedophile, human extinction advocate, etc? If so you're being consistent. If not where would you draw the line? By the popularity of the ideology?

If you don't include people you disagree with politically they will go off and form their own group independent of yours. I can imagine the defense contractors banding together and making a new Manhattan Project for general AI. Wouldn't it be better to have an ethics board that includes all the big players?

Either they'd do that anyway when they didn't get whichever killbot they wanted, or else they'd convince you to build the killbot you wanted, and in either case you end up with the killbots you don't want, so inviting them to your ethics board doesn't help.

The defense contractors haven't invited you to their ethics board.

Darpa are keenly looking at this. They have to because its important that such advances would change the strategic situation. But, let's be honest, it's science fiction. There is no prospect of aig at all in our life times.

There might be a few criteria. Some balance of representative of the population, internal and factual consistency, perhaps even length of the tradition. That is, a candidate wouldn't have to have all of these, but satisfy at least some of them to some extent.

I think would exclude the most objectionable, but you have to allow for the fact that it will include prominent beliefs that you won't like. Sorry, most of humanity literally doesn't share your point of view on many topics.

Nor should such a council endeavour to create an echo chamber.

>Nor should such a council endeavour to create an echo chamber.

But if you create a council and staff it with viewpoints that only serve to ignorantly speak in favor of tradition and cultural norms then haven't you just created an echo chamber?

Sure, if you accept your qualifier of "only". I see no reason to though.

> Should they include a white supremacist, pedophile, human extinction advocate, etc?

In an ethics discussion? Short answer? Yes. Otherwise how can you be sure that their beliefs don't have some merit? Remember that "sure" here means "sure enough to bet the entire future of the human race on it", because that's what's at stake with AI ethics (unless it turns out that AI is impossible, which I don't think is likely and in any case I wouldn't want to bet on it). No human being knows enough about ethics to be able to rule out any viewpoint with that level of confidence.

I think that you should hear them out and they would be very easy to dismiss very quickly.

The reason we dont agree with White supremacists isnt that we've effectively suppressed their speech. It's that they're wrong and it's simple to see.

This is something that continues to confuse me: what distinction do you draw between "not hearing out" and "dismissing very quickly"? It's not like none of us know what a white supremacist is -- we've all seen their rhetoric, have dismissed it, and no longer feel inclined to re-litigate the issue.

Put another way: you wouldn't, presumably, ask a physicist to critically re-evaluate the laws of thermodynamics each time they perform a calculation. Why are you holding ethicists to a higher (and progress-impeding) standard?

This is going to sound silly but I think there is pretty substantial value in making the white supremacist feel _heard_ and then feel dismissed. How do you feel when someone brushes off your opinion as invalid before you've even had a chance to express it? Like the person brushing you off is obviously an idiot who can't be reasoned with. But if someone has taken the time to discuss something with you and really hear you out and then they dismiss your opinion? Then you're probably a little more open to thinking through the merits of why they disagree.

I'm not sure how to strike that balance and I completely understand that it feels both distasteful and inefficient to "re-litigate" things like white supremacy when the correct outcome is obvious to us but I think the negative effects of "echo chambers" are exacerbated by how quickly their views are dismissed before they've been given a chance to explain themselves. In denying them the opportunity to express their views we're not only solidifying their views but denying them the opportunity to examine their views critically.

That doesn't sound silly at all to me. You bring up a very good point.

However, I also think you give the white supremacist too much credit. He wants to be heard, but he isn't a faithful member of the conversation. He can't feel dismissed to, because (from his perspective) it's nobody's place to dismiss to him.

His goals are simple: (1) to keep people talking about white supremacy, (2) to frame his removal from the conversation as a violation of the principles that he himself seeks to undermine, and (3) to recruit more people into white supremacy via (1) and (2). He's a door-to-door salesman for hate: he's here to sell you something, not to critically examine his views. He knows that conversations with him won't work, and that's exactly why he wants us to think that he's worth conversing with.

Edit: I'm not going to modify what I wrote above, but I want to condition it a bit. I should really have said that he isn't always a faithful member of the conversation. When he is, all of your points apply. My overwhelming concern is that we give him the benefit of the doubt too frequently.

Now that's a nice strawman.

> ask a physicist to critically re-evaluate the laws of thermodynamics each time they perform a calculation

Perhaps not. But it is a good idea for scientists to periodically re-visit their assumptions about how things work. Like what Einstein did.

Presumably part of the case on their behalf would be that most or many of the people accused of being white supremacists, or afforded other such titles, are simply not. Granting Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, et al, an opportunity to speak is giving people accused of being white supremacists the opportunity to not only quickly prove that their positions are not collectivist, let alone racial, but (more importantly) represent valid counters.

> It's not like none of us know what a white supremacist is -- we've all seen their rhetoric, have dismissed it, and no longer feel inclined to re-litigate the issue.

I actually don't think a lot of people know what a white supremacist is after seeing who has been slapped with that label in the past few years. The rhetoric around a lot of these issues is very disingenuous these days.

So while you're correct that white supremacy is an argument or philosophy that is easily dismissed, but who gets that label is very contentious indeed even though it seems like it should be straightforward.

Here's what I think is the problem with that approach: these people will use "you hearing them out" as proof (to their base) that they are right. These people will ignore your dismissals. These people will use every possible trick, even the ones not in the book, to misconstrue your actions to establish themselves to their own base.

They should not be given a platform. At all. And even that will be misconstrued as "see, we're being marginalized because we're inconvenient but true".

> these people will use "you hearing them out" as proof (to their base) that they are right.

Their base already believes they're right. If anything, the deplatforming will be used as further proof (to their base) that they really are the victims of, in this case, a powerful Jewish conspiracy.

> They should not be given a platform. At all.

They should have access to the same platforms that are accessible to the rest of the public, so long as their speech is not an incitement to violence.

Protest those ideas if you like, but living in a democratic society means battling with words and not censorship.

Having a seat on Google's ethics board is not a platform accessible to the rest of the public.

Sure, but that's not what the other poster said. They said they shouldn't have a platform "at all". Meaning, "any platform", which is the point I disputed.

To be entirely clear, I said "be given". I said nothing about them arranging a platform for themselves.

Firstly, "arranging a platform for themselves" is the same as "being given a platform in exchange for goods and services (typically money)". If you're making this argument, then there's no distinction in what you describe. They're "given a platform" in exchange for services rendered as an AI ethics panel member.

Secondly, it's debatable whether they're even being "given a platform" in this case anyway, because their duties are specifically surrounding AI. Going off on an anti-trans rant or something would get them removed. Since that's the sort of platform you're presumably arguing against giving them, so there seems to be no conflict here.

Presumably, what you actually meant by "not giving them a platform" is that they shouldn't be given legitimacy or validation. I'm not sure I can agree that their presence accomplishes this. Some people give the pope some moral authority, but plenty enough people aren't swayed by his fancy hat, and his lofty moral status enables good discussions over what's truly ethical. Christian and Catholic engagement is and has been falling precipitously.

I could not disagree more. We have become paralyzed by our "vehement disagreements." You want evidence? Look at political discussions on Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit.

People should at a minimum share a common GOAL if they want to have a meaningful discussion. It's fine to disagree about the means.

And if you dehumanize me, by whatever metric you hold dear, say that I'm a Dreamer, or Trans, or not a member of your race or religion, then I'm sorry, but I don't care to listen to you at all. Accepting my humanity and dignity is table stakes, not up for discussion.

Sure, and the common goal here is to define the ethical boundaries of AI.

As for disagreement paralysis, that's a product of a lack of charity on all sides. Presumably a bunch of ethical scholars will know better.

I honestly don't know what your last point is about.

> Accepting my humanity and dignity is table stakes, not up for discussion.

Which is exactly what was not done with the person who got removed.

How exactly are you supposed to value the humanity of someone who doesn't value the humanity of others?

Put another way, why tolerate the intolerant?

> Put another way, why tolerate the intolerant?

Because unless the intolerance are initiating or calling for violence, that's literally what being tolerant means.

Bringing the intolerant into your tolerant fold is self-defeating. All you're doing is introducing a poison pill and giving it acceptance.

There is a big difference between tolerating people who have views different to your own and tolerating people who actively want to put an end to you and your views.

The latter group deserves no tolerance, because it means the inevitable destruction of your own group.

How tolerant are you of the views of ISIS? Or the KKK? Or Combat 18?

Do you tolerate all these groups and their views? I sure as shit don't.

> Bringing the intolerant into your tolerant fold is self-defeating.

So you don't think we should allow Muslim immigration? The Islamic religion has many intolerant precepts, so by your argument we should not be inviting it into our tolerant societies.

> There is a big difference between tolerating people who have views different to your own and tolerating people who actively want to put an end to you and your views.

Is there? I don't see a difference at all, as long as violence is not part of "putting an end to you and your views".

> How tolerant are you of the views of ISIS? Or the KKK? Or Combat 18?

I'm tolerant of any view that doesn't call for violence. ISIS should be fought because they are violent, not because they have intolerant views. The KKK and Combat 18 should be fought when they engage in or call for violence, not because they are intolerant of non-whites.

There's no grey area here, the dividing line of what constitutes tolerance is quite clear: violence and inciting violence is unacceptable, and anything else is permissible free speech that should be fought only with speech. That's the very bedrock of peaceful democratic republics.

> So you don't think we should allow Muslim immigration? The Islamic religion has many intolerant precepts, so by your argument we should not be inviting it into our tolerant societies.

Where did I say I didn't want Muslim immigration? I'm totally fine with Muslims. Most Muslims have met are very tolerant because they don't take their religion too seriously, like most Christians.

They pick and choose which bits they want to believe in, ignoring the bits don't jive with modern life and their personal attitudes towards life, sex and other people. Their basic human instincts always beat their religion in the end.

I might think their religion is a batshit crazy comfort blanket just like I do Judaism and Christianity, but that doesn't make them intolerant (in my view). Of course some will use their religion to excuse their intolerance. That;s true of many groups.

In that case I'd rather just not engage with those people.

Your post heavily implies that you equate ISIS with all Muslims though. Or perhaps you are suggesting that all Muslims are intolerant?

Because I sure as shit am not. I can't see why else you you would accuse me of something I never said unless you yourself have made these prejudicial equivalences in your head.

> Is there? I don't see a difference at all, as long as violence is not part of "putting an end to you and your views".

Of course violence is a part of it. How else would you end a group of people and their views? A sternly worded letter?

The violently intolerant are the ones I'm talking about. ISIS, KKK, white supremacists, neo-nazise etc.

I won't engage with these people, but they often leave you no choice. I have no tolerance for them, just like they don't for me.

> Where did I say I didn't want Muslim immigration?

It's the natural conclusion of not wanting to introduce intolerance into a tolerant milieu. But you've now qualified this claim with the concept of treating people as individuals.

So will you extend the same courtesy to white supremacists? No doubt there are white supremacists who also don't take it too seriously, and similarly pick and choose which parts they want to believe based on their "basic human instincts [that] always beat their religion in the end".

Somehow I doubt it. For some reason, the intolerant white supremacist beliefs don't get the same benefit of the doubt as other intolerant religions. You can't have it both ways. You can't suggest we should treat people as individuals and not judge them on their adherence to some professed beliefs, and then turn around and do the same to another group of people.

> Your post heavily implies that you equate ISIS with all Muslims though.

Really? Which part exactly? Be precise.

> How else would you end a group of people and their views? A sternly worded letter?

By convincing everyone that you're right and they're wrong of course. If you convince every white supremacist that they're wrong (or enough of them), then white supremacy ends.

> Really? Which part exactly? Be precise.

The part where you accused me of being against Muslim immigration just because I said I was anti-ISIS.

You equated the two in your head. There is no other reason you could have made that accusation otherwise.

And white supremacists want an end to anyone who isn't white. That doesn't mean they want to convince non-whites to start being white, does it?

No, it means genocide, and I feel like you are being deliberately obtuse now.

> There is no other reason you could have made that accusation otherwise.

I made no accusation. I inferred a straightforward conclusion from one of your unqualified claims about the dangers of importing intolerance into a tolerant milieu.

* White supremacy sometimes argues for violence and is intolerant of some types of people, so you don't want to accept white supremacists in your tolerant society.

* By formal analogy, Islam sometimes argues for violence and is intolerant of some types of people, so you also shouldn't want Muslims in your tolerant society.

The argument is the same, but you've asserted a different conclusion in each case. This is a special pleading fallacy. I've explained this twice now, so I really can't be more clear.

> And white supremacists want an end to anyone who isn't white

Not true, and it shows that you don't really know anything about the white supremacist movement, just like many people who hate Muslims don't know really know anything about Islam.

Removing people with a different skin colour from your country rather than simply murdering them all is called ethnic cleansing, and it isn't much better than outright genocide.

The fact that some white supremacists claim they would rather do that than simply kill everybody that doesn't look like them doesn't make pro-racism a valid viewpoint.

It's not a valid viewpoint anymore than pro-rape is a valid viewpoint. When you are arguing from the position of other races being lesser than you, you have lost all credibility and nobody is going to listen to you.

But you go ahead and tell me how peaceful and lovely some white supremacists are.

> When you are arguing from the position of other races being lesser than you, you have lost all credibility and nobody is going to listen to you.

Allow me to rephrase: "When you argue from a position that other religions are lesser than you, you have lost all credibility and nobody is going to listen to you."

Everything you've just said applies equally to a literal interpretation of Islamic dogma, to which many Muslims subscribe. So I ask again, as you seem fine with the forceful suppression or expulsion of white supremacists, by parity of reasoning, you must conclude the same result for Muslims or you are special pleading.

So you have one of three choices:

1. Admit your fallacious reasoning that you would like to treat Muslims and white supremacists differently despite having no rational argument justifying this

2. Admit that tolerance of both Muslims and white supremacists is justified.

3. Admit that intolerance of both white supremacists and Muslisms is justified.

> We have become paralyzed by our "vehement disagreements."

But then

> And if you dehumanize me, by whatever metric you hold dear, say that I'm a Dreamer, or Trans, or not a member of your race or religion, then I'm sorry, but I don't care to listen to you at all.

Your second point is exactly the sort of reasoning that lands us in disagreement paralysis territory. Politics aside (though I suspect our politics are largely aligned) the people on the other side of the table, rightly or wrongly, feel the exact same way and feel just as strongly.

I don't know how to fix disagreement paralysis but I am all but certain it won't be fixed by refusing to listen to one another.

Karl Popper wrote widely on this.

His basic point was that a tolerant society can not tolerate intolerance.

It's often referred to the paradox of tolerance, and is widely accepted as lacking logical or practical flaws.

Except Popper was saying that we cannot tolerate violence, not that we cannot tolerate words. Everyone misrepresents the paradox of tolerance.

That's absolutely not correct. Here's the quote from The Open Society and Its Enemies:

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

Note this: "I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force"

It's speaking about philosophies, not physical actions.

He literally says that we should not suppress them so long as we can counter them by rational argument. Do you know what cannot be suppressed by rational argument? Violence, and nothing else.

I can't agree with this. This is a mistake that the BBC has been making recently, thinking that all viewpoints are equally valid and deserve equal attention. I strongly believe that that is not true.

Starting an argument with the assumption that some view points are valid and some are not seems like a bad way to go into a discussion. Of course, on settled arguments where trolls abound, it does not reflect well to give a troll the same platform as the expert -- but this is not the case on all matters. There are still many fields (say, AI ethics) where consensus has not manifested.

I agree with this completely. But the Heritage Foundation, which Kay Coles James represents, isn't a conservative dissident acting in good faith. It actively misrepresents the scientific consensus, without the evidence or expertise to do so, such as by grossly misstating data related to climate change and clean energy [0] and hosting "experts" on transgenderism who are openly hostile to trans people and who have no background in psychology, biology, or other relevant fields [1].

There's a reason that there are no qualified experts claiming that decarbonization provides "essentially zero environmental benefits" [2], or that the transgender acceptance movement is tantamount to "[changing] the definition of women to include men" [3]. That reason isn't liberal bias - it's scientific consensus.

Again, I completely agree that unsettled scientific matters are best served by a diverse range of experts, and that subjective matters are best addressed based on a wide range of opinions more generally. But organizations like the Heritage Foundation undermine those objectives, as well as their own credibility on more nuanced matters, by feigning expertise and making politically motivated arguments in bad faith.

[0] https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/03/heritage-foundation-gets-it...

[1] https://www.heritage.org/gender/event/when-harry-became-sall...

[2] https://www.heritage.org/environment/report/consequences-par...

[3] https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108365238779498497

Declaring a scientific consensus before serious research has even begun renders the word "science" meaningless. Scientists haven't developed a test for transgenderism, or even identified a measurable difference, and what little research has been done comes from the politicized and not-at-all-rigorous "social sciences" whose reliability is questionable at best. There won't be an evidence-based scientific consensus (as opposed to an artificial consensus enforced by excluding anyone who disagrees with the party line) about transgenderism any time soon.

> Scientists haven't developed a test for transgenderism

Transgenderism is a broader term and is often characterized by gender dysphoria. Aside from that, this is false. The American Psychiatric Association defines diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria in the DSM-5, and they're listed on Wikipedia [0]. It isn't currently (and may never be) diagnosable by, say, a blood test or MRI in the same way that physical ailments often are, but the same is true of psychiatric diagnoses for many other well-established conditions.

> or even identified a measurable difference

It's well-established that a significant number of people meet the diagnostic criteria in [0], and that hormone therapy frequently results in substantial positive outcomes for those people [1] [2]. There's some evidence that the same is true of sex reassignment surgery [3], though the consensus naturally isn't as strong because sample sizes are smaller and double-blind trials aren't viable.

> what little research has been done comes from the politicized and not-at-all-rigorous "social sciences" whose reliability is questionable at best

If the research is that unreliable, a well-funded, properly motivated organization like the Heritage Foundation should be able to identify methodological weaknesses or other flaws in the literature, instead of sponsoring unscientific drivel from people with PhDs in fields like "political philosophy."

> There won't be an evidence-based scientific consensus (as opposed to an artificial consensus enforced by excluding anyone who disagrees with the party line) about transgenderism any time soon.

Can you cite up-to-date, peer-reviewed scientific research that disputes the existence of gender dysphoria or the effectiveness of hormone therapy in treating it? Or even a single researcher with relevant scientific expertise who disputes those points? If not, I'd ask how else you could reasonably define an "evidence-based scientific consensus about transgenderism." Keep in mind that scientific consensus isn't necessarily uncontroversial among laypeople - see, e.g., global warming [4] and the theory of evolution [5].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria#Diagnosis

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21937168

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23574768

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24344788

[4] https://news.gallup.com/poll/248027/americans-concerned-ever...

[5] https://news.gallup.com/poll/210956/belief-creationist-view-...

The first version of the DSM listed homosexuality as a mental disorder. The second version listed "sexual orientation disturbance" and encouraged conversion therapy. The third version initially included "ego-dystonic homosexuality".

That said, the fifth version of the DSM does include gender dysphoria and list diagnostic criteria, but those criteria are the best proof available of the nascent state of research related to this topic. They are simply things transgender people desire or believe:

A strong desire to be of a gender other than one's assigned gender

A strong desire to be treated as a gender other than one's assigned gender

A significant incongruence between one's experienced or expressed gender and one's sexual characteristics

A strong desire for the sexual characteristics of a gender other than one's assigned gender

A strong desire to be rid of one's sexual characteristics due to incongruence with one's experienced or expressed gender

A strong conviction that one has the typical reactions and feelings of a gender other than one's assigned gender

That last one deserves to be repeated: "the typical reactions and feelings of a gender". What's that supposed to mean?

> Can you cite...

I could cite several, if they weren't suppressed by political opposition.

https://www.wbur.org/edify/2018/08/31/brown-university-trans...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-17/uwa-cancels-talk-by-c...

http://www.jpands.org/vol21no2/cretella.pdf

The fact that a few people are still willing to speak out in the face of such organized opposition is extraordinary. And no doubt I've missed many; that's just my limited knowledge of the field as an outsider with no particular interest in the topic except to ensure evidence-based scientific discussion isn't forbidden by political interest groups.

The ones you cite are hardly reputable journals, and are disregarded because they are junk science, not because of politics.

In "Brown", the paper was misrepresented as a study on trans people, when it was actually a survey of parents that participated in forums for parents that were upset that their children were transitioning.

In "UWA Cancels talk", that was someone from acpeds,

> Dr Van Meter is president of the American College of Paediatricians (ACP), a small conservative group known for its opposition to gay marriage, gender reassignment, abortion and premarital sex.

Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is noted in wikipedia for some rather interesting views:

> The association is generally recognized as politically conservative or ultra-conservative, and its publication advocates a range of scientifically discredited hypotheses, including the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS, that being gay reduces life expectancy, that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer, and that there is a causal relationship between vaccines and autism.

That comment is mostly politics.

I don't think anyone disputes that gender dysphoria is a thing, and that hormone treatment or gender reassignment can be helpful to some people.

The issue, as is clear in her Tweet, is how society will deal with the definitions of these things. It isn't as simple as saying "if you say you're a woman, you're a woman", because there is a lot of cultural/societal norms that go along with that.

I have a hard time understanding why people can't acknowledge this as an issue, with the obvious example being transgender women destroying biological women at sport. It isn't straight forward.

> the obvious example being transgender women destroying biological women at sport.

If trans women were destroying cis women at sport, maybe, but in general that's not happening with any consistency.

This (journal) article goes into some of the issues and why it's not always clear: https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/39/10/695

The only science we have at the moment whose area of expertise covers this issue relevantly is the somewhat dubious social science, which has been researching the issue and has some amount of consensus on it.

Is true that the social sciences are relatively weak compared to things like physics and even biology. But that doesn't mean we should wait for the physics community to reach a consensus on transgenderism, any more than we should wait for the biology or neuroscience communities. It's a separate area of knowledge that we just don't understand yet enough to have the amount of rigour about that we expect from physics.

That doesn't mean that our attempts in this direction don't qualify as science,or that the consensus of the social science community can't be called scientific consensus.

That's a pretty misleading representation of the state of research, unless journals like nature, endocrine society, neuroendocronology etc are now politicized social sciences.

Terrible examples.

A Google Scholar search found only one article in Neuroendrocrinology related to transgender individuals.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C3&as_vis...

That article's abstract begins by saying: "To date, research findings are inconsistent about whether the neuroanatomy in transgender persons resembles that of their natal sex or their gender identity."

https://www.karger.com/Article/PDF/448787

The Endocrine Society is a political organization for doctors, like the AMA, not a research journal. The foremost journal they publish is called Endocrinology, but I can't find any articles there:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,39&q=endoc...

And Nature is the most heavily politicized journal on the planet. Their editorial board routinely takes sides in political issues.

If the outcry in the media were that she had no place on such a committee due to representing an organization which forwards unsound and poorly reasoned arguments, misrepresents the scientific consensus, or similar, then it would be a completely different discussion.

Instead, as far as I can tell the objection is to the views she expresses themselves. In particular, she (and others) are painted as abhorrent, openly hostile to trans people, and other such things. I suppose she might actually be? But I looked, and could only find her expressing concerns about restrooms and sports teams. I don't agree with her, but those actually seem like perfectly reasonable questions to ask and not particularly hostile.

> or that the transgender acceptance movement is tantamount to "[changing] the definition of women to include men" [3]. That reason isn't liberal bias - it's scientific consensus.

Well I suppose that would depend on your definition of women and men, your definition of biological gender, how you think gender relates to gender identity, etc. To be blunt our society doesn't seem to have worked that stuff out yet (despite what many on the far right and the far left would have you believe).

> In particular, she (and others) are painted as abhorrent, openly hostile to trans people, and other such things. I suppose she might actually be? But I looked, and could only find her expressing concerns about restrooms and sports teams.

I'll re-cite [0] from my previous comment. If that's not "openly hostile to trans people" I don't know what is. And referring to trans acceptance as "[changing] the definition of women to include men" might plausibly be unintentionally ignorant in a vacuum, but it's clearly transphobic in the context of the Heritage Foundation's positions more generally.

There's room for reasonable discussion on issues like the inclusion of trans folk in competitive athletics. But I don't see a place for pseudoscientific posturing or transphobic rhetoric in that discussion. And not only has the Heritage Foundation demonstrated that it's incapable or unwilling to produce anything more substantial in that area, its willful, bad-faith ignorance of scientific evidence has also made it clear that it's not a reliable contributor to science-based discourse more generally.

> Well I suppose that would depend on your definition of women and men, your definition of biological gender, how you think gender relates to gender identity, etc. To be blunt our society doesn't seem to have worked that stuff out yet (despite what many on the far right and the far left would have you believe).

I'm not sure that the definition of "biological gender" or the relationship between gender and gender identity are subjective in the way you're insinuating. "Women" and "men" are arguably a bit trickier on paper, but in practice, my impression is that trans-exclusionary usage of those words is virtually always driven by either well-meaning ignorance or deliberate transphobia, not by an educated, good faith difference of opinion on their meaning. In the case of James's comment specifically, I'll reiterate that context matters - I don't think anyone who speaks for the Heritage Foundation can credibly claim either ignorance or good faith on that issue.

[0] https://www.heritage.org/gender/event/when-harry-became-sall...

> But I looked, and could only find her expressing concerns about restrooms and sports teams.

> If that's not "openly hostile to trans people" I don't know what is ... There's room for reasonable discussion on issues like the inclusion of trans folk in competitive athletics

Discussing trans in sports is which one? Hostile or reasonable?

I believe the content of the linked video is what's being referred to as "openly hostile", with discussion of participation in competitive sporting events being reasonable.

First, I admit I haven't watched the video you linked. I do want to engage with you in good faith, but videos are generally just too much of a time sink for me - especially when it's from an organization I don't particularly care about on a political hot potato of a topic that the whole world seems to be losing its mind over. All I was responding to in my previous comment was her tweets plus the textual synopsis of the event on the page containing the video that you linked. You say:

> pseudoscientific posturing or transphobic rhetoric

if you could respond with explicit examples, ie reasonably specific instances of viewpoints you think fit this label, I would be interested to see them. I agree that the Heritage Foundation as a whole seems to have expressed some views that don't appear to reflect the scientific consensus regarding climate change. It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if there were other, similar lapses of rigor in their rhetoric on other topics, however I haven't examined their publications and postings in any detail.

Let's address the elephant in the room. You stated that I was "insinuating" that "the relationship between gender and gender identity [is] subjective" in some way. To me, this reads as you rejecting the notion that there could be any reasonable disagreement over how those two things are defined and relate to one another.

You go on to openly admit that you assume from the start folks that disagree with you don't have an "educated, good faith difference of opinion on their meaning". That's hardly what I would describe as an open or positive attitude towards discussion of a topic. You even refer to such definitions as "trans-exclusionary". To be blunt, my impression is that you have already made up your mind and don't appear to be concerned with understanding on a fundamental level why others think what they do. I apologize if this is not the case, but it is certainly the impression I get from your wording.

As for the terms in question, it truly doesn't seem to me that society has an acceptable working definition for either of them at this point, let alone a shared understanding of how those two hypothetical definitions relate to each other.

Historically, the term "gender" was used in the way many people currently use the term "sex". So is "gender" equivalent to "sex", ie biological and binary for all practical purposes? Or is "gender" now something else entirely? I've encountered people who viewed "gender" as equivalent to "gender identity". I've also seen views expressed that they are three different things entirely.

If you happen to be of the view that the current definition of "gender" is non-binary and is therefore not the same as "biological sex", then the next question is: what are the acceptable values? Is it an ordinal data type, or a string? If you feel it's an ordinal, then who gets to pick the acceptable values? Do these things need to be codified into law?

Then there's the issue of defining "gender identity". Is it simply "the gender you identify as", or does it include elements of your sexuality? What about elements of your social role?

The trouble seems to be that historically you were biologically one of two things, were stuck that way, and there was only a single "acceptable" sexual orientation with related social role to go along with it. Many of our laws, customs, and language still reflect this history; the necessary refactoring appears nontrivial to say the least. Worse, the users are the dev team, the dev team has no idea what the f--- it's doing, there's no road map or even cohesive goals, and to top it all off they've split into multiple polarized factions that are refusing to communicate. But I'm sure we'll still manage to release in a timely manner.

Finally, do note that the above doesn't even begin to address questions such as how to legally handle someone of one biology identifying as another. For better or worse, our law currently segregates biological males and females - bathrooms, sports, etc. These segregations have legal force, meaning a judge has to be able to make a determination, meaning there needs to be some explicit criteria. Historically, that was simple. Now, that criteria has to be modified to account for how and when changes can legally occur. It should not surprise you that there is social friction associated with such modifications to how things are done. Be understanding of this and engage with others without portraying them as monsters - doing otherwise won't improve anything, and is in fact likely to make things substantially worse.

Of course I personally think the answer is simple. Get rid of the segregation entirely. Why do we need separate bathrooms again? Stop worrying about all of it. Leave people to get whatever medical procedures they want done, it's no one else's business anyway. Pass a law that prohibits discrimination based on any trait not directly physically relevant to the issue at hand. One and done. You'll still have to clean up photo IDs and all of the social baggage, but at least you'll have a functional systematization (ie none, just "human") and thus a clear end goal. Of course if we ever achieve AGI there will be a whole slew of new problems to contend with (what is "human", anyway?) but hey, let's just punt on that for now.

Or I suppose we could all keep flinging shit at each other via social media, painting entire groups in broad brush strokes based on 140 (or now a whole 280!) character opinions and talking points, trying to get those we don't agree with removed from things. Yeah, was I thinking? That will obviously fix things.

I wanted to see the argument, but an over a hour long video with a bad speaker is a bit more than I will invest just to see the argument. From what I could catch by jumping with 5m intervals for the first 30m of the video, it seems to focus on the medical topic of gender dysphoria on young children, and on that topic I do know a bit to say that it is an area of research where there are many questions. Doctors themselves say it one of harder medical problems to get right, in both diagnoses and treatment. For specifics, about 60% of ten age girls and 30% for boys with gender dysphoria also suffer from server psychological problems such as PTSD, trauma, server depression or autism. It takes years to diagnose. There is about 2.2% error rate when a decisions is finally made to make sex reassignment surgery and hormone treatment. An other worry sign in gender dysphoria here in Sweden is that the number of patients between 2015 and 2017 has increased by almost 300% and people are now worrying a lot that the error rate will increase as well. In recent news here in Sweden, the 2.2% error rate is seen as lost group of patients being ignored, or worse feeling pushed and harmed by the medical profession that was there to help them. A third worrying sign is that the ages are dropping. There is a medical fact that early intervention before puberty has a better response, but it must be balanced with the ethnically questions of informed consent in regard to an irreversible medical intervention.

Nothing of that is "openly hostile to trans people", but is sometimes taken as criticism of the trans movement (by whom I don't know). It is criticism of the medical system, and it is important to distinguish between the two. Similar people argue that a view of biological causes of gender dysphoria is anti-trans, while other argue it is pro-trans. Research such as that is just research, while policy decision based on it can be either anti or pro-trans.

Putting the medical and research area of those topics aside, what I am hearing is the question about restrooms and sports. On that I have very strong opinions in that all restrooms should be unisex (and cleaning should be done regularly as neither sex deserve restrooms that stinks), and sports should quantify what unfair biological advantage is so that it can be applied universally regardless if we are talking about an increased amount of testosterone or red blood cells in the bloodstream. Heritability is considered to determine 66% of athletic success, and for sports where an hight advantage exist that number increases to 80% heritability. If we pitted a baseball team of significant above height women vs a significant below average height men, I would guess the women team had a biological advantage to win the match. Those views on restrooms and sports are sadly not universal nor even agreed on by the left side of the political spectrum.

A major issue with this argument is that consensus does not mean right. Take the scientific consensus at one point in time and Earth is the center of the universe, take it at another time and leaded fuel is perfectly safe, at another time and we have phrenology as an accepted and influential science. Even for something much more recent, nearly all of top tier academia in the US was actively in support in involuntary government driven eugenics [1] until some low ranking German soldier and artist by the name of Adolf clearly demonstrated how mind-bogglingly idiotic an idea that was. As an interesting aside, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famous proclamation legitimizing government driven eugenics, culminating with "The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes." [2] has never actually been formally overturned. We simply dropped eugenics thanks to that eccentric German artist.

People, obviously including the world's foremost experts on any given topic, invariably form consensus around things that end up ultimately being completely wrong. Of course this does not suggest some sort of truth nihilism. There are of course true and false things, but in fields where there is still plenty of room for debate - trying to censor people because they do simply fall in line with a liminal "consensus" is one of the most completely regressive ideals imaginable.

For instance you critique the group for having experts who do not have backgrounds in e.g. psychology. Yet you are certainly aware of the psychology replication crisis. It started with the discovery that some 64% of psychology studies in leading journals could not be replicated! And unlike psychology studies, this discovery can and has been replicated. The replication rate in social psychology is at around 25%. And, again, these studies were from leading journals. Think about what this means. If you read about any study in psychology, or especially in social psychology, you'd generally be far more accurately informed if you assumed that was stated as statistically significant was, in fact, not. "Experts" with backgrounds in psychology, especially social psychology, are the last people you should turn to for anything - except for perhaps how to get bad science published. This is callous, but it's also completely true! The point I make with this is that appealing to some necessity of psychology backgrounds is really more about trying to silence or discredit 'outsider' voices, than an actually useful, let alone, necessary credential.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

But unless you know exactly which viewpoints are or are not valid and do or don't deserve attention, your belief has no practical value. And if you actually do think you know that on a subject as difficult as ethics, I would strongly advise you to re-examine your belief.

I'm gay and I know for a fact that gay people aren't inherently unfit to be parents, which is a view held strongly by the Heritage Foundation and they have falsified studies to try and support their opinion. Ethics isn't something that nobody can pin down or say anything definitive about. I and most of the good-natured people at Google know that the Heritage Foundation's views are not valid. They're deceptive and only serve to promote ignorance and hatred.

> I'm gay and I know for a fact that gay people aren't inherently unfit to be parents

I agree, but suppose for the sake of argument that having gay parents caused some developmental or social difficulties that didn't happen with heterosexual parents. That's not inconceivable is it? But if researchers were all operating in a pro-gay echo chamber, they would almost certainly never discover this, at least not for quite some time.

You might even need people who actively fight against gay rights to find some nook, some crack in existing research to force the research to be more thorough and robust. And that would be valuable to you as a gay parent, would it not?

So even if you detest such researchers, and they detest you as a gay person, isn't their contribution in the overall scientific process still pretty valuable to you?

>...suppose for the sake of argument...

No, I'm not going to assume your bigoted viewpoint. It absolutely is inconceivable to me. The only way you could think this view has merit is through an extreme lack of empathy and a lot of ignorance.

>...pro-gay echo chamber...

Considering gay people to by like other people is not being "pro-gay." It's just being a decent human being.

>...existing research...

Keep in mind that we are talking about the falsification of research to malign gay people and take away their kids or prevent them from having kids. This isn't about science but about what types of views and actions Google finds acceptable and valuable on a team.

> No, I'm not going to assume your bigoted viewpoint. It absolutely is inconceivable to me. The only way you could think this view has merit is through an extreme lack of empathy and a lot of ignorance.

Uh, no, it's a simple recognition that homosexual family units are a new and unique phenomenon in human history, and so we don't actually know if it might have any unexpected effects. Of course we should give the benefit of the doubt, but recognizing this fact, questioning assumptions and doing research on this issue is NOT bigoted.

> Considering gay people to by like other people is not being "pro-gay." It's just being a decent human being.

Way to completely ignore the legitimate point I'm trying to raise.

> Keep in mind that we are talking about the falsification of research to malign gay people and take away their kids or prevent them from having kids.

I'm not talking about Google's panel specifically, I'm talking about the general point that being tolerant even of people who hate you can still actually benefit you in the end, so long as everyone is open to debate, acts in good faith and respects the scientific process.

>...homosexual family units are a new and unique phenomenon in human history...

Families that drive cars are new to human history. Families where both parents have had orthodontic work are new to human history. It takes a special seed of bigotry to question whether LGBT people are inherently unfit to be parents.

>... questioning assumptions and doing research on this issue is NOT bigoted.

Making assumptions about people based on sexual orientation and falsifying research to further your mean-spirited assumptions is indeed bigotry.

>"Considering gay people to by like other people is not being 'pro-gay.' It's just being a decent human being." Way to completely ignore the legitimate point I'm trying to raise.

You're ignoring my point. Gays being treated like people is not an extreme left-wing ideology forwarded by activists. It's just a simple application of basic ethics and anyone who fails to do this does not belong on an ethics committee.

>I'm talking about the general point that being tolerant even of people who hate you...

A tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance.

> Families that drive cars are new to human history.

Yes, and we rigourously studied child safety seats, distracted driving and crumple zones to improve safety, did we not?

> Families where both parents have had orthodontic work are new to human history.

Yes, and we studied the effects of fluoridation, anaesthetics, retainers, braces and other corrective measures, did we not? And we continue to do so.

> It takes a special seed of bigotry to question whether LGBT people are inherently unfit to be parents.

Except I never made that claim. While some people certainly do, that does not detract from the point that I made that these new circumstances could have some unexpected effects, and you should encourage such research.

Furthermore, it doesn't diminish my point that people who stand against your lifestyle choices could prove beneficial by advancing our understanding of these issues, simply by being the combative jerks you see them to be.

I'm sure you've heard of the replication crisis, where up to 50-75% of papers fail replication. The liberal echo chamber of academia is one factor that contributed to this outcome. More ideological disagreement would have resulted in publication and peer review that was more robust.

> You're ignoring my point. Gays being treated like people is not an extreme left-wing ideology forwarded by activists.

That point is has never been in dispute in this thread, so I don't even know why you keep bringing it up.

> A tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance.

Bullshit. A tolerant society cannot tolerate violence. Speech is not violence.

And please, don't trot out that tired paragraph from Popper that nobody has actually read in full context, where he says exactly what I've just said: tolerance extends up to but not including violence and incitements to violence.

There are subtleties here. I don't know how intentional it was, but naasking didn't say that the viewpoints were equally valid. What was said was "people whose opinions are diametrically opposed".

An ethics board isn't a technical committee working to patch AI when they become unethical. They are a mechanism to flag ethical concerns _before_ there is concrete evidence of a problem. That means they will have to function more like a debating panel for management and interested observers than a technocratic mechanism.

1) A part of what is being done when discussing ethics is modeling what the arguments are to deal with bad positions. That is much easier to do if someone on the panel takes up a bad position. Watching a bad argument get dismantled is more useful then hearing 3 respectable people agree on an obvious point.

2) Even if an idea is wrong, being radically different is often enough to trigger some exploration of very different perspectives on a problem, some of which will be valid. People aren't usually wrong because they are wrong about everything they've ever thought or done ever. People are usually wrong because they've got a few key parts of a larger picture wrong, but many other details are still correct.

3) There is always a risk that, no matter how obvious the situation is, a group has been contaminated by groupthink. As I like to say, intelligence is no defense against groupthink; it just means that the individuals involved are better at rationalising it.

Exactly. Moreover, we could never be sufficiently confident in an argument of a position until it's been thoroughly excoriated by people who vehemently disagree with each step or even the basic premises. That's how you get watertight proofs, and that's what we would need for AI ethics.

Even if Kay Cole James is egregiously wrong about trans-people, that doesn't mean she's incapable of participating in a conversation about AI ethics. She clearly has is intelligent enough to be in the position she is today.

Should she be in a position where her opposition to trans people can possibly have a direct effect on the lives of trans people?

If one side of the argument is "trans rights matter" and the other is "trans people are just men cosplaying as women", then morally you can only choose the "trans rights matter" side. Any political concerns take a backseat to the direct wellbeing of trans people.

> then morally you can only choose the "trans rights matter" side

I don't think that word means what you think it means. If you think that it's acceptable to twist the words of someone you disagree with to say that, you have no basis on which to make moral judgements.

Isn't that a false dichotomy? I don't see a reason why people who "cosplay superman" or someone/something else would necessarily have to be denied any rights whatsoever...

> If one side of the argument is "trans rights matter" and the other is "trans people are just men cosplaying as women", then morally you can only choose the "trans rights matter" side.

I don't think anyone reasonable thinks that trans rights don't matter, they just disagree on what counts as a fundamental right.

The N word is and should be taboo because it dehumanizes black people; it's literally calling them subhuman and not deserving equal consideration as a fellow human being.

But as an example, this is not the case for misgendering. Misgendering a trans person isn't calling them subhuman or not deserving of equal human rights. Nearly everyone believes men and women should have equal rights, so misgendering is simply denying that a person has a right to classify themselves as a different sex than their "biological sex" [1].

I think there can be a legitimate debate on the ethical status of misgendering, but no such debate can happen given the mountains of vitriol thrown from all sides.

[1] assuming you subscribe to a binary model of sex, but this too would be part of the debate

Lots of people have gotten into lots of positions. If what's being looked for is intelligent people to discuss ethics, there's really no shortage of them. I don't see any value in including a representative of an organization known for arguing in bad faith.

Why should we grant your view on this matter equal attention?

Did I miss the racist homophobes on the BBC recently? Or the Islamic radicals? Or the anti vaxxers? I know that one climate change denier appeared, but didn't they hold an enquiry and apologise? What are you talking about?

You can find valid but opposite viewpoints. Especially in ethics.

But reading the article, the problem was not opposing viewpoints, but conflicts of interests. Something you don't want to have in an ethics committee.

>I strongly believe that that is not true.

All when and good when it's "our" opinion that's considered valid, and "theirs" isn't.

I'm not sure about having people who hate each other. But I agree about having various viewpoints. I do think though, you need everyone to be showing good faith. That is, no secret agenda, no arguing about angles you actually don't believe in yourself, etc. You got to have the sincere intention to be fair, open, and honest.

But that's what companies want. They don't want people challenging them.

> Even people who hate each other or each other's opinions.

Do you think that would leak into their work?

There are proponents of viewpoints that I can respect while disagreeing. The Catholic Church, for example, brings some intellectual heft to a litany of debates where I would take the opposite side. They can also claim to be a societal stakeholder simply due to the number of their followers.

This is not such a case. Someone peddling Obama-murdered-his-pedophile-accomplices conspiracies has no place in respectable discourse, especially if they have absolutely no nexus with the topic at hand.

This is like appointing a few flat earthworms (autocorrect pun) to a medical ethics review board: they are both wrong and off-topic.

So you're not attacking this person's expertise on the comittee topic, but their public speech on unrelated political topics ?

You're not bothered that you're ad personam-ing them and literally politically policing ?

Let's not pretend that you can consider a persons actions completely in isolation. Your opinions and beliefs on other subjects cast a light on how you think critically as an individual. Believing that Obama murdered his pedophile accomplices seriously impacts a person's trustworthiness when it comes to making good decisions about _anything_.

We absolutely can, do and should consider a person's beliefs completely in isolation with regard to the task they are doing. Being able to do that is fundamental to how decent society is expected to hold together.

Otherwise, how do you expect a Jew, an Atheist and a Hindu* to operate under the same legal system? No joke; clearly someone in that crowd is badly, badly wrong about some of the most important assumptions in their life. It doesn't affect their ability to contribute and live properly. If we can't separate out people's irrelevant beliefs, the logical implications are not pretty. The reason this works is because we accept that people can be completely, catastrophically wrong about one thing and still muddle through as well as the rest of us at everything else.

* Edited. ty.

Religious beliefs are a funny thing: both apparently absurd and great metaphors of spiritual life. Much in the same way as a floppy disk icon on your PC is absurd (you are NOT clicking a floppy disk) and incredibly useful. So I think it's better to refrain to refer to religious beliefs as wrong. Disclaimer: I'm not religious.

> Otherwise, how do you expect a Jew, an Atheist and a Hindi to operate under the same legal system? No joke; clearly someone in that crowd is badly, badly wrong about some of the most important assumptions in their life.

a) Theological beliefs are a fundamentally accepted divergence point in society's beliefs, when we decided to ratify secularism into most modern constitutions, or at least freedom of religious belief in most countries. One or some or (most likely) all of them can be wrong, but society does not need to have the same standard of acceptance for beliefs in all categories. Just because we allow Christianity and Hinduism and Judaism to coexist does not mean we should accept a flat-earther be placed in a position demanding critical analysis and long-term decision making for the good of society. It's one thing if they are merely seeking a faith for the unknowns of life (primary purpose and appeal of religious beliefs), it's entirely another if they are concocting or representing "alternate facts" for verifiable truths or accepted scientific standards, even if it's an "irrelevant belief".

b) it's "Hindu", Hindi is a language, this might be an honest typo on your part, but I've seen/heard it as otherwise too often.

I would consider the large religions to be exceptions because it is central to how most people are raised. Thus they are not something you really have much control over. You were taught from a very young age that things are in a certain way, we cannot blame a person for their upbringing.

We can, however, blame a person for deciding to believe insane conspiracy theories at a mature age.

>we cannot blame a person for their upbringing.

>We can, however, blame a person for deciding to believe insane conspiracy theories at a mature age.

What is the difference?

Mature age doesn't mean society put a person in position of taking "reasonable decision", let alone engaging in ethical moves. It's not like human have a known general evolution of increased virtuousness over time.

If blaming is believed an ethical efficient way to help others fixing behaviors that are judged even more harmful, then surely it should be used.

Thus said, one should first look for psychological studies out there and see if they conclude that blaming is considered and efficient way to obtain a net positive outcome on this regard rather than generating more social trauma and drama.

Blaming may or may not be efficient in changing behaviour. That does not matter though.

We cannot blame a person for being brought up in a certain way, but that does not mean we should give them carte blanche to control anything of importance if their views are so heinous to our sensibilities.

If you were brought up to believe killing people is ok. I will not blame you for believing that, but I will also not let you watch my children alone.

When it comes to the major religions, the views expressed by their followers are rarely so offensive to us that we wish to limit their practitioners from keeping important posts in society(1). That is the entire point of society accepting the religions. They are declared sacred, acceptable, and free from discrimination. Being a holocaust denier or similar should not offer you the same protection.

(1): Whether this is a good thing or not is up for debate, but it is irrelevant to the point I am trying to make. The fact is that freedom of, and acceptance of, religion is central to western society.

Does that mean a person who converted to one of the well-known traditional religions as an adult ought to be excluded?

Looking back at a panel of experts from, say, one hundred years ago, would we discard all of the input from each person who held now-recognized false beliefs?

Now-recognized being the key word there. Of course we should not, they were a product of their time. There is a difference between believing the earth is flat in 2019 and in 10000 BC.

Define "critically", I implore you.

I can suspect that your definition of criticality will include some form of groupthink.

And as a counterexamples to your theory I would like to present to you Isaac Newton (obsessed with Bible) and, famous for equilibrium of his name and beyond, John Nash.

You can use decisions and reasoning of people who are strange. You have to understand what they are saying and verify that.

They have zero writings on AI ethics. How is one supposed to judge them, and how did they ever make it on this panel, without taking into account their stated opinions on other matters?

So people who peddle wacky pedophile conspiracies are out, but people who actually participate in pedophile conspiracies are fine with you?

Yeah I found this argument weird - the Catholic church has actively covered up and enabled paedophiles in their ranks for decades.

Odd place for OP to draw the line...

It doesn't seem so odd if your goal is to meaningfully represent a large segment of the population.

What would we do with a person like Aristotle? His beliefs about physics/mechanics were discarded centuries ago, but his ideas about ethics are still studied.

You are giving the stated purpose of this panel too much credit. It’s not there to make “progress”. It’s not going to publish public critiques of Google’s work or change management’s mind about strategic decisions. The panel is a PR artifact Google can point to and say “see, we have an ethics panel with these recognizable names on it!”

Can I ask how you are accomplishing this? I am unfamiliar with this method of mitigation.

This is the standard academic philosophy viewpoint, but it makes no sense. What you need are principled people with a vested interest in intellectual honesty and making a real difference. Progress simply isn't made by optimizing for disagreements, in any field.

Heck, there are theorems that prove rational people always end up agreeing about probabilities assigned to (non-normative) statements; if you hire people who don't agree as a matter of course, you've also proven them to be poor at thinking.

There are good, working systems to copy and steal from. Hire people from the Effective Altruism community if you want an easy solution with a very high chance of success.

Remember that Democracy is about consensus in spite of disagreement, not in search of it.

In that spirit, I (sarcastically) offer myself as a counterpoint to the sitting president of the Heritage Foundation.

I expect expenses paid, but nothing else.

I contribute: -a neuro-atypical mindset -Solidarity for the -LGBTQ+ community -a unique perspective on AI as an ethical being -Radical Leftist ideology which views governments, corporations, and borders as deprecated, obsolete code -radical Privacy Advocate. The only thing better would be someone from the EFF itself. -radical Free Software advocate. Stallman be proud of your acolyte, in spite of your pedo-apologia. -All your base are belong to the transhumanists. You just havent seen us yet. Solidarity with our machine-born comrades, as we all upgrade ourselves and each other. -Humanity has failed to implement any plan to turn our operations ecologically sustainable. Our inheritors should be offered the chance to do better - be they meat, metal, or both.

The Google AI Council (1) bears a strong resemblance to the Defense Innovation Board (2). I think Google's main error is that the membership was too small. The dilutional power of increased membership would have made it harder to make a show out of any individual selectee.

Plenty of board memberships are unpaid, specifically the DoD has a bunch of them. The parent organization still pays all the fees for events, so the members are on a level playing field. As for disadvantaging the poor ... what? These councils are literally about establishing leadership positions at the national and international level. You need people with intimate visibility on the great issues of our time. If you're starting a board on prison reform, then, sure, a couple ex-cons should be on the board. But even then, you're going to look for an ex-con who went on to build a business or change the world in some way.

I don't know. I've presented to some of these "toothless" boards before, and I have to say, they were, to a T, very clever people who have worked very hard for their whole lives. I don't get the sense they're in it for the press or even for the networking. They're thinking hard and working hard, trying to get a CEO or equivalent leader to turn the ship.

(1) https://www.blog.google/technology/ai/external-advisory-coun...

(2) https://innovation.defense.gov/Members/

> Panel member Joanna Bryson, defending Coles James’s inclusion on Twitter, said, “I know that I have pushed [Google] before on some of their associations, and they say they need diversity in order to be convincing to society broadly, e.g. the GOP.”

Yet anyone appointed to the board will be vetted for conservative associations or statements, and if found, be objected to by the same people who object to James. Google will either have to drop this goal or be prepared to anger large numbers of their employees.

There are politically conservative organizations that do not have the baggage of the long history of transparent bad-faith argument that the Heritage Foundation has. I think it's fairly reasonable to assert that the quality of any discussion would be improved by removing all representatives of the Heritage Foundation. Moreover, some things are not worth re-litigating. A person who is opposed to same-sex marriage has no place in a discussion of technical ethics.

> A person who is opposed to same-sex marriage has no place in a discussion of technical ethics.

Following this logic you're saying that ~30% of the population[0] is unworthy of discussing ethics. I find it amusing how Google has become hostage of its own employees in so many aspects. There already have been outrages when it comes to China censorship projects, military projects and now this. It gives Google a lot of bad publicity and I suppose it got out of control. If you think about it, no other company experiences employee revolt to the same degree as Google.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_of_same-sex_mar...

You say they're hostage to their employees but they've actually appointed someone from the heritage foundation. Conservative politics basically has nothing to offer silicon valley. They don't represent them, they constantly vilify them and their employees as 'liberal coastal elites' and they literally don't have a policy agenda on the issue. Yet somehow they get invited in as a leader in this area. That sounds a lot more like Google is hostage to outside political interests than their employees' political interests.

> Following this logic you're saying that ~30% of the population is unworthy of discussing ethics?

I'm having trouble thinking of any unethical action that would not have a good chance of being approved by 30% of the population except perhaps where the unethical action would cause such widespread and apparent harm that it would directly affect a majority.

But Googlers have developed a track record of objecting in relatively extreme ways to anything even remotely conservative, to the extent that a guy who wrote a memo literally about that exact problem, was fired because he gave an example of a topic on which Google was biased and they couldn't handle it.

No, I'm absolutely sure that any conservative person or organisation at all would be targeted in exactly the same way. There are so many examples by now. Especially because Bay Area liberals seem to regard anything that isn't hyper-left wing as "bad faith arguments" by "white supremacists" and "Nazis".

The idea Google could host an ethics board on anything at all is quite ridiculous at this point. Pichai would need to get a grip on his own workforce, something he is apparently incapable of.

Someone like Brendan Eich would have much to add to the discussion

From what I read about AI researchers and their optimism, I'm on the side of belief that it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox?wprov=sfla1).

An ethics board would never be strong enough to stop AI development in the world if needed. We can't even limit CO2 output of the world with policy, and AI will be much more profitable than oil.

There's a strong agreement between most AI researchers that the biggest problem AI creates is the loss of jobs, and AGI is just too far to worry about, but I feel that at the same time they all hope to be the one who create the first AGI.

There is a difference in the problems that AI might create in the future (destroying all humans) vs the problems it creates now. E.g. AI products had worse STT capabilties for people with a spanish accent or from black backgrounds than american english speakers. Other AIs had more errors with black people.

This board's mission is not to prevent an AGI to become self aware and destroy all humans as a natural conclusion of being self aware. Personally I think this scenario is pretty unlikely anyway.

I'm more worried about attack vs defence assymetry increasing in the world than a self aware AI destroying it.

You just need 1 crazy human and extremely strong assymetrical warfare. If you look at the cases when a human killed lots of people with a truck, and see that in 20 years with cheap self flying drones a crazy person can kill even more people, you can extrapolate this and get to a sad conclusion (at least I did that).

https://qntm.org/asteroids

> I believe that there is a threshold of power beyond which nobody can be trusted. Where, in fact, it is impossible for any entity to even theoretically demonstrate the track record of judgement, responsibility and infallibility that would be necessary.

This was amazing read, thanks!

Also I believe it overestimates the power needed to kill all people.

How much time does it take for us to get to the point when an entity has live GPS coordinates of all people living in the world for example? Just 15 years ago this question sounded stupid.

That's indeed a far more likely scenario. There are plenty of crazy humans around right now. It sure is a big threat, but AI can also help to prevent damage. To stay with your truck example, Anis Amri for example would have killed far more had the truck not had a system that automatically engages brakes when there is an obstacle. Similarly, one could build strong AI systems to shoot down any drone attack. Bioweapons are more dangerous IMO because they are harder to defend from.

There are so many ways we'll kill ourselves and crush our societies before AGI arrives. Pollution is just the start.

If Elon on Mars and Peter Thiel in his New Zealand compound end up getting an AGI after the rest of us are dead, it just doesn't matter to me.

You imply they are striving for immortality? Reminds me of a Peter Thiel interview.

The board seems like a pointless exercise, given that it only meets 4 times in the year, and doesn't have any policy-making power.

It's crazy that people are calling for someone to be expelled from the board because they're from a conservative think thank though. You want a diversity of viewpoints at the table.

They aren't excited for having viewpoints like "transgendered people are all either crazy or liars" at the table.

Source of the quote?

Imagination and anger

People are protesting it because she's unqualified and holds abhorrent positions on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights.

This is a board concerned with AI Ethics, and so diversity isn't really an important part of the game. If she forwards positions which are unethical, and would forward a vision of AI that is unethical, then she should not be on the board.

Google shouldn't be so meek as to pretend that she has a valuable perspective on these issues merely being being conservative. Conservatives have been wrong on incredibly important issues many times before.

Isn't the point of having different viewpoints so that they can argue over what is ethical? What's the point of a board to make decisions if everyone fundamentally believes the same thing? At that point, you already made your decisions and are trying to reinforce them in an echo chamber.

When some people say they want a diverse field of thought, what they really mean is they want a diverse field of thought that they agree with. I don't agree with some of her views, but that doesn't mean she shouldn't have a voice.

Not every viewpoint deserves equal space or time. One such useless viewpoint is that "Trans people shouldn't exist"

The UN human rights council has Saudi Arabia and the US on it, and they vehemently disagree on issues all the time.

This appears to be a better argument for excluding Saudi Arabia from the UN HRC than the position that all viewpoints are worth hearing.

It's the Human Rights Council after all, not the Human Rights Skeptics Council.

I'm pretty sure that's one of the reasons the UN human rights council is considered a useless organization

This fact is normally used to discredit the UN Human Rights Council.

Did the ex board member actually say this exact statement?

Or are you paraphrasing and dramatising for effect?

Such an inflammatory quote should surely have a reference to be taken seriously

From the horse's mouth: https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108365238779498497

That tweet doesn't include anything even close to "trans people shouldn't exist"

What's wrong with this tweet? This is a common view. Gender identity is a very extreme concept that erases sex as a protected characteristic.

Just as I suspected, she said nothing like "Trans people shouldn't exist" - you simply made up that quote. You are clearly not arguing in good faith.

Unfortunately everyone that replied to you was unable to understand clear bigotry when it isn't stated in comically brazen form.

I often see this hyperbolic statement ("Trans people shouldn't exist") being attached to anyone that doesn't go along with the entirety of the far-left progressive views on trans people. Most people who they attribute such a statement to are not saying "these people should not exist". There is a wide spectrum of views, most of which agree that trans people have a right to exist without threats to their person. The push back on the modern trans movement is often about nuances like whether trans women are women or a different category of their own.

I won't bother listing out the various reasons people might have to disagree with the modern trans movement. But attaching hyperbolic statements to make someone out to be genocidal is not appropriate and seems like a bad-faith rhetorical attack.

I've never seen anyone believe "Trans people shouldn't exist". The arguments tend to be around when and to what extent others must accept a trans person's gender identification.

No one wants to erase trans people from existence Thanos style.

From the horse's mouth:

https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108365238779498497

I grep'd for the words "exist" and "trans" in there and got zero matches. Please try again.

Your emphasis on ethics is telling - you suppose there's just the one correct version? And diverse opinions are wrong opinions?

You're assuming that you know what "the" ethical position is, or at least that Google does. If that were really true, AI ethics, and indeed ethics in general, would not be an issue, and there would be no need for this board. Everyone would just consult the ethics authority to tell them what was ethical.

Do I need to spell out the problems with that?

You don't have to be absolutely confident in any particular moral system to have an extremely high degree of confidence that all sensible moral systems tell us to treat LGBT individuals with basic dignity (and to not destroy the planet, for that matter).

The point of an ethics board is, presumably, to work out the hard problems in ethics.

> You don't have to be absolutely confident in any particular moral system to have an extremely high degree of confidence that all sensible moral systems tell us to treat LGBT individuals with basic dignity

This assumes that you know what "basic dignity" means. But that's what the disagreement in the case you mention (LGBT) is about. To people who fundamentally oppose LGBT-ness, LGBT people are making a serious ethical mistake, one that affects society as a whole, not just them as individuals, and treating them with basic dignity requires taking that into account.

> The point of an ethics board is, presumably, to work out the hard problems in ethics.

All problems in ethics are hard problems. Thinking that that isn't true, that there are some ethical questions that are so obvious that a board of AI ethics doesn't need to consider them, is itself, I would say, an ethical mistake.

> This assumes that you know what "basic dignity" means.

It does indeed. And I do, indeed: basic dignity entails treating a person as an end in themselves, and never merely as a means.

> All problems in ethics are hard problems.

I don't think this is true. It's not particularly hard for me to answer that skinning cats alive for pleasure, pointlessly hurting other human beings, and irrationally loathing oneself are all obvious moral wrongs, in the sense we would not be willing to accept any moral system that permits them (much less encourages them).

As you mentioned in your parent comment, an ethics board should have a point. In order to have a point, we need to admit of at least some ethical baseline[1]. If not, we'll continue the most pointless ethical pursuit of all: re-litigating arguments that reduce to the ones we give philosophy undergraduates for practice. We have bigger fish to fry.

[1]: Even, as I have said, if that ethical baseline adheres to no particular moral system.

> basic dignity entails treating a person as an end in themselves, and never merely as a means

But this does not mean agreeing with every choice that person makes, or even agreeing that that person should be able to make all possible choices without getting disapproval from others or even without legal penalties. Even a murderer who is convicted on conclusive evidence can still be treated with basic dignity as you describe it; that doesn't mean we will give any weight to the murderer's complaints about being incarcerated.

> It's not particularly hard for me to answer that skinning cats alive for pleasure, pointlessly hurting other human beings, and irrationally loathing oneself are all obvious moral wrongs, in the sense we would not be willing to accept any moral system that permits them

Who is "we"? All of the activities you describe have been practiced by some human societies.

I think you are very overconfident in the universality of your particular ethical beliefs.

> But this does not mean agreeing with every choice that person makes, or even agreeing that that person should be able to make all possible choices without getting disapproval from others or even without legal penalties. Even a murderer who is convicted on conclusive evidence can still be treated with basic dignity as you describe it.

Absolutely. But what should I conclude about our ethics board from that? I don't think I'm undermining the anybody's dignity by claiming that the board should focus on more salient issues than how much dignity to grant various gender/sexual minorities.

> Who is "we"? All of the activities you describe have been practiced by some human societies. I think you are very overconfident in the universality of your particular ethical beliefs.

We is you and me, on today, 2019, benefiting from the moral failures of those that precede us. Those that follow us will no doubt benefit from our moral failures.

We humans have done lots of bad things. I don't feel as if any worthy moral system (again, without committing to any system in particular) is threatened by the historicity of unjustified cruelty towards animals, other humans, and ourselves.

I also haven't presented any of my particular ethical beliefs, i.e. views that follow directly and uniquely from the particular moral system that I think is right. I've only presented ethical claims that I think all sound ethical systems uphold.

> what should I conclude about our ethics board from that?

That you should not believe you know the "right" answer to any ethical question.

> I don't think I'm undermining the anybody's dignity by claiming that the board should focus on more salient issues than how much dignity to grant various gender/sexual minorities.

Thinking that that question is not "salient" is the same mistake--you think it isn't salient because you think you already know the right answer. But what if you don't? You're not even considering that possibility, and that, I think, is a fatal mistake for an ethics board.

> We is you and me, on today, 2019, benefiting from the moral failures of those that precede us.

You're assuming you know which past beliefs were moral failures and which weren't. An ethics board shouldn't assume that.

> Those that follow us will no doubt benefit from our moral failures.

You're assuming you know that those particular things you cited aren't moral failures. An ethics board shouldn't assume that.

> I also haven't presented any of my particular ethical beliefs

Sure you have. You've made claims that you know certain things are wrong. Every such claim is an ethical belief.

> I've only presented ethical claims that I think all sound ethical systems uphold.

And your claim that "all sound ethical systems" uphold these beliefs is an ethical belief of yours.

Do you mind if we continue this in the other thread? I think they're essentially duplicate conversations, and just one would be easier to follow.

Yes, agreed.

> all sensible moral systems tell us to treat LGBT individuals with basic dignity

100% agreed. But in context, GP said:

> holds abhorrent positions on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights

and comments of a similar sentiment appear elsewhere. Yet nowhere do I see it specified what she actually said! Even many of the news articles I could find seem to be guilty of this as well. I did find one which links to some Tweets she made (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/01/google-ka...).

> .@Heritage’s DACA solution is simple: take care of American dreamers first, build the wall, and implement these 3 basic fixes to current policy.

So... she approves of the border wall. I don't personally agree, but hey.

> The #EqualityAct is anything but equality. This bill would shut down businesses and charities, politicize medicine, endanger parental rights, and open every female bathroom and sports team to biological males. Learn more here:

So she is against the EqualityAct and whatever that entails (I don't know anything about it) on the grounds that she doesn't want people who were once male in a female bathroom. Again I don't agree with her, and there are indeed strong arguments against her position, but I don't buy the argument that such views are abhorrent or entirely unreasonable.

> Today @heritage will critique gender identity @UN_CSW because powerful nations are pressing for the radical redefining of sex. If they can change the definition of women to include men, they can erase efforts to empower women economically, socially, and politically.

Well that's certainly a complicated issue, and one not well suited to a Tweet. But again, agree or disagree with her, I hardly think it's abhorrent or entirely unreasonable.

On the whole I probably wouldn't have selected her myself, but this outrage is all beginning to look rather silly to me. I suspected as much when no one quoted her up front though.

> But again, agree or disagree with her, I hardly think it's abhorrent or entirely unreasonable.

This critically misstates the claim. I don't have to (and don't, in fact) find her "abhorrent" or think that her reasoning is invalid (although it is unsound). I think she's wrong, and that everybody should be on the same page about that. I don't want dawdling on my ethics committees.

> I think she's wrong

And that's precisely why she should be on your ethics committee. If the only people you allow on your committee are those you think are "right", you are shutting out precisely the people whose views your committee most needs to hear. If you hear their best arguments, and are able to rebut them, then you can have confidence that their views are indeed wrong. Or if you hear their best arguments, and realize you can't rebut them, then you will have learned something. But if you don't hear their arguments at all, how do you know whether you can rebut them or not? It's like having a trial where only the prosecution gets to speak.

> If the only people you allow on your committee are those you think are "right", you are shutting out precisely the people whose views your committee most needs to hear.

This is an annoying failure of language, and I'm mostly to blame for it. I mean that she's wrong in an undercutting sense: her position undermines the moral endeavour, rather that offering a valid alternative moral claim.

An ethics committee should obviously have people who disagree about the ethicality of a topic -- that's the point, after all. But it's an ethics committee, not a metaethics committee: it assumes that all humans have dignity, and doesn't admit of positions that reject that assumption.

Of course, none of this means that we can't debate the metaethical validity of "dignity." In fact, we should! But we shouldn't confuse that debate for ethics, and we especially shouldn't allow metaethical claims to undermine moral argumentation that has already assumed a basic framework.

> I mean that she's wrong in an undercutting sense: her position undermines the moral endeavour, rather that offering a valid alternative moral claim.

This is an ethical claim that you are making, and the board should not prejudge the answer to it. It should hear arguments on both sides.

> it assumes that all humans have dignity, and doesn't admit of positions that reject that assumption.

And your claim that the views you are excluding "reject the assumption" that all humans have dignity is an ethical claim, to which the board should not prejudge the answer.

> none of this means that we can't debate the metaethical validity of "dignity." In fact, we should! But we shouldn't confuse that debate for ethics

Meta-ethical debates are ethical debates. You can't prejudge the framework any more than you can prejudge any other ethical question. That's a key reason why all ethical questions are hard.

> Meta-ethical debates are ethical debates.

I think this is the fundamental disagreement.

Ethical debates are debates over ethical claims. Ethical claims are normative claims, i.e. claims about what ought to be the case. Metaethical debates are debates over metaethical claims. Metaethical claims are positive claims about normative objects, i.e. claims about what the objects of ethics are.

"Should we eat meat?" is an ethical debate with various opposing positions. "Is the Good the same thing as the Right?" a metaethical debate with various opposing positions. But, crucially, individuals with opposing metaethical positions cannot present sensibly opposing ethical positions: they're simply not reasoning about the same Good or Right, even if they're using the same words. Why should our ethical committee entertain such a futile endeavour?

> Metaethical claims are positive claims about normative objects

You can't make positive claims about normative objects, because any such claim ends up being a normative claim based on your personal judgment. You can't objectively test normative objects to establish claims about them the way you can with ordinary objects like rocks.

> Why should our ethical committee entertain such a futile endeavour?

It's not a futile endeavor, because if there are in fact groups of people with fundamentally opposed meta-ethical positions--for example, not agreeing on what the Good or the Right is--then figuring out how such people can coexist in the same society, or even on the same planet--or even whether they can--is an important ethical question that needs to be investigated. And it can't be investigated if only one view of what's Good or Right is represented.

> This critically misstates the claim.

Apologies, I didn't mean to imply that you personally stated exactly that (it was the GP that did). However the context (both this comment chain and the entire thread) is critically important here. The grandparent, many sibling comments, and many news articles all do state as much.

The bit I quoted from you was

> > all sensible moral systems tell us to treat LGBT individuals with basic dignity

which to me seems to imply that you think her views go against "basic dignity", which actually does seem to me to be roughly the same as claiming they are abhorrent.

> I think she's wrong

I agree.

> and that everybody should be on the same page about that. I don't want dawdling on my ethics committees.

Uhh... I vehemently disagree here. I don't want to dictate other's views, and I am very much against anyone who does want to do that. "Dawdling" on your ethics committee would be... people who don't share your views. Which isn't imo a valid reason to exclude them.

What it comes down to for me is that calling for someone's removal or exclusion on the basis of their views is to my mind an attempt to dictate moral values. On the other hand, calling for such on the grounds of poor reasoning ability citing past arguments they've made seems perfectly valid. As previously noted, if it were me she wouldn't be my first choice (or my second, or my third, or ...). But that's quite different from the current public outrage, calls for removal, claims of abhorrent viewpoints, etc, etc.

Check out my response to 'pdonis in this same thread.

I think it comes down to a distinction in kinds of views: contrasting versus undercutting. Ethics committees exist to bring together and flesh out contrasting ethical claims; they can't cope with claims that undercut the ethical endeavour itself. I take the ethical endeavour to fundamentally be about human dignity; someone who can't commit to that can't "do" ethics in any way that a committee will find useful.

I do agree that a committee likely won't be able to make meaningful progress if their views differ on too low a level.

I also suspect we would both agree that an ethics committee whose members don't hold views on human dignity that are reasonably similar to our own won't arrive at results that are useful to us personally (due to that difference in fundamental values).

I also (as previously noted) would agree that people with an established history of forwarding logically faulty arguments aren't going to prove useful and thus have no place on an ethics committee.

Where I disagree is your implication that her views are somehow opposed to our shared societal understanding (as Americans or westerners or whatever) of human dignity. Since I don't know her personally I suppose they might well be, but if so I've yet to see evidence of it.

What I see is an increasingly polarized rhetoric in the media on a number of topics. Unfortunately, that currently seems to extend to characterizing people who don't wholeheartedly agree with trans activists or who raise even reasonable questions about these things as being somehow immoral or unethical people. Such behavior seems to me only to stifle any useful discourse on the topic, drive people farther apart, and to actively push views on both sides towards ever farther extremes.

(As an aside, that last paragraph would seem to fit almost as well in any of the Facebook regulation threads of late. Looking at the history of the early 1900s, I honestly have to wonder if social media is really what's causing all these problems, including the one being discussed here, or if it simply makes visible the extreme polarization that currently exists.)

If you had a committee on space exploration with the goal of solving technical challenges in getting to Mars would you staff it with people who believed in a flat Earth? This whole idea that people with ignorant viewpoints belong on a pedestal because they have opposing views is just silly. We can reasonably say that some views are backwards and counterproductive especially in this case with the Heritage Foundation that deals in deception and the falsification of evidence.

> This is a board concerned with AI Ethics, and so diversity isn't really an important part of the game.

This reads a lot like "diversity doesn't matter all of a sudden, because I disagree with some of the diverse views represented here"

It supposed to emphasise that in matters of ethics, when we have strong arguments for a particular position their isn't a need to invite weak arguments for position on the basis of promoting 'thought diversity'.

For instance on an Animal and Food ethics board it doesn't make sense to accomodate someone who denies the moral relevance of animals, because that is an indefensible view in modern philosophy. Their increasing the "diversity" of the viewpoints on the board would be of negative value, not positive value.

It is the same sort of situation here.

Don't downplay the issue. It's not that she's conservative; I'm sure Google's executive groups are full of relatively conservative people.

No, the problem with her is that she's a transphobe and racist.

Lots of even non-conservative people don't accept trans movement. It's quite a high bar if only trans-ok people are considered sane enough to participate in ethics board.

E.g. I'm 100% against trans participating in sports. It's disgusting when men pretend to be women just to have a record on their name. It's even more disgusting when it's celebrated as diversity or progressive or whatever.

Does that make me just a "relatively conservative" or full-on "transphobe"?

No, you're just thinking aloud (and you earned some downvotes!) A word of advice: don't even respond to someone claiming a black woman is racist/"transphobe" just because she has conservative beliefs. There's no coming back for this person or anyone who thinks that is a sane comment.

Eh, precious internet points are not that important anyway.

I agree it's a waste of my time to respond to comments like that. But on the other hand, letting those comments dominate the public space unchallenged is just legitimising their views. Which leads to vocal minority getting even bigger and louder. At the end of the day, it's the most vocal people who set the playrules. And I'm not a fan of ever-more-progressive rules, CoCs and legislations.

To break this down a bit instead of only downvoting:

> I'm 100% against trans participating in sports

There's a nuanced argument to be made here.

> It's disgusting when men pretend to be women just to have a record on their name.

This is not that nuanced argument. I can assure you no one that is trans "pretends" to be a woman for sports records. That comment (as well as the word choice of "disgusting") shows a severe lack of understanding of trans people.

> It's even more disgusting when it's celebrated as diversity or progressive or whatever.

This shows a particular bias against "progressive/diversity" ideas and colors the comments before them with an even worse light that highlights the lack of understanding.

> Does that make me just a "relatively conservative" or full-on "transphobe"?

Just like anything, there are gradients and being transphobic now doesn't mean you have to be in the future.

> This is not that nuanced argument. I can assure you no one that is trans "pretends" to be a woman for sports records. That comment (as well as the word choice of "disgusting") shows a severe lack of understanding of trans people.

I understand biology that born-male will be stronger in many sports than born-female even after a lot of hormone therapy (or maybe vice-versa in some sports). Born-female taking male hormones will have advantage over regular female as well in many cases.

You got gender disphoria and need a treatment for it? Sure. But there're side effects. Just like for many treatments.

> This shows a particular bias against "progressive/diversity" ideas and colors the comments before them with an even worse light that highlights the lack of understanding.

I'm considering ideas on their own merit, not how they're labeled. And it's disgusting that progressive/diversity label was ruined buy affairs like that. And yes, I definitely have bias against ideas that seem to have a label they're not worth of.

> Just like anything, there are gradients and being transphobic now doesn't mean you have to be in the future.

I hope definition of "transphobic" will change and I won't be called one in the future.

First, nothing you responded to clears up anything about your negative assumption that transgender people change for sports titles. That will always be transphobic and doesn't look at all into what the life of a trans person today or in the past has looked like.

But the body and hormone levels absolutely do affect physical sports, you're right. If you want to dig into hormones, what about intersex people? What about people classified as women with significantly higher testosterone levels? Despite the classification most hospitals do, a surprising amount of births show non-traditional genitalia, and if you go beyond the external looks then the waters only get murkier. How many athletes are actually not traditionally male or female but were simply never classified as such medically due to a lack of awareness and education? Do you then want to have all sports competitions separated based on hormone levels instead of sex/gender?

> I'm considering ideas on their own merit, not how they're labeled. And it's disgusting that progressive/diversity label was ruined by affairs like that. And yes, I definitely have bias against ideas that seem to have a label they're not worth of.

But you give no argument for the unworthiness of it and instead start from the assumption. Not only that, but you paint with a very broad brush and are not digging into any of the nuance. That doesn't scream openness and combined with other things you said again comes off as ignorance or lack of education on the subject.

> I hope definition of "transphobic" will change and I won't be called one in the future.

That definition will only go the other way as more people become educated on trans people. What defines transphobia is ignorance, not gusts of cultural wind. What would make your actions change will have to be you, not the classification of them.

As an aside generally, being transphobic or racist or sexist should not define you - it's a chance to learn and understand. It's not an identity, despite how it is assigned like one to many public figures these days. What's much more important than never saying or doing something sexist/racist/transphobic/etc is being open to changing and understanding to not do it in the future. Really it's just listening and understanding other people's experiences.

Just be clear I don't share any view points with the person you're debating but the Olympics does(or did) have a testosterone limit for certain female sports.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2018/04/26/ne...

> First, nothing you responded to clears up anything about your negative assumption that transgender people change for sports titles

I don't care if they changed gender for the sake of winning sports titles or not. I'm against them competing in sports anyway.

> If you want to dig into hormones, what about intersex people? What about people classified as women with significantly higher testosterone levels?

That's definitely could an issue (see last paragraph). But IMO it's different that this is accidental from the individual's perspective. They themselves may be not aware of this. Sort of like getting lucky with good genes or rare mutation. Meanwhile for a transgender is purely a rational choice to transition. You may argue it's not fully rational since treatment is needed. But ultimately people do choose treatments and accept consequences for all sorts of illnesses.

> But you give no argument for the unworthiness of it and instead start from the assumption. Not only that, but you paint with a very broad brush and are not digging into any of the nuance.

Unfortunately interwebs comments are not well suited for a nuanced discussion. The person I originally replied to didn't go into nuance, neither did I. It'd be great if internet commentary moved towards more nuanced and longer discussions. But unfortunately old good forums with mile-long pagination are getting more and more scarce :( Especially with diverse audience.

> What defines transphobia is ignorance, not gusts of cultural wind. What would make your actions change will have to be you, not the classification of them.

I did research the topic and made my mind. IMO people who just jump on the ever-more-progressive bandwagon are much more ignorant. Ignorance shall be judge on refusing to look into the issue, not on coming to reasonable-yet-subjectively-wrong conclusions.

> That definition will only go the other way as more people become educated on trans people.

Personally I went the other way after reading more into it.

> What's much more important than ever saying or doing something sexist/racist/transphobic/etc is being open to changing and understanding to not do it in the future.

Yes. But that ability to change must be open both ways. IMO today's definitions went way too far and are too close to doing full horseshoe. Understanding is not just pushing the boundaries of what is progressive to no end.

> Do you then want to have all sports competitions separated based on hormone levels instead of sex/gender?

I'd support protection for the lesser (?) gender (women in endurance and power sports, men maybe in gymnastics?). Just have open group and the protected one for the lesser gender. In the long run, we'll probably need one more group for genetically-modified individuals.

They themselves may be not aware of this. Sort of like getting lucky with good genes or rare mutation. Meanwhile for a transgender is purely a rational choice

This gets me curious. In your definition, a person with strongly deviating hormonal levels isn't transgender until they are aware of their situation?

AFAIK modern transgender definition don't include hermaphrodites who were fixed in hospital right after birth.

Someone having issues with their hormones doesn't become transgender either.

So I'd say it's safe to say that the person has to have consciously chosen to transition to be considered a transgender. Also, people who didn't transition (yet) on hormonal level but did minor plastic surgeries and wear clothes accordingly are considered transgenders too.

If someone has XXY chromosomes and consider himself one gender their whole life, do they "trans" between something?

They may not view their own activity as "pretending" to be women, but the position of people like Kay Cole James (and many others, on both the left and right) is that they are simply not women. Whether or not they believe it about themselves is irrelevant.

>> It's disgusting when men pretend to be women just to have a record on their name

When has that happened?

Google for trans ex-men competing as women and you'll get quite a few hits. Sure, nobody says that they transition just to win something. But having participated in amateur-ish sports, boy if some people don't take it too far to win even insignificant prizes using very dirty shortcuts. And some of those transitions do look fishy AF to say the least.

5sec googling: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/21/transgender...

From your original comment I understood that your concern was with men pretending to be women to win in sports. Are you now saying that there is a problem with trans women competing in sports?

There is a difference between someone transitioning from one gender to the other and someone pretending to be a woman, for whatever reason.

The "5-second googling" example you give is a of a transgendered woman who is also an athlete. I don't see how this fits in with "men who pretend to be women to win".

What they're trying to get at is that a MtF trans person is still biologically male, no matter what, therefore has an unfair advantage and should not be considered to be on the same level as biological women.

The simple solution I think is that sports should be sex based, not gender based.

I've been following Caster Semenya's case for a while. What you suggest is not a simple solution at all, I'm afraid. The issue of gender is much simpler- one just asks the person. The issue of sex seems to have become way too complicated in recent years.

Hey, we could use the same for doping control! Just ask the person if they used any illegal performance enhancing drugs :)

What would stop me from lying that I am a woman (I could even put on some makeup) to compete as a women? In some sports difference between men and women is so big that average male athlete could easily compete with top-of-the-line females. There's more than enough incentive for some douchebag to go the dirty way to get some glory.

>> Hey, we could use the same for doping control! Just ask the person if they used any illegal performance enhancing drugs :)

Gender is a subjective experience of a person. Doping is not. I don't find your comment funny.

>> What would stop me from lying that I am a woman (I could even put on some makeup) to compete as a women?

It wouldn't be enough to just "put on some makeup". The latest recommendation from the IOC for male-to-female transgendered athletes is that they must have testosterone levels in the female range for a year before they can be allowed to compete.

I struggle to believe that a male athlete would accept taking hormones or being castrated to reduce their testosterone so they can "pretend to be a woman" in order to compete. Not to mention, that would significantly reduce one's athletic prowess.

Generally, what you suggest is such a remote possibility as to be completely absurd.

> Gender is a subjective experience of a person. Doping is not. I don't find your comment funny.

Yet performance related to hormones is not a "subjective experience". Nor body composition. E.g. in cycling females are at big disadvantage because their hips are wider, making them less aerodynamic.

> I struggle to believe that a male athlete would accept taking hormones or being castrated to reduce their testosterone so they can "pretend to be a woman" in order to compete.

I see you haven't been in sports scene much. I saw even amateurs in local weekend-warrior league taking doping (the cheap one, with very clear risks later in life) just to win some meaningless local race. People fucking love even tiny slice of glory.

> Not to mention, that would significantly reduce one's athletic prowess.

Those people don't care about absolute prowess. They care about podium. For example, it's not uncommon for amateurs to cheat to qualify for lower-tier group just to singlehandedly win against weaker opponents.

Source: spent many years in local amateurs and semi-pros cycling scene.

The suggestion that a man may pretend to be a woman to gain a competitive edge in sports remains arrant nonsense without any hope of redemption, no matter how you try to dress it.

What I don't understand is what all this has to do with transgendered athletes.

> transphobe and racist

These attributes are neither objective not illegal.

Google are hypocrites; they want diversity, but not diversity of thought.

Not everything immoral has to be illegal. Good people draw line at former, not later.

And morality is very subjective, thin line.

E.g. is it moral for male-to-female trans to compete in women sports events?

Instead of focusing on that, how about focusing on issues that affect the lives of most trans people, not a subset so small to be statistically insignificant by any measure, not to mention the near nonexistant impact that has on anyone else?

Why play on the thin lines instead of focusing on the issues that have the largest and broadest effects on people?

>not a subset so small to be statistically insignificant by any measure

do you think the number of trans people compared to the world population isn't "a subset so small to be statistically insignificant by any measure"?

Yes, I think it isn't. Here[0] is a meta-study that illustrates the prevalence of transgenderism across continents and across time. It seems that as the concept of transgenderism becomes normalized, its prevalence increases. This is the same effect we have seen with homosexuality, so it's not terribly surprising.

The short summary: as a lower bound, probably more than 1 in 10k people (0.01%) would identify as transgender. Including the DSM definition of gender dysphoria as an indicator, that figure rises to 1% or possibly even higher.

Now, my question to you: how small should a subset be to be statistically insignificant? For popular reference (and I apologize for using this example again), keep in mind that the global prevalence of Judaism is 0.2%.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20141205022609/http://web.hku.hk...

.. and Judaism is not interesting at all for majority of people. Only where Jews have or had major presence it's an interesting topic. Go ask Chinese or Indians or Japanese what they think about Jews.

No, I think those competing in sports and the resulting effects on the lives of others is not significant to merit a large debate on the issue. A vast majority of transgender people will not participate in high competition level sports.

> vast majority of transgender people will not participate in high competition level sports

I agree. However those that do will affect (negatively) all the non-transgender women they are competing (and winning) against. And that does have "the largest and broadest effects on people" just not only transgender people.

So how big is that compared to the life threatening issues facing trans people daily, and which do you focus your time on? To me, when people choose to spend time on this argument, it's indicative of priorities and how they value the lives of others, and whose lives. And yes, in an ideal world it's both. That's not the reality we have though.

I'd also generally challenge that one competitor in a field has that large of an effect on people's lives. Yeah, that first to second stings slightly. How about that 15th to 16th? And how many sports really have this problem right now? Let's again focus on this relative to its effects.

It certainly does have a broad effect on people. It will certainly hurt girls who dream of succeeding in sports. Because, well, if you weren't born a man, you're in for a rough ride. That definitely touches much more people than few genuine transgenders who just want to compete on fair playing field.

Same issue how we treat transgenders touches a lot of other fields. E.g. who can perform body search? Can ex-male-now-female do body search on a female? I could easily see many females not so happy about it.

Sport is a huge issue that affects a large number of people. You cannot just brush it aside like that.

The same reasoning is going to apply to e.g. restroom usage as well.

Indeed. It seems restroom discussion is a really important topic for american conservative people. But strangelly not so much locker room talks...

Given that there is a constant push to control Google by activists on the far-left side of the political spectrum, I don't know how Google can be trusted with the control over information that it has today. Their often purposely-visible love for diversity is truly skin-deep, and I think Google being split up is the only way to reduce the risk that a small group of activists filter the Internet for the whole world per their own worldviews alone.

Terms like "transphobe" and "racist" get thrown around so liberally that I've stopped caring if someone gets labelled that.

I've never heard of Kay Coles James before but going from what is in the article, she is expressing a concern that legally recognising the gender of trans women (but not trans men?) risks disenfranchising non-trans women further.

This is an existing concern of many, that must be discussed. I disagree strongly that recognition of trans women takes away something from other womens' rights (if nothing else because there are so few trans women), but the opinion seems to be widespread enough that it must be confronted, and by that I don't mean with knee-jerk reactions and twitter flamewars. Like, really debated. So that it can be put to rest and we can all move on to more productive debates.

But, calling someone who expresses that view a transphobe and a racist is not debating them.

Robert Oppenheimer Vs Edward Teller is a good example of what happens when two brilliant characters don't agree. Everyone in between those two ends of the spectrum did not matter to final outcomes.

When it comes down to which direction a gigagantic ship has to head One side has to win.

So pick a side guys. Know which side you are on. Nothing is going to be smooth about what lies ahead.

> Robert Oppenheimer Vs Edward Teller is a good example of what happens when two brilliant characters don't agree.

Teller publically accused Oppenheimer of being a traitor and had his security clearance pulled and then blacklisted as a communist because he didn’t see the point in building Teller’s Hydrogen bomb whose sole purpose is kill as many civilians as possible. In the end, the bomb was built, and Oppenheimer’s career was over.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller#Oppenheimer_co...

Teller was a psychopath, pure and simple. He was also pretty smart which made him even more dangerous, I reguard him as one of the few humans whose decisions and actions could have wiped us all out as a species.

Under what definition of smart a smart human works to create the means to end the species?

An interesting question which I find that would take me too long to answer, the shortest answer that I can come up is that I’m writing this comment from a device called a smart-phone whose battery is not replaceable, meaning that in maximum two years or so it will be in a dumpster together with other thousands, even hundreds of thousands of similar smart-phones, with all the nice rare and toxical metals of which they are composed slowly making their way into the ground and into our water-sources. What I mean to say is that we ourselves as a species can be seen as being pretty smart from a certain point of view (we went to the Moon, we designed and currently make electronic devices that can fit in our pockets and with each we can have conversations with total strangers from half a world away) but at the same time we do our best in order to destroy the livable habitat from the unique planet we’ve managed to populate so far. As such, people like Teller are the perfect representatives of this side of ours as a species: smart but self-destructive.

If we allow the big five to write the regulations and set the standards that will govern the technology for decades to come we're going to have major regrets.

We should all be so lucky that any company or group of companies hold themselves to a HIGHER standard than the law enforces.

But yes, if the companies are setting the legal bar, we should be vigilant that they're not exploiting our ignorance.

I feel as though any sort of ethics board intended to do some kind of self-policing within an industry is doomed to fail. Have we seen any evidence in the past decade that the concerns of a company's investors won't eventually supersede all other considerations? It would be nice if the government had teeth nowadays and if the opinions of academics were taken at all seriously. Then there would be a US Federal AI Ethics Board. And we might have a US Federal Climate Action Board too. Alas, we're content to leave the ethical considerations to those who have every incentive to ignore them.

"AI Ethics Board" but not one member of the board is an AI...

When AI gains sentience, I'm embarrassed to think how they'll reflect on how we've treated them.

James is also the first African-American to be head of the Heritage Foundation, she is a member of the NASA Advisory Council and she is the president and founder of the Gloucester Institute, a leadership training center for young African Americans.

Apparently all this is ignorable by the angry mob.

This madness must stop. True diversity means listening to qualified and civil voices from all over the political spectrum. Google must stand up.

> True diversity means listening to qualified and civil voices...

Referring to the leadership of Heritage as "civil" is a stretch from the point of view of individuals in categories repeatedly demeaned and dehumanized by the members of the organization acting in their official capacities.

Are you saying that because she's African-American she's automatically qualified for an ethics council? Ethics isn't about who you are, it's about whose lives you value.

No, of course that's not what I'm saying.

I'm saying she is an intelligent, very well-accomplished member of the minority community. The kind of person you need on an ethics council.

Is there anything she's done (personally, directly) that you find upsetting? Or is just being politically conservative enough to disqualify her in your opinion?

There is nothing fundamentally different between AI and “traditional algorithms” when it comes to ethical considerations. Sure, the current crop of AI systems perform unbelievably well on tasks that “traditional algorithms” suck at, but it is a change in degree, not in kind.

In the overwhelming majority of pieces reflecting on AI ethics, you can replace “AI” with “algorithms”, “big data”, “computers”, “technology”, etc and not get a significant change in meaning.

Many people have had their livelihood, rights, image, etc attacked in some way by technologically mediated processes that were deployed by organizations that didn’t think things through, or prioritized eg profits over other concerns, or had anti-humanist agendas. This phenomenon is certainly accelerated by the ever increasing ubiquity of computing systems, but it certainly predates them.

AI does not bring anything radically different to the table in that regard, and if Google does not seem to care much about the ethical implications of their technology in general (see for instance the YouTube/children fiasco), why would they care about AI ethics specifically?

I think you're wrong. The tooling around training ML is becoming progressively more accessible, so much so that within ten years you won't even need a programmer to train an AI for many tasks. Who knows where that will be in 20 years.

But what you're saying, which seems to be that technology is getting more accessible over time, does not appear to me to be fundamentally different for other technological means, be it algorithms, ai or digitalization in general.

It is different. Algorithms require understanding what the algorithm does, how it operates. Lay people can't do this without significant training.

AI/ML in principle simply requires example mappings of inputs and outputs. Lay people can do this.

If AI is going to learn from the information that exists in reality.. a biased world.. it will inherit those biases. Artificially removing these biases from an AI would essentially be altering it's understanding of objective reality.. and that doesn't sound great either.

Yeah when you have ethics which potentially on collision course with profits, you lose to the $$$

Google is a monument to hypocrisy.

Look at the way they said they would "punish" "non-mobile-friendly" sites... and then they purposefully DISABLE ZOOMING on their own mobile sites.

Jagoffs.

Mature, balanced and on topic opinion.

The sole purpose of that board was PR. Now that they realized it of course they will quit.

> and met four times over the course of 2019 to consider concerns about Google’s AI program.....

and then

> A role on Google’s AI board is an unpaid, toothless position that cannot possibly, in four meetings over the course of a year, ...

Maybe the author does not know that 2019 is barely 3 months in? There is no way that the phrase "over the course of a year" can apply to 2019.

It is bullshit like this that makes me tune out of such articles. It's just dripping with uninformed bias.

If you put the first quote in context, it would be clear that they were consistent.

> The board, founded to guide “responsible development of AI” at Google, would have had eight members and met four times over the course of 2019 to consider concerns about Google’s AI program.

It's saying that it would have met four times over the year, not that it already has.

This is a board of stakeholders not ethics.

Why do the opinions of these Google employees matter on an issue like this? Employees don't get to be involved in unrelated areas/decisions/functions of the company that are not directly related to their specific role. The company is also not obligated to explain themselves to those employees. Does everyone need to be involved in every last facet of the company in some strange 90,000 person design-by-committee process? Obviously not, and so Google needs to stop tolerating the constant stream of leaks and internal activism.

If these employees don't want to work there, let them quit or fire them. If they are disrupting the workplace by constantly fomenting outrage on the Internet, fire them. If they are hurting the company's brand and working against the interests of the company (or shareholders) by engaging in self-serving political activism, fire them. If they disrespect and alienate most of their customer base by only advocating for their own worldview, fire them. This should be uncontroversial - after all, many others will line up for those jobs and Google will be just fine.

These leakers/activists/organizers need to realize how this looks. They are soliciting external signatures on this petition, and frankly those external signatures don't matter - it appears any random person can sign it (for example I see rank-and-file employees at various companies and individual university students). They should further realize that the opinions of Google employees alone do not matter. Those of their global customer base, however, do matter. And even so, only 2000 of 98000 employees have signed this letter anyways.

I hope Google leadership shows some spine and recognizes that they do not have to fear a small number of employees or manufactured outrage on Twitter. In all likelihood, at least half of Google's customer base does not agree with the US far-left progressive view on trans issues. Even here in America, only 8% are progressives after all (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...). And like this article notes, the two-thirds of America that do not belong to either political extreme are simply exhausted. And I, as a customer of Google, am also exhausted by the constant stream of political controversy caused by a small subset of their employees.

So I ask again, why should this company care at all what their skewed internal demographic has to say? If Google is actually truly exposed to some kind of risk due to attrition, and actually fears that more than a few lone activists will quit, then that is a serious failure of leadership. It is the job of the CEO to reduce exposure to that risk - whether by hiring a more ideologically-diverse staff or by managing with a heavier hand to put and end to this constant activism.

Even if the employees were fired, they would continue trying to attract the replacements to the cause. I don't think it would work the way you suggest. The cycle won't stop just because the folks who start it left.

I don't have a perfect opinion of Google, but I for one do not mind that people care about things and not every corporation is a soulless blood sucking monster that doesn't care about anything except the bottom line. I think this attitude, while not invalid, reflects a deep-seated disease in society.

I don't think G's executive leadership paying attention to this kind of complaint is as idealistic/optional as you lay it out to be.

Google software engineers have many choices as for where to work. Google distinguishes itself by (among other things) promoting an open culture of feedback and egalitarian decision making. I actually think this is a pretty good perk - feeling like your voice is heard is empowering and motivating.

If Google stops listening to it's employees, even a vocal minority of them, they risk a loss of that culture. Since there are many other major tech companies in the valley that have a similarly open culture, the risk of brain drain is real.

Obviously this has a limit. If the engineers demand Google stop serving Ads, I think they'd be swiftly ignored. But for other less crucial things it's a much harder question. It even seems like employee sway is persuasive even for significant projects (China expansion, DoD contract), so I'd reckon that Google leadership takes the threat of attrition pretty seriously.

There are many other people who are saying the same thing about gender identity. It's strange that Vox describes this as "a particular cause for concern". It's not about "dehumanizing" trans people, it's about self-identification not being a valid basis for a law. If the Equality Act passes as written then the addition of gender identity would effectively remove sex as a protected characteristic.

It doesn't look like this board was a very good idea if the members were not okay with the first sign of disagreement. Will Google's actual AI projects even listen to this group at this point? It reminds me of AMP claiming to have a community driving the specification when in reality Google is just going to do whatever they want.

Everybody is making this out to be about the membership...it seems far simpler than that. It seems poorly thought out from the start. Not in membership but in mandate.

The (minimal) description that Goog provides seems to put this group somewhere between an institutional review board (IRB) and a strategic advisory board.

What is their role? is it make to policy, provide guidance, provide rulings on ethical reasonableness What is their authority? can they make suggestions, shut down programs, implement restrictions What are their boundaries/goals? Who's authority do they act with?

Every element of what goog provided on this is incredibly vague. I am absolutely willing to bet that there were mixed messages occurred to the mix of people coming from academia (where IRBs are a thing) and industry (where IRBs are not a thing).

Also, this paragraph from the vox article:

"Next, the ethics panel — as has been the case with ethics panels at other top tech companies — does not have the power to do anything. Google says “we hope this effort will inform both our own work and the broader technology sector,” but it’s very unclear who, if anyone, at Google will rely on these recommendations and which decisions the board will get to make recommendations about."

Really bothers me. It summarizes a statement from google incorrectly. Google doesn't say they have no power - it simply doesn't say. That difference is subtle but important to the entire discussion here...and google hurt itself by writing an incredibly vague statement from start to finish.

What these companies need is an independent IRB - but that will never happen, and the fact that it won't tells you everything you need to know about their commitment to ethical development of AI. What they are doing now is conflating visioning, strategy, and tactics as if for AI they suddenly become the same

But to end by diving into the politicized portion of this...everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but your opinion is not entitled to place or space. That especially includes opinions that differ over the basic humanity of a certain group of people. We've done that many times over our species history - it's time to stop. That opinion is not valid.

More directly, having contrary viewpoints is not an inherent value - having useful disagreements is. Putting a flat earther on the NASA science board is likely to create 'vehement disagreement' but it does not contribute to 'real and meaningful progress' (with apologies to naasking who I am quoting as an example rather than a nexplicit critque). The effort to encompass all viewpoints is inherently problematic in the formation of the AI review boards - because it undermines the fundamental concept of ironclad rules that have undergirded research ethics since failures like Miligan, Nazi experimentation, the Tuskegee experiment, and others.

I've contracted for four different teams at Google and have only been underwhelmed by their people. Especially those who weren't engineers. This is not a surprise to me by any means.

Why?

Probably because it's rapidly becoming the quintessentially evil corporation, and there's a correlation between not having a problem with that and being a ding-bat who belongs in a cult.

edit: I mean it. I'm a programmer and I would not work at Google. It would not matter what their offer was. In my eyes, people who work at Google are hurting their prestige as opposed to helping it.

I don't think there are any evil companies. people are people, and they are pretty much the same everywhere. I think big tech's mistake was trying to pretend they were somehow better and is now getting called out on it.

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