Google cancels AI ethics board in response to outcry
vox.com
vox.com
The previous discussion on the story is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567290.
I am of the left myself but on a meta-level what we're doing is essentially making it impossible to ever find middle ground on issues if we're unable to talk to folks who we don't agree with on 100% of things.
This is a dangerous trend for all of us because it makes it impossible find common ground in an open democracy even if half the country in our eyes have essentially deplorable views, we need to recognize that they feel the same about us and then it's simply not constructive to be unable to find common ground.
With the widening political divide, we find ourselves in this weird situation where any decision makers are swarmed with moral outrage attacks unless they're the bastions of politically correct ideology. An increasing number of topics are taboo because merely opening up a discussion around them summons the moral outrage army. Moral outrage has become most effective social manipulation technique, and morality has long ago stopped playing into the equation.
The entire point of ethics discussions is to capture the views of the population in a proportionate manner and try to come to a set of mutually positive outcomes. Bonus points for not stomping on minority views. Instead even on HN we have people claiming that their views are the Correct views and the opposition should not even be given a voice.
No matter how disagreeable you may find some particular viewpoint, if it happens to be held by a non negligible number of people and you marginalise them, it will eventually result in tremendous blowback.
I don't know how we got here, it's a bit scary.
Yes, but we must recognise the difference between etiquette and ethics. Ethics are the things you must do, but courtesy is a matter of etiquette, behaviour that is optional but culturally polite.
PC culture these days raises etiquette to the level of ethics, and that's simply wrong.
While there’s no doubt that one can find cases to which this applies, I’d think that applying that broadly to the vast majority of people who are arguing in good faith would stifle debate.
Given what has been seen regarding both 4chan psychological operations and Russian intelligence operations on major message boards, I can see the vantage point where it's fair to not treat good faith as assumable.
What about in private, among a group of friends? Should the degree of correctness be uniform or proportional to the size of the audience?
It seems to me that the purpose of the ethics board is to allow a company to be left alone to get on with its private ethically-laden research. It needs to be seen to be ethically responsible and nowadays that requires ultra-political correctness because more people than ever are watching.
But this is incompatible with having actual ethics discussions which require diversity of opinion.
So there's a dilemma: trying to be ethical versus trying to be seen to be ethical.
Surely you can see how that generalises to 'if <decision maker> doesn't hold <my view> then they're not fit to make decisions' and that you're basically demonstrating exactly what's being discussed?
Can we then sum up your stance in two statements:
1: not all ethics viewpoints are equal, and yours are superior
2: in this instance, you believe that the above opposed viewpoint does not deserve any representation at an ethics board, even if it is represents a significant population of the US and the world?
Is that correct? This is your stance?
But for what it's worth, in the specific question of trans individuals, my personal view point is that majorities have been wrong before, and there's no reason to believe they wouldn't be wrong again. This is one of those times. Trans exclusionism doesn't pass the "Do not ban that which is not harmful to others" sniff test for freedom-oriented society.
But again, my personal viewpoint doesn't rule the Google corporation's decisions. However, we shouldn't be surprised when a company that has positioned itself to be clearly trans-inclusive doesn't find somebody who denies the dignity of trans people acceptable on their ethics board.
What's the point of a discussion if the only people that are allowed to participate all agree on everything?
Being barred from speaking is entirely different from being denied a seat at someone's table. Or are we also upset that The Heritage Foundation doesn't have Miss Major Griffin-Gracy on their experts panel?
Do we really need to play facts <-> opinion?
In a discussion about ethics you include as many viewpoints possible or it become dishonest immediately.
You are not a priest or something like that. It has taken too long to accept premised authority.
I do consider myself morally and intellectually superior but I do fight for you to have the same rights as me and everyone else despite that and I welcome your dissent.
For example, a very common topic in practically all discussion around trans right in the US is the issue around toilets. An obvious solution to it is unisex toilets, but the right never accepted it and the left abandoned it so it is now a centrism political view. When it comes to both the left and the right, it seems to exist a fear that unisex bathroom are more likely to cause crime, through there is no data to actually support it. Thus rather than settle the issue, they fight over it.
If we could convince both side, maybe by using data from countries which overwhelming use unisex bathrooms, we could settle those fears.
I call this the "I can't understand why X behaves like this, so the reason must be..." In other words, from complete uncertainty arises certainty.
The reason could be simpler. It could be that she doesn't believe she has to justify every aspect of her existence for a role where it likely doesn't matter. I sure as hell wouldn't discuss my views on classes of people or climate change for a position that requires a stretch of the imagination to be tied to these topics.
"Why Has 'Transgender' Become a Trigger Word For YouTube?" [https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-has-transgender-become-a-t...]
Having someone on the board that is starting from a premise of "That outcome is fine" runs counter to Google's existing stance on the topic.
Looking at your comments here, it's starting to look like you have a singular agenda will just support whatever larger movement best aligns to it without considering the moral or fairness implications. Nothing wrong with that I guess, but that is the antithesis of inclusiveness or ethics.
I have transgender, transsexual, and transvestite friends who I care deeply about. That's absolutely true. I want the world to be more welcoming to them, because I see the disapproval society heaps upon them as sitting at one of those particular intersections of unfair and unnecessary. If you have groups you also care deeply about, feel free to share.
This sounds like you think we need to serialize helping marginalized groups. Was that the intent?
I'm totally okay with that particular poster continuing to focus on the trans community because of their own personal agenda, but pretending that they represent inclusion or fairness is an outright lie at that point.
Why should 'helping other minorities' be exclusionary. Who is this 'other'? Trans people are NOT actively sought by employers - I've personally witness the exact opposite.
Maybe the issue is that people - including those who use religion as a form of control - have forgotten the Golden Rule.
While you might think "Trans rights are worth the sacrifice" the general trend in tech is that there is a "right answer" to same-sex marriage (Brendan Eich), biological differences between gender (James Damore), politics (all the flake Peter Thiel got for supporting Trump) and now trans rights. This trend is worrying because it shuts down discussion.
It is also alienating because if you disagree with one of the "right answers" you can get fired for it, which seems kind of counter to the narrative of diversity and inclusion. This is why you sometimes hear people voice the criticism of "diversity in everything but thought"
(Damore's also a bad example for supporting the hypothesis that holding wrong opinions bans you from discourse, because it appears he's been pretty vocal about his opinions since Google let him go).
If a person were concerned about being fired for expressing a politically-charged viewpoint, I'd personally counsel them to consider whether that viewpoint is worth the price of the job, and if it isn't? Be silent. Silence is free. Making the decision that one's viewpoint is more important than the job is always a decision one is free to make.
I don't know why this thought is so scary to some people. I hypothesize that they're too accustom to operating in a pseudonymous consequence-free world where you can say whatever you want without social censure or personal ramifications, but that's not how most of the world works, and the advent of the Internet didn't change that fact.
>If a person were concerned about being fired for expressing a politically-charged viewpoint, I'd personally counsel them to consider whether that viewpoint is worth the price of the job, and if it isn't? Be silent. Silence is free. Making the decision that one's viewpoint is more important than the job is always a decision one is free to make.
While this is a valid stance to have, I don't think the left as a whole follows this standard consistently. When there is talk of diversity and inclusion, its normally shown as a higher ideal that the left is ascribing to. So, if it really is I higher ideal, we can change the subject of your idea and see if it still works.
Would you support me giving the below advice to a gay coworker?
f a person were concerned about being fired for expressing a LGBT viewpoint, I'd personally counsel them to consider whether that viewpoint is worth the price of the job, and if it isn't? Be silent. Silence is free. Making the decision that one's ability to be out of the closet is more important than the job is always a decision one is free to make.
What people have a problem with is that you can have people fired for holding political viewpoints in the first place. You seem to be saying that's ok to do.
(The civil service is generally a noteworthy and fascinating exception to this rule, as it was learned early in America's history that there was little value gained in gutting the bureaucracy every time executive leadership changed hands. So, for example, the President's cabinet and some top positions are appointed and tend to rotate out upon change of Presidency, but most hired positions in the federal bureaucracy are protected from politically-motivated hiring or firing. But that protection is not extended to the private sector, with some state-specific exceptions. California is a notable exception to the rule, and whether Damore was fired for being conservative has come up. The possibility didn't sway the NLRB's ruling, apparently.
Whether one political point of view or another could make someone likelier to take actions that are in violation of federal employment law is left as an exercise for the reader ;) ).
For example, a person is perfectly free to believe that all unbelievers are less worth as people, but they have no right to believe that people of a specific race are less worth.
There is really no distinction between a religious opinion or a political opinion, but under US law one is protected and the other is not. In Swedish law they are often regarded as identical, which mean that political views do hold some protection against discrimination.
The intersection between freedom of religion and the laws of society is one of the hardest interfaces for American law to adjudicate, and yet it does.
We have an entire world of academia to debate issues that the private sector can't touch.
It's a good thing that that's not what he said though. Good job on misrepresenting his view point. I find this misrepresentation particularly funny, because he was trying to help, because clearly the way things have been done so far haven't worked. He tried to explain why and that we need a different approach.
>(Damore's also a bad example for supporting the hypothesis that holding wrong opinions bans you from discourse, because it appears he's been pretty vocal about his opinions since Google let him go).
Because most people can simply lose their jobs as though it's nothing? This would effectively create censorship for the vast majority of the population, because they are unable to risk losing their job.
>If a person were concerned about being fired for expressing a politically-charged viewpoint, I'd personally counsel them to consider whether that viewpoint is worth the price of the job, and if it isn't? Be silent. Silence is free.
You are literally advocating for censorship here. Imagine if people had held this opinion about homosexuality or transgender in the past? They were not accepted. Imagine if simply advocating or agreeing that people should be allowed to be homosexual would get you fired. I don't think that would've been good for society.
>I don't know why this thought is so scary to some people.
It's scary to people because we understand that we don't have all the answers. There are things we are wrong about and to challenge those ideas we need people to be open to speak their mind. The second reason is that a world built on censorship is a world of fear and fear breeds mistrust.
Absolutism in either direction is unacceptable; the particulars are debatable.
(... also: are you really equating the notion "homosexuals or transgendered people don't have fundamental differences that make them worse employees" with "women do have fundamental differences that make them worse employees?" I'm calling foul on your false equivalence.)
As determined by who? You?
Being transphobic (or racist or vegetarian or religious or egalitarian or...) is something that people are allowed to be, no matter how much someone else dislikes that.
I think we got here because of telecommunications and the internet. The world is joining up and a nascent collective mind is emerging. Like the individual mind it has a set of ideas about who it is and what it should be doing, a.k.a. an 'ego'. Many potential thoughts in a normal mind are continually being censored/suppressed because they do not conform to those fixed ideas. Something similar is happening on a larger scale.
However just as there is hope for the individual in the form of spiritual awakening there's hope for the world too. The form it would take is unknowable for now. If it resembled a religious revival then I guess it would have to be a new and rather different kind of religion. Where might militant atheists and religious fundamentalists find common ground? Presumably within the new fields of consciousness and AGI research. Though I doubt they'll like it much, at least to begin with...
My own theory is it's due to the decline of religion. I say that as a non religious person who has lately started wondering if I'm so right to be that way (I never used to question the righteousness of scientific atheism).
Religion can be defined as a moral framework. We have agency and we must act. Religion helps answer the question "how must I act" in a thorough and formalised way: it tells us what right and wrong is, and it does so from a position of pseudo-authority (God says it, so it must be moral).
The common thread between all these conservatives-get-censored stories we're seeing is that leadership, whether it be corporate political or academic, is staggeringly weak in the face of moral outrage. Even when that outrage is coming from people who are barely adults, people far more senior and more experienced than them fold immediately - even if they actually disagree.
I think this is because without any kind of rigorous moral framework, people don't have any footing on which to push back. Someone pops up and says "that person is the devil because they don't respect women" or whatever, and maybe that's a total pastiche of their position but it's a position anchored in the moral framework of identity politics/femininism. Without any equivalent grounding in an alternative moral framework, the leadership doesn't know how to respond, they are desperate to see themselves as a "good person" and so they're left scrambling to obey the demands of the assembled mob. If they already felt like they were good people, they'd be much more capable of resisting such attacks.
Organised religion crops up in every human society throughout history except this one - I believe we're really the first to be widely atheist. But it seems all we've done is replace one set of gods with another: now instead of worshipping invisible deities of peace, love, war, etc, we worship at the deities of minority intersections ... and crusade against heretics who deny the sanctity of that worship.
Those working tirelessly to shut down contrary thoughts and opinions and playing semantics games are doing so with a religious fervor and to redefine social norms to their own worldview.
I don’t think someone following the tenets of Buddhism would worship anything. Correct if me I’m wrong.
Most religions condone murder in the name of their "religion", this is not how people should act.
Most religions teach their "morals" with parables that can be interpreted in different ways, not what I would call formalised or thorough.
The fact that christianity is so divided while claiming to believe the same thing should be all the proof you need of this, and its not just christianity.
Parables: yes, that's certainly true. But can you create an adaptable moral framework without a lot of ambiguity? Even the law is ambiguous and it's far too large for the widespread adoption a moral framework requires.
The fact that christianity is so divided while claiming to believe the same thing should be all the proof you need of this, and its not just christianity.
There are a billion different religions when you break them down, but, they all agree on the basics. Every branch of Christianity agrees with principles like "thou shalt not murder", "feeding the poor is virtuous", "love thy neighbour", "care for the sick" etc.
I'm not saying Christianity is an awesome moral framework mind you. That's not my argument. My argument is that the vast majority of people no longer have any framework that guides them in how to act. When faced with the outrage of people who do, they crumble as a consequence.
Successful religions follow the golden rule and the like. People don't need a religion to evaluate how their actions impact others.
Rather that the people protesting for or against something because of their religious views are much less likely to suddenly change those views or crumble in the face of pressure from opposing activists. They have some sort of concrete belief system that they've thought about and are invested in - it doesn't have to make sense, but they aren't going to turn around and say, "ok ok I promise I won't be pro-life anymore" because some angry Google engineers tweeted that they must hate women's rights. Their views are more robustly grounded than that.
Postmodern atheism and postmodern theism converge.
It turns out that the answer to this is transphobia, sadly.
More recently, social issues have been the wedge between Democrats and Republicans in the US. The Republicans leveraged abortion and contraception because the killing of innocent babies via abortion and/or contraception is the worst sin a human can commit (moral outrage). Now progressives leverage LGBQT+ rights because erasing the humanity of a living person is the worst sin a human can commit (moral outrage). Climate change has both sides too; killing the planet for the convenience of cars and plastic bags is worst; sacrificing human economic progress and security for some stupid turtles and this made-up sea level thing is the worst.
Moral outrage is just a tool. Research is accumulating on the addictiveness of self-righteousness. Moral superiority and outrage get people to do stuff (vote, give money, show up at protests, sign petitions), in a way that self-reflective questioning does not.
How could we engineer things so that "moderate compromise with room to listen to the views of others" would get people to act?
(Edited to add a paper on self-righteousness, with experiments! http://home.uchicago.edu/~nklein/KleinEpleyLessEvil.pdf)
...absent the Victorian age and some time after, which we all moved beyond culturally because it was backwards to force one top-down rigid "proper" way to live and speak.
Not to mention the definition of "acceptable" to these special interest camps is forever a moving goal post where anyone who isn't the perfect caricature of mainstream "acceptableness" can't have a say in any economic, cultural, political, etc discourse without being tarred, feather, and demanded to apologize for even thinking they could engage in the process.
This is a very different development than just employing moral outrage. A critical part of a healthy democratic society is accepting people have different worldviews. We're moving to a world where there is one alleged correct worldview and anything else is a showstopper.
Particularly relevant to my own experience was the commentary on how politicians have become less cooperative with their rivals in other parties, and how political views/party associations have become more extreme/less tolerant overall.
Highly recommend.
Except, I guess, what the center is has always been subject to discussion. For my part, I think it's a kind of bizarre imaginary construct. A center conjures the idea of some kind of shape that has an inside and an outside. That's a very weird model for people's beliefs, which are kind of discrete, non-connected, certainly not points on lines or planes.
I'd go for a definition of center as, exactly whatever compromise or group of interests there are that currently rule. So, obviously, when there's a crisis of leadership, a crisis of norms, the center starts falling apart.
There are many reasons to fear for the future of our political discourse but I don't think this is one. This was just poorly thought through.
(edit) Maybe what you're getting at is that the mission of the group should be more explicitly non-partisan, and then hopefully politics stays away from it altogether. That sounds like a good idea.
I grew up in small town rural Pennsylvania in a lower middle class family. I'm certainly now someone who is "in the industry". What differentiates me from myself twenty years ago is twenty years of learning and experience. I went to school, I had jobs.
What you're implying is that even someone like me wouldn't have a representative opinion of the American population. If any American, after being educated on the subject they're expected to develop ethics guidelines on, is no longer an acceptable candidate, we've started down a very dangerous path. It means that expert opinions are inherently untrusted. How can ethics be developed in a reasonable way if the people we trust with the task are people whose credentials are their likeability?
The phrase "leading thinkers" is loaded with meaning. It's a phrase used almost exclusively by one political grouping to mean "people who think just like us". It should be obvious that it can't have any objective meaning (leading according to whom?).
To see this try replacing it with "leading thinktanks". Sounds quite different now, right? Thinktanks are organisations associated with conservative thought. If I heard someone talk about how they were assembling "trusted voices from leading thinktanks" I'd assume the resulting group would have a conservative bent. Maybe it's just me.
It means that expert opinions are inherently untrusted
This is in fact the default viewpoint of large chunks of the population and is a key aspect of conservative thought: it's not as dumb as it sounds either. Problems with the opposite, i.e. expert opinion being inherently trusted:
1. How do you decide who is an expert?
2. Oh, credentials? Credentials which are awarded by ... more people claiming to be expert. How do you know that credential doesn't just mean someone toed the conventional orthodoxy?
3. If expertise is unquestionably real it tends to be concrete and narrow e.g. expertise in how to program computers or construct skyscrapers. It's easy to test claims of expertise by comparison to real world results. But the type of people frequently cited as experts in policy discussions tend to claim to be experts in very vague and expansive subjects like "Asian politics" or "social psychology" or "national security", where testing against reality isn't easy. This undermines the word "expert" in the sense Google has used it here to mean "experts in how to construct AI ethics boards" (where do such people come from again?).
4. Many experts who do make testable results turn out to be frequently wrong and sometimes uselessly so. This is especially true in economics, e.g. mainstream economists failing to predict the financial crisis, health experts being unable to decide if foodstuffs cause cancer or prevent it.
You can't assume that reverence for "experts" defined as people labelled as experts by the media, academia and "leading thinkers" is automatically virtuous or right.
But then it's possible it was a non-partisan group then
For example, would you put the president of company that sells a purported homeopathic measles cure (yes, that exists) on a medical ethics board in the name of finding common ground?
I wouldn't, because they either (1) know that they are selling a product that is nothing more than a placebo, which they lie about to ignorant people, and which will likely lead to serious harm for many of those people (often children), but value their income more than that, or (2) they actually believe that it works. The former is disqualifying because it calls into question their own ethics, and the later because it calls into question their ability to understand objective evidence and draw sound inferences from it.
The Heritage Foundation publishes things like this [1]:
> The current average world temperature is about 58 degrees. The true believers in climate change are predicting global catastrophe if that temperature rises by a worst-case estimate of 7 degrees Fahrenheit. That would bring the world average temperature to about 65 degrees.
> Dubai, today, is doing quite well at an average temperature 35 degrees higher.
The gist of the article is that people can handle heat in Dubai through the use of air conditioning in their cars and buildings, which shows that maybe if we just go all in for cheap fossil fuel based energy we'll be able to handle the paltry little worst case 7 degrees that we might get if climate change turns out to be real.
I find it extremely hard to believe that they don't know that this and most of their other material on climate change is scientifically wrong, and so I'd rule out putting their president on an ethics board because they are not an ethical organization.
You want some conservative viewpoints to find common ground on your board? There are conservatives who have not embraced scientific quackery. E.g., [2]. Pick from them.
[1] https://www.heritage.org/environment/commentary/how-fossil-f...
Kay Coles James has not studied climate science.
As a lay person, she has rejected the scientific consensus.
I have a difficult time imagining the value of the input she would provide to any ethics board.
I've worked with IRB for healthcare. I wouldn't want a phrenologist on my IRB. Or a homeopathic medicine advocate. Someone who pushes MLM essential oils. A young-earth creationist. A Christian Scientist who rejects medicine. A Scientologist who rejects psychology.
Those people aren't on the Red Team. They're on the Denial Team. They don't want to make my process better. They don't believe in my process.
There's a huge difference between respecting a person, engaging them on a personal level, listening to their concerns, granting them dignity, allowing them to self-determine, having a vote in politics, etc... And allowing that same person to steer ethics for a corporation, or industry.
Society needs to have the broader conversations you're talking about. No question. I hear what you're saying. But an ethics board can and should be more selective about who they invite.
As such, the board would seem to be corrupted if it has people openly working towards that goal. Good that Google has agreed.
No. That's one specific ethics, the one you seem to agree with. But it's not the only possible one. Btw, you seem to want to remove a right to speak from an entire demographics of people, those who profess ethical stances you don't like. How about this?
Don't view political impasse as a problem. Indeed, it's the only thing that will lead to the eventual dismantle of the federal system we have today. Why do we need a super-state?
We must decentralize authority. Don't try to save democracy, let it fail under it's on weight as all democracies do.
Dear Hackernews, you are arguing with others who think banning people for different opinions is fine, but also downvoting and flagging them at the same time.
Nothing to see here :)
.......
The older generation of political activists were too closely tied to their particular political ideology to find comprise and co-operation with other politicians and their parties very easily."
- The Coming Of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, page 84.
It is worth to note that Ray Bradbury described exactly that what we witness now in his "Fahrenheit 451" (written more than 60 years ago). The fight between minorities dumbed-down any substantial discussion. Everything that could hurt any minority was burnt and forbidden and people were left with nothing but stupid soap operas about nothing.
What’s fairly recent is that millions of us now have the potential to reach millions of people with our social media posts. My Tweets get more views than when I wrote for my college newspaper 10 years ago! So of course if I wind up writing or saying something that a majority of people disagree it will cause me problems.
My options are to either not write and say controversial things (or at least not under my name) or to just deal with being in a contrarian position.
The great thing about expressing opinions is it’s optional. People who are women or gender non-conforming, racial minorities, homosexual or disabled have no way of changing their position in life so we protect them. Controversial opinions and beliefs? Those are easy to mask or change.
But not men? If you look into it you'll find that men are a minority in quite many places: universities being one of them.
> as I look through her history I am mostly confused why she was chosen in the first place. She doesn't have any background in tech. She doesn't have any prior writing or research related to AI. No background in the other topics that come up - surveillance, data privacy, international security. She's mostly a culture warrior, so no wonder now we're having a culture war.
I'd encourage other folks to read the whole thread. It's not really mainly about Kay Cole James, more about how the whole panel looked like simply a PR exercise from the start, and I especially liked how she compares it against what OpenAI is doing.
Not sure why the Reuters follow-up made the front page instead.
Just because you know a thing or two about ethics doesn't mean you are equipped to discuss a particular domain.
How can you possibly begin to discuss AI Ethics if you have no idea how it works or what's -realistically- possible?
I'm getting the sense that the goalposts are ready to slide here, but I wouldn't expect an expert on "when to not do a new Holocaust" to be able to model interactions between uranium atoms.
Not having any familiarity with the subject is obviously its own disqualification as an expert in a given area of ethics. And a nuclear physicist could lack understanding of ethics, international politics, history, military, who's even armed... This would be far more disqualifying.
In this case I don’t care how trained an ethics person is in ethics or history. They literally are not equipped to discuss this topic without being fed information from somewhere, which leads to its own issues.
I would much rather take domain experts and train them in philosophy, ethics, and history to an extent. That is far easier and better than the other way around.
What matters for ethics is the effects things have on people. You generally don't have to know how something works in order to understand what effects it has--someone who does understand how it works can figure that out and tell you.
For example, if you had to decide between on the ethics of using a nuclear weapon and using conventional weapons to destroy some legitimate military target you wouldn't need to know anything about the physics of nuclear weapons.
All you'd need to know about the nuke is how powerful it is, the long term illnesses it can cause, how it can affect people far away from the blast, how it can make the area unsafe for humans for a long time, and so on. To decide the ethical issues you are concerned with what happens, not how it happens.
If we ever get to general AI, and are dealing with ethical questions like whether it is murder to restore a robot to factory settings, whether it is slavery to own a robot, or whether a robot can own property then we will probably need ethicists who are also AI experts.
In this case “using a nuclear weapon” is easier to reason about for a non expert. What about “using nuclear technology for renewable energy”? If the person doesn’t really understand the pros and cons of this by nature of being a domain expert, they’re just relying on whatever information they may have (incorrectly) learned or been indoctrinated about.
Otherwise smart ethics people may make stupid decisions because they think they understand what they’re talking about, but actually do not.
Just take existing domain experts and train them in ethics.
That's what other members of the board are there for. Let's flip your question: How do you expect a tech person to comment reasonably about AI ethics when all they've taken is an undergrad course in philosophy (and even that may be a stretch).
The notion that a person on the board must be an expert in every aspect involved is ridiculous.
I wouldn’t want John Stuart Mill on that board because he wouldn’t know what he was talking about, and therefore would be unable to properly evaluate things.
How about pushing this to congress. None of them know hardly anything about anything. They delegate a lot of their thinking.
So two problems.
1. People who are practitioners are more likely to be for the technology than against it. Tristan Harris is a good example of what you're looking for. 2. Going to the logical extreme on this doesn't work.
P.S. Should we apply this to journalism? Because seriously journalists these days don't even know how to make phone calls to even pretend to fact check.
I don’t buy your argument that all experts are necessarily proponents. Even within a domain there are disagreements.
The government issue is real and also slightly tangential. We need to make working in the public sector more attractive.
And yes it should apply to journalism, but discerning that falls onto individual people. It’s a bit of a different issue.
Well then we disagree. Being an engineer or a technician does not make you a good ethicist. And that's what we need.
Training an ethicist that is impartial or thoughtful from the beginning about the technology may also be easier than the opposite. They may be similar...
But training an engineer in ethics I think is a good step. Some fields, like medicine, have it somewhat built in. We can debate how effective or serious that actually is.
Being a technician or engineer does predispose you to thinking what you are working on or working with is ethical. I did list Tristan Harris as a good counter-example and someone that certainly can speak to the ethics of the issue. But his example is also a good example of engineers/technicians not being good candidates for being impartial because he has to be a type of activist.
> I don’t buy your argument that all experts are necessarily proponents. Even within a domain there are disagreements.
I said likely, not exclusively.
I mean, human drivers' education doesn't cover choosing who to kill in unavoidable crashes. Isn't that because we believe crashes where the driver can't avoid the crash, but can choose who to kill, are so rare as to be negligible?
IMHO much more realistic and pressing AI ethics questions surround e.g. neural networks for setting insurance prices, and whether they can be shown not to discriminate against protected groups.
I'd look at a few other reasons:
- We don't have "driving ethics" classes at all. Human driving education covers how to drive. "AI ethics" might cover many things, but I don't think "how to drive" is on that list. That topic falls under "AI", not "AI ethics".
- The usual example you hear about is an AI driver choosing whether to kill a pedestrian or the driver. There is no point in having a "driving ethics for humans" class which teaches that it is your moral duty to kill yourself in order to avoid killing a pedestrian. No one would pay attention to that, and people would rightly attack the class itself as being a moral abomination.
This example actually makes me more sympathetic to the traditional view that (e.g. for Catholics) suicide is a mortal sin, or (for legalists) suicide should be illegal. This has perverse consequences, like assuring the grieving family that at least their loved one is burning in hell, or subjecting failed suicides to legal penalties. But as a cultural practice, it immunizes everyone against those who would tell them to kill themselves.
The main focus of "AI ethics" needs to be on model bias and how to counter it through transparency and governance. More and more decisions, from mortgage applications to job applications are being automated based on the output of some machine learning model. The person being "scored" has no insight into how they were scored, often has no recourse to appeal the decision, and in many cases isn't even aware that they were scored by a model in the first place. THIS is what AI Ethics needs to focus on, not navel gazing about who self-driving cars should choose to kill or how to implement kill switches for runaway robots.
To anyone who is an expert, this is a profoundly uninteresting question. Literally no modern system is programmed this way, and many people would argue that telling a system who to hit is, itself, unethical.
A more interesting question might be if our models will hit certain groups of people more often, without anyone having explicitly asked them to.
Archive link to the short bios, since Google seems to have taken the document down: https://web.archive.org/web/20190331195013/https://ai.google...
Tech people can design the tech. But here we are talking about the impact and those people should not be the one deciding everything. They are doing that over a decade and disappointed.
Tech companies are not made only of tech people. Those companies you named employ many engineers but are led, like any other company, by finance, sales and management. This whole story is actually about a conflict between the rank engineers and the management (similar to the earlier conflict about military projects).
You should totally trust the tech people, as they are the ones who are not in for the money (or less likely to be just in for the money, at least).
Actually, the whole story of Google not being trustworthy any longer might just be the story of engineering being slowly overruled by finance/management there.
I would totally trust Google AI researchers, like i would totally trust Einstein with the fussion theory. That employees were still able to overthrow a comitee formed by upper management will achieve more than whatever little benefit this comitee would have achieved.
I agree, it doesn't require technical AI skills but I would expect a person in this position to have SOMETHING relevant in their background that they could point to as a qualifier.
Honestly, I read the article and it left me feeling quite sympathetic to this lady. It seemed like another clear cut case of political correctness run amok. Then I looked up her bio online and found she has a Bachelors degree in Education from the Hampton Institute and her entire career has consisted of a series of political appointments the highlights of which include Director of the Office of Personnel Management (despite not having any HR related background) and the Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Services (despite not having any public health background). She has neither training nor experience in either AI or Ethics. Politics aside, she was not even remotely qualified to be on an AI Ethics Board for Google.
Many successful teams in history included members who were not technically skilled, but had an implementable vision. The gap in knowledge bridgeable, and the alternative is more "Facebook is involuntarily committing users to an experiment in what makes people sad" ethical errors.
Publication records help to separate the wheat from the chaff.
They're all weird. Because the whole field is a bunch of people who are experts in a field which has no differentiation in expertise.
It's a charlatan field.
What about all the other board members?
• Alessandro Acquisti, a leading behavioral economist and privacy researcher. He’s a Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University and the PwC William W. Cooper Professor of Risk and Regulatory Innovation.
• Bubacarr Bah, an expert in applied and computational mathematics. He’s a Senior Researcher, designated the German Research Chair of Mathematics with specialization in Data Science, at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) South Africa and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Stellenbosch University.
• De Kai, a leading researcher in natural language processing, music technology and machine learning. He’s Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Distinguished Research Scholar at Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute.
• Dyan Gibbens, an expert in industrial engineering and unmanned systems. She’s CEO of Trumbull, a Forbes Top 25 veteran-founded startup focused on automation, data and environmental resilience in energy and defense.
• Joanna Bryson, an expert in psychology and AI, and a longtime leader in AI ethics. She’s an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bath. She has consulted for a number of companies on AI, notably at LEGO researching child-oriented programming techniques for the product that became LEGO Mindstorms.
• Kay Coles James, a public policy expert with extensive experience working at the local, state and federal levels of government. She’s currently President of The Heritage Foundation, focusing on free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom and national defense.
• Luciano Floridi, a leading philosopher and expert in digital ethics. He’s Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he directs the Digital Ethics Lab of the Oxford Internet Institute, Professorial Fellow of Exeter College and Turing Fellow and Chair of the Data Ethics Group of the Alan Turing Institute.
• William Joseph Burns, a foreign policy expert and diplomat. He previously served as U.S. deputy secretary of state, and retired from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2014 after a 33-year diplomatic career. He’s currently President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the oldest international affairs think tank in the United States.
>as I look through her history I am mostly confused why she was chosen in the first place. She doesn't have any background in tech. She doesn't have any prior writing or research related to AI. No background in the other topics that come up - surveillance, data privacy, international security.
Is this true for any other board members? Have journalists been focusing only on Kay, or did they do due diligence into the others?
Well, that's the point, isn't it? If the AI ethics council is meeting four times a year for a couple hours at most, and and has people who can't even agree on "Which bathroom should this person use," how are they going to produce productive advice for actual hard questions that haven't been well-explored?
There is a place for debate between people who don't agree on worldview. This council was never going to be it.
(Obviously the people who complained about a prominent right-wing figure would just argue something hypocritical like "only the right kind of diversity of opinion", but that's beside the point; the panel was a dumb idea to begin with, coming from a group with so much of a stake in trying to advance AI for the sake of advertising)
Putting someone hostile towards the LGBTQ community and LGBTQ rights? That’s not diversity. That has no place in 2019.
The fact that they don't agree with the others on LGBT rights should only be an issue if they insist on trying to espouse their unrelated viewpoints using the panel, in which case by all means kick them off.
Say, for instance, that you're asked by a supervisor to collaborate with a Muslim living in a middle eastern country on writing a piece of software. For the sake of argument, say that this particular person believed that the laws recently enacted in Brunei were in line with the commands of Islam, and therefore just. (For the sake of argument only--obviously not everybody in those categories is like this at all--but clearly at least some must be or we wouldn't have situations like this recent one.) Would it be right to refuse to work with this person on writing say, some python code, when the topic of "sharia law" is never going to be a factor? Furthermore, by your argument, would you be willing to trust this person's judgement on software architecture when they have exhibited a, in your view, extreme lack of good judgement in another field?
Second, you can even take this argument to a higher level. You admit that the opposing party has a reason to believe what they believe, and I'd imagine that you'd even grant that they probably believe that their reasons for their particular position are good reasons. Leaving aside whether the positions themselves are good or not, how do you evaluate whether someone's reasons for holding a particular position are good? After all, a religious person may believe that one day an omniscient being will call them to answer for why they failed to keep holy commands in their life. To the holder of such a view, that's a pretty good reason to do some twisted stuff. If anything, (if their religion is right) such a reason for them holding their particular position (fear of eternal condemnation) may even be better to them than your reasons for your position are to you!
And if you're going to pick one in the end, why not get everyone from that worldview? There are lots of Roman Catholic theologians, for instance, that they could have included. I don't personally agree with them either, but they absolutely have a rich history of thinking about ethics, and they mostly also don't believe in trans people. Why leave James to fend for herself?
For example, they may not agree on how bathrooms should be organized, but they probably all agree that bathrooms should exist.
The fact that the board had wildly varying opinions is a feature, not a bug. The outputs of this board should be widely agreed upon. If they make declarations that half the country disagrees with, they're going to lose credibility fast. Having an ideologically diverse board helps to secure their credibility.
(If the point of the council is to tell you things that anyone with a functioning conscience could tell you, then the fact that it's needed is a serious indictment of Google management. I'd like to think the council is here for the hard questions.)
With a diverse board, the answers to some questions are going to be inconclusive. But that doesn't mean the board shouldn't exist at all. And it certainly doesn't mean we should eliminate all diversity in the board.
There's also the standard fallback answer for "which bathroom": if you make them all single occupancy, it doesn't matter which one. Sometimes that's the solution used in situations like schools.
So maybe pick a better example of a hard question that seems easy. (Though I get the relevance here, given the decried panelist's history and views)
Brunei?
Routinely, trans people are treated as an entity that should not exist. Or a disease or condition that should be rooted out. Not a valid identity.
Personally, I don't see a point in sex/gender-segregated bathroom at all. The only segreggation that makes sense to me is sitting/standing (which mostly conincides with private/non-private).
But if we want sex-segregated bathrooms (and AFAIK many governments force that), then there's little point if people can just randomly change their mind about which category they belong to. What's the point of categories then?
Categories do not need to be immutable. There are meetups for bikers and redditors and many other categories which anyone may self-identify as belonging to. These people prefer to think of themselves as belonging within those categories for any of a number of reasons, and accepting their choice is generally a decent thing to do, barring a compelling reason to the contrary.
The point of the male/female categories is that a large number of people identify as one of those two genders, and prefer strongly to be recognized as within one of those categories. There are exceptions and it's more complicated than that, but in the common case, that's why the categories have value: people ascribe value to them. If recognizing someone's desired identity makes them feel more comfortable, why shouldn't we? In the case of genders, it's especially important since it's such an important category.
Finally, people switching genders on a whim is a strawman itself. Transitioning your gender officially is a multi-year process, and you face significant persecution and stigma along the way. I don't see why anyone would undergo that unless it helped resolve some acute gender dysphoria.
I agree, but you have to ask yourself, what purpose do the categories serve. It seems to me that th epurpose of sex-segregated bathrooms is two-fold: (1) to make people feel more comfortable, because many have weird hangups regarding intimacy and sex, and (2) to keep women safe. Even disregarding (2), it seems to be a choice between inconveniencing a tiny proportion of the population a bit more or inconveniencing most of the population a bit less. In any case, regardless of what bathroom trans people should go in, it doesn't even remotely start to solve other issues (e.g. what bathroom does a dad take his 4-year old daughter in) which is why I think the whole idea is a huge politically-motivated strawman.
It's also the reason we need more ethics boards, because it's a common error technical training leads a person to, where we're taught how to optimize for common cases and defend against unusual cases---when the things we use aren't people and don't care if they're considered "common" or "unusual."
The fundamental difference that will not allow us to converse well here is that you are intentionally not accepting that a trans person is the gender they have transitioned to.
It's clear that's the case from, for example, you saying "to keep women safe" and very obviously not including trans women in that group. Trans women are women and also deserve to use the bathroom where they will feel safer.
But you seem to be intentionally overlooking GP's main point -- people (dare I say most people, probably) have that strange hangup that they really prefer to visit the restroom with people of the same biological gender.
And before somebody comes back with "at some point people did not want to share bathroom with people of a different race", there was a movement to make people see folks of other color as fully human. There is no movement to make people accept seeing naked people with different genitalia.
(added) I don't think anyone is arguing seriously that transsexuals should not use public restrooms, period. But which restroom to use isn't quite as simple as "whatever gender they identify with", unless you believe that others have absolutely no say in the matter.
Hard questions, as I mean them, are ones where there's a lot of complexity to even reach a potential answer. Google's trolley problems are those where the decision isn't just "flip the switch," it's "should we gather this data" or "should we conduct this experiment" or "should we participate in the market in this way" where there are unforeseen side effects to doing so, and you want a bunch of smart people in a room to try to figure those out and shake out all the complexity in the problem that you haven't even managed to state clearly.
But if you can't decide whether it's better to kill one person by action or five by inaction in the first place, figuring out whether taking/not taking the action has unexpected ethical implications isn't going to get you closer to any answers.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/4/18295933/google-...
The initial complaint was around comments from 1 of the 8 board members: Kay Coles James
The complaint was published Apr. 1 in a Medium post:
https://medium.com/@against.transphobia/googlers-against-tra...
As evidence the post lists 3 tweets from Kay Cole James:
https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108768455141007360
https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108365238779498497
https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1108365238779498497
https://twitter.com/KayColesJames/status/1100488434500685824
tweet 1: Against the Equality Act which would have made sexual orientation and gender identity federally protected classes using standard right wing talking points.
tweet 2: Promoting Heritage foundations critique of gender identify at the UN using standard right wing talking points.
tweet 3: (linked below) Support for the border wall using standard right wing talking points.
It really seems like she is getting hammered for being mainstream conservative. I understand the critiques about her not being technically qualified to understand the AI ethics issues. The idea that if you disagree with current transgender talking point you are not allow to work with Google in a public capacity seems extreme.
In other parts of the country that's not common and people see "guys" as gendered, and people feel like you're forgetting they're there.
The word "dude" as a form of address is gender neutral and business appropriate some places and not others.
It's a hard problem: Y'all works some places but sounds goofy and affected in others. Same with "folks."
If I know that some phrase is really uncommon or has different shades of meaning in a different part of the country or a different part of the world, I also know that if I use that phrase in that other place, it will get interpreted differently from what it means to me. It can be frustrating if I haven't yet picked up on the differences, but it's just the nature of communication.
I have also tried to hang on to "y'all" and "folks" since moving to the west coast. "Folks" is a harder sell though, when I use it feels more like an affectation. But that's my perception of others' perceptions. Maybe I'm pulling off "folks" without realizing it. But "y'all" has more staying power, because it's a legitimately useful term that's otherwise missing from the English language.
One less fraught, but equally confusing terms are "a couple" vs. "a few" vs. "a handful" (some believe "couple" = 2 whereas others treat it and the others as explicitly more fuzzy). Often it's best to just assume as little context as possible and be a little more explicit and verbose.
Hey everybody!
Listen up people
All,
What each of you needs to do...
I have a task for all of you
Let’s all have a great time
Alright gentlemen and lady,
Everyone on the team should read this
This applies to everyone on the team
Any person on the team can do xyz
If you see something, say something
Thou hast best checkest thyself, ‘ere thee wreckest thyself!
As a result, I've gotten into the habit of saying "y'all" and "folks" even though I'd otherwise never have used these words.
So what's the acceptable format? "guys, gals, and... others?"
Please make sure to put a cover sheet on your TPS reports.
Team,
Please make sure to put a cover sheet on your TPS reports.
Everyone,
Please make sure to put a cover sheet on your TPS reports.
Good Afternoon/Morning,
Please make sure to put a cover sheet on your TPS reports.
Staff,
Please make sure to put a cover sheet on your TPS reports.
I just quickly browsed through my emails I've received this year (coworkers, customers, vendors) and that covers all the ones I've received. All of those are perfectly acceptable.
I wouldn't be personally use "guys," "gals," or "guys and gals" in a non-friend situation.
Folks,...
When did she do this?
> 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. #CSW63
That tweet does not say anything like "trans people don't exist", or that they should be harmed in any way, or that they aren't human. That tweet expresses a perfectly reasonable sentiment that many others share: that human beings are sexually dimorphic and cannot change sex. This sort of hyperbole on the part of transactivists is very frustrating: anyone who doesn't agree with extremist gender ideology is painted as a "bigot".
This is more important than one AI ethics panel with questionable authority. Google is in a position to censor and influence a huge amount of speech on the internet, and the fact that they were targeted by and arguably caved to a small extremist group is very troubling.
It advocates "critiquing gender identity," which I take to mean asserting that gender identity is either not real or not important. Gender identity is the defining characteristic of trans people, so when someone critiques it as a concept, that implies that they think trans identities are made up, possibly for some insidious purpose, ie. that trans people don't really exist. I've heard people say things like "there's no such thing as a transgender, you're either a man or a woman," and this tweet makes me think that James would agree with them.
> or that they should be harmed in any way
Advocating against legislation to protect marginalized groups harms them directly.
> That tweet expresses a perfectly reasonable sentiment that many others share:
Many people in the world share the sentiment that apostates should receive the death penalty. If you lived in a place or time where this was considered a reasonable sentiment, I hope that you would not let it stop you from doing everything you could to oppose murdering people. We currently live in a society where many people believe that trans people should not accepted. I'm willing to be an "extremist" in order to change that.
> that human beings are sexually dimorphic
This tweet says nothing of the sort, nor would I expect it to, as no one in the history of the world has ever suggested the contrary.
> and cannot change sex
This is a red herring. The public controversy is not over what features of human biology can and cannot be changed, but over how society should treat trans people.
> transactivists
trans activists
> This sort of hyperbole on the part of transactivists is very frustrating: anyone who doesn't agree with extremist gender ideology is painted as a "bigot".
If you call the idea that we ought to respect the identites of trans people "extremist gender ideology," I am very happy to call you a bigot.
If gender is—as intelligently argued in decades of academic literature on the subject across a number of disciplines—a performative social construct and not an inherent biological characteristic, then gender identity is, in reality, made up. That doesn't mean gender identity isn't real, but that it isn't inherent. If gender identity isn't inherent and fixed at birth, then it is socially constructed and performed. There are socially dominant identities constructed and performed by the vast majority of humans that matches their [notions of] biological sex. There are also non-dominant identities constructed and performed by not-insignificant minorities of humans that [may] diverge from their [notions of] biological sex. But the identities themselves are made up—they're constructed and performed. Trans identities that diverge from biological sex are just as made up as those of normative male and female identities that match biological sex. The gender identities are real. They're also made up.
I say all this because it frequently comes across as intellectually contradictory and conversationally confusing to not recognize/admit that gender identities are real, but they are also made up by society and its members. I find the vast majority of the most vocal actors engaged in gender debates to be constantly yelling past each other on this point.
PS: Imagine how differently your otherwise nice post would have sounded if it ended like this:
> If you call the idea that we ought to respect the identities of trans people "extremist gender ideology", we have a lot to talk about. I am very happy to take this conversation offline and explain further how it isn't.
If your primary motivation is to ensure all people are accepted, respected, and treated equally and fairly even if they are trans, I find it rather unclear how calling someone a bigot—or litigating academic definitions of socially performative and constructed identities—gets you closer to that. I've been arguing and advocating for the equality of all people regardless of their sexual, gender, ethnic, religious, and whatever other identity group they might belong to for 20 years now. I've seen people's minds changed. I've seen them recognize new ideas. It doesn't happen overnight. And it doesn't happen by calling people bigots because they haven't seen the light yet. It takes consistent, careful attention and respectful effort—even when it's difficult to muster the effort and you just want to tell someone to fuck off for holding what appear to you to be bigoted views. It doesn't matter if the other person doesn't get it, they still ought to be treated with respect and you try again next time. It doesn't matter if they spout off what sound like bigoted views—so they remain convinced of a wrong view now; we can try again the next time we talk. Calling someone a bigot doesn't move the needle. Hell, you didn't even bother to get a definition from the parent for what they think "extremist gender ideology" even is. You jumped right to calling them a bigot. That doesn't help improve the state of discourse or the challenges facing trans people.
The claim that all trans people are actually just cisgendered people trying to fool everyone does imply that trans people don't exist. It also implies that trans people are inherently deceptive. You are demonizing trans people when you claim this. Trans people are not mean-spirited demons who are trying to pull the wool over everyone's eyes and to say that is unethical. Trans people are not "activists" for just being themselves and expecting to be treated with basic human dignity.
Why not? When people in positions of power hold ignorant and/or harmful opinions, a stir should be made. One individual in particular comes to mind.
> What kind of unforgiving and judgemental culture are we living in?
The kind where public figures curry favor with their bases of obstinately illiberal^[1] followers by intentionally spreading divisive sentiment?
Nobody is a victim just because people disagree with what they're saying and say as much to their faces. Bad ideas do not in theory deserve a platform beyond what simple freedom of expression provides them. Striving for "diversity of thought" does not mean we should elevate willful ignorance and demagoguery.
^[1] In the general sense of the word. Far-left whackos included, though I think they're a bit less scary than what's going on on the right these days.
I highly doubt having one person with some past bigoted opinions is going to completely overthrow an 8 person council. If anything, once you stack your council with people who all have the same views, then the one individual that comes to your mind will use exactly that to completely undermine the entire council.
These are not opinions she held in the past, these are opinions she holds now and which she actively promotes.
This person was peddling in ludicrous Obama-killed-his-friend conspiracy theories. If you want them on your ethics board, you need to also invite flat earthers and people believing there’s a ham sandwich that rules the world. Because who are you to judge some opinions more legit than others.
James wasn't invited because she believes Obama-killed-his-friend conspiracies; so that argument doesn't make sense. Those conspiracies are clearly unrelated to AI ethics and so she was clearly representing something else. She was likely included because she is obviously great leadership material given what she has achieved as an African-American women. Someone of that caliber, and representing a conservative viewpoint to boot, was obviously a reasonable addition to any ethics group.
it‘s also not unrelated, because it speaks to her ability to evaluate facts, and to her soundness of mind.
Yes.
> it‘s also not unrelated, because it speaks to her ability to evaluate facts, and to her soundness of mind.
Well, her record of success also speaks to her ability to evaluate facts and suggests she is doing fine.
Believing something that there is clear evidence against is a very common affliction. As long as someone isn't actively acting on their misconceptions, it doesn't suggest anything.
If you demand that leaders are perfect, you will discover all your leaders are liars.
The choice of leader matter great deal. It influences goals and approaches. Leader matters and is strategical choice.
Can I get a link to what you are talking about? You are very clearly referencing something but I have no idea what it is.
> then the one individual that comes to your mind will use exactly that to completely undermine the entire council.
He'll do it anyway. "Wind turbines cause cancer," etcetera. If we start toadying to the anti-intellectual bent of modern "conservatism", we've already lost, and we should just turn on Fox News and wait to die.
If not, all you've said is that conservatives shouldn't be allowed a voice in context such as this. I for one, although not a conservative, think that conservative thinkers may have important contributions to make to ethical debates around technology and AI.
"Conservative" is a word that has become overloaded. Same with "liberal". In fact progressive/conservative and liberal/illiberal are orthogonal axes. I don't have a problem with conservatism, per se—I have a problem with illiberalism, and that's what's on display here.
On an abstract level I think "diversity of thought" (can't believe I'm using those words) is necessary in talking about the ethics of applying new technologies. E.g. human cloning: what are the benefits? What are the pitfalls? If everybody in the discussion is on the same side, the result won't be useful, and I totally agree that someone with intellectual integrity, who identifies with traditional conservative principles, could have a lot of value to bring to the table in that situation.
On the other end of the spectrum we have the "homosexuality is a slippery slope to bestiality" and "men have penises, women have vaginas, GET OVER IT!!! LOL <insert laugh-cry emoji>" crowd. Frankly, no, I don't think those people have anything of value to add, and I don't think we should allow those who indulge them to influence the public discourse. Of course, that horse has left the barn.
There is a middle ground, and I think this woman falls there. I think the highlighted tweets show that she has opinions on social issues that have been shaped by toxic identity politics and demagoguery. I personally judge her poorly for that but I'm not ready to make an overall judgment because those three tweets are all I know about her. I don't think there is anybody who has never said something they regret (of course, I doubt she regrets saying these things, but you get the point).
FWIW I think "the left" goes too far in their reaction to things like this. My comment was more meant to address the general oppression complex "conservatives" have over the "diversity of thought" issue.
Conservatives will almost always be "behind" progressives where progressive social issues are concerned, by definition. Even when they aren't trash-talking outrage merchants, they are inclined to support traditional institutions and social arrangements. There needn't be any malice in this: they want to conserve the good and are hesitant to overturn age-old ways of being for fear of unintended consequences.
That's precisely why I think theirs is a position worth listening to in debates around the ethics of new technologies and their possible impact on society. It's an important consideration and one we're not going to hear from techno-utopians or many on the left.
1) I think that a physical border should be erected on the southern border. 2) I think same-sex marriage should be allowed. 3) I think those who engage in same-sex relationships are engaging in an immoral activity. 4) I think there are 2 genders, male and female, and they are fixed at birth. This breaks down for some people with medical conditions but make up a small enough percentage with should deal with that on a case by case basis.
That's good, because in a liberal society people should be allowed to do and be × whatever and whoever they want as long as they aren't impinging on others' right to do the same.
We are trying to build a liberal society here, right?
> I think those who engage in same-sex relationships are engaging in an immoral activity.
And how do you act on this opinion? In light of your 2), maybe you keep it to yourself because you hold others' freedoms as more important than your personal judgment of their lifestyles. I might judge you in the same way for having this opinion.
> I think there are 2 genders, male and female, and they are fixed at birth. This breaks down for some people with medical conditions but make up a small enough percentage with should deal with that on a case by case basis.
Similar to the above. Personally I don't get why some "right-leaning" folks get worked up about this, but what I care about is: what are you doing about it? Despite your own feelings, do you respect the right of someone to identify as a gender not traditionally associated with their biological sex? Surely, at least, you recognize that the statement in 4) is not any more than an opinion?
This issue gets into thornier territory and I do think it has to be handled on a case by case basis. Given today's political climate you may be surprised to hear that I don't think e.g. that I, a biological male, should be able to declare myself female and then go compete in physical sports against biological women. We have to be honest with ourselves, and treat in good faith with "the other side"; on this issue particularly I think the public discourse is in a very sorry state. We are talking past each other, and we love it. It's disgusting.
---
This segues into another point, and your 1). Take the bathroom thing. People are allegedly concerned that men will declare themselves as women and use this fraudulently assumed identity as an excuse to prey on women in the women's bathroom.
I see this as a silly thing to worry about, and here's why: is there any real evidence or convincing argument that it will make the existing problem worse? Recently in my city, Seattle, (for instance) there have been multiple incidents of homeless men raping women in women's bathrooms. In general, women are preyed upon by men with some frequency. So I don't really worry about this opening a door; the door is already open.
> I think that a physical border should be erected on the southern border.
Similarly, is this a data-driven solution? Is it anchored in a lucid, rational analysis of the real world? I see "the border wall", the idea in the public consciousness, as a thing that exists solely as a political tool. Maybe that is me being excessively cynical, but that's a fact: I see people who support it as having been duped by a demagogue. I would be interested to hear informed opinions stating otherwise.
And here I can circle around to answer your question more generally. The fact that I've typed this all out is representative of my expectation of a certain level of good-faith engagement that no longer (?) seems to exist in the American public discourse. I believe that if people are not speaking thoughtfully, if they are not arguing in good faith, that their contributions are worthless and should be ignored.
Our politics today is full of this. It exists on the left and the right, but Trump is perhaps the exemplar. He is a bully and a brazen liar, illiberal and anti-intellectual, and he fosters and encourages those traits in Americans who follow him. I don't believe he or those who make contributions on the same level should be allowed to contribute, no. I think we should stand up and say enough is enough.
That is not the same as me saying conservative voices should be silenced. Far from it.
> We are trying to build a liberal society here, right?
That might be what you’re trying to do, but it isn’t what many conservatives are trying to do. Depending on the their type of conservatism, many consider the needs of the family, the community, and the nation to be of more importance that the wishes of the individual.
You appear to be saying conservatives are fine so long as they aren’t actually conservatives and are, in fact, liberals with slight conservative leanings.
This is a very hand-wavey thing to say, that (as you say) quite obviously doesn't map perfectly to everyone who identifies as "conservative" and does apply to a lot of people who identify as "liberal". Gun control is one issue that comes to mind.
I touched before on the orthogonality of the progressive/conservative and liberal/illiberal axes, I think, so I won't go into it again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
> You appear to be saying conservatives are fine so long as they aren’t actually conservatives and are, in fact, liberals with slight conservative leanings.
I think that's an incredibly reductive and inaccurate summary of what I said, unless the word "conservatism" has been redefined to mean "illiberalism", to make the latter more palatable.
Oh wait, yes, that is exactly what has happened.
In fairness to conservative thinkers, I will not be going along with this redefinition, and I will continue to call out illiberalism for what it really is.
I'm not disagreeing with you- that kind of environment can be nice and intellectually liberating in its own way, as long as it isn't a global setting. But that is what you're asking for. Judgement-free safe spaces where everyone has to be nice to each other.
This seems to be strange obsession of HN: people excusing (with words) the worst possible statements (words), because „words are not actions“ or „words have no meaning“.
Because they want to be able to use whatever words they want without consequence? Yet they insist on posting somewhere that does have consequences for word usage - downvotes, flagging, and bans. You'd think they'd all go to a freer platform.
Of course?
If someone tweeted "Unfortunately, the holocaust didn't happen, but we can change that" and their view on the issue of "the Jewish Question" was "the parasites must be exterminated," then I imagine that you would be up in arms if they were ever appointed to an ethics council.
You might not think that James' views are bad enough to warrant the outcry, but can't you at least imagine why someone might think that? If you were trans, for instance, might you be worried about this person getting a position of potential influence?
Now if the council had multiple people like you describe, or worse yet a majority of them, then I would certainly be up in arms, yes. Just like I would be up in arms if a majority of such a council held _any_ extreme-by-society's-standards position (Greenpeace member, orthodox Jew, Catholic priest, Communist party member, hard libertarian, etc, etc). From my point of view, the most dangerous failure mode for an AI ethics council is groupthink that leads them to not notice problems that should get noticed. If the council is set up right, it should not require unanimity, or even a majority to flag something as an issue.
I suspect that you're only willing to say that because, at the moment, nazis are not anywhere close to being in a position to carry out any of their promises. Let's imagine that 30% of the general population agreed with this person's views, but that they were highly unpopular among educated people and had little influence in certain institutions, such as Google. Would you still be shrugging your shoulders and saying that it was worth it to have a diversity of opinion, or would you be scared, and willing to do anything you could to prevent this person and their views from having any more influence?
> From my point of view, the most dangerous failure mode for an AI ethics council is groupthink that leads them to not notice problems that should get noticed.
Hmm… I didn't think there was much of a chance of this council producing anything of value to begin with, so I basically just saw it as a minor endorsement of a small group of people. Maybe my opinion on this matter would be different if I were more concerned about AI and thought that there was meaningful progress to be made by such a group.
But that's not what we're talking about here, either for the particular person on the ex-board or the overall population dynamics: 30% of the population is not in favor of murdering trans people, and neither was anyone on Google's board. To get to the 30% number I think there are two options: 1) reduce the level of disapproval to the point where you in fact have a meaningful fraction of the population (not 30% by any means, but not negligible either, and including some members of congress, which I realize is much more acutely true for the trans case) with an equivalent disapproval level of Jews, or 2) define any expression of disapproval or concern with complications at all as an existential threat. It seems to me that a number of people do the latter in practice, which is why we end up with comparisons with the hypothetical Nazi-like.
Just to expand on this, I really do think there is a vast difference between 1) people who acknowledge that trans people exist and are "legitimate" in whatever sense one cares to think, have concerns about trans women's participation in women's sports, and want to figure out how and whether that can be made to work reasonably, 2) people who just wish trans people as a concept would disappear because it would make everything so much simpler, and 3) people who advocate violence against trans people. I don't think my viewpoint is universally accepted, and there are various instances in this very thread of comments conflating various positions on that spectrum.
Finally, I agree that if this board is not a serious attempt at ethics oversight and is instead just a PR stunt, then there's no point in worrying about a diversity of viewpoints and all that; Google should just appoint whoever will score the most brownie points in whatever status competition they think they're involved in. But I do think that external oversight of AI ethics to prevent echo-chamber effects is quite important, and I'm disappointed in the lack of such, whether that's because there's no board or because there is a useless board.
If Google put a literal Neo-Nazi on an ethics board, I would tell everyone I knew to stop using Google products and applying for jobs there. I'd probably set up a script on my university Gmail to auto-reply to everything saying that I can't be reached through a Nazi-supporting platform, and explaining to the sender can run the same script in protest. Knowing my university, we'd be off Google in a few weeks.
I'd say that the Heritage Foundation is about 2 percent as bad as a Neo-nazi organization (supposing that they were the same size), so I'm about 1/50th as concerned as I would be in the hypothetical scenario. But that's still enough that I'll post on Hacker News about it, and I'd probably sign the petition if I worked at Google.
I, personally, would not be surprised if 30%, or more, of "educated people" across the US agreed that some (though perhaps not all) of the issues she raises are valid issues that need to be addressed.
Now maybe this just makes the situation scarier for trans people, of course....
If there was a concern that impacted every non binary Googler and they all spoke out passionately, it might not register as a major voice, but it still seems important to listen.
Should we only concern ourselves with what the majority thinks? Isn't that the groupthink I see everyone talking about? Or should we take time to listen to these minority viewpoints and ensure we are building an environment where they feel welcome?
I'm sure 1 pct of people are white supremacists but we don't listen to them just because they whinge
... And your implied comparison of Google's trans employees to white supremacists suggests you may not understand this difference yet. Some aspects of morality are considered (legally and morally) no longer up for debate.
Perhaps you know already that the white supremacists are wrong, no matter how many of them there are?
This is the fundamental meta-question of appointing an ethics committee: you have to have some idea, already, of what is ethical. That idea could be—but probably isn't—to follow the world around you in proportion to their beliefs. That idea almost certainly is to follow your own existing sense of right and wrong. You want to find people who seem better at you than reasoning but the same as you in ultimate values. You want people who are going in the same direction you are, just better at getting there.
- Google leadership is, themselves, SJWs. They're just SJWs who are bad at things but once something problematic is brought to their attention they take actions of their own volition.
- Google leadership is a bunch of pushovers who listen to the most vocal faction even if it's a tiny minority and chase PR over getting things done. This means Google absolutely should not have AIs taking actions in an ethical framework decided upon by Google leadership, and certainly shouldn't have an outside council to legitimize their actions, because it isn't always the SJWs who will be loudest. (And in particular, there was a legitimate risk of the Heritage Foundation injecting its worldview into Google through James, because there's also a loud strain in American conservatism.) Google should be broken up and someone else should try.
- Actually, the SJWs are disproportionately responsible for Google's engineering success, despite being a minority, and if you're tired of them speaking for you, you need to prove that Google can survive without them. (Or they're not a minority, and there's a silent majority of people who stay quiet but are actually aligned with the SJWs, or something else equivalent.)
Isn’t that state worse than having someone you disagree with on some principles but in theory provide constructive criticism where the politics don’t intersect?
I mean, making some jobs obsolete or making decisions on recidivism etc I think are distinct from what a panelist thinks about an unrelated issue.
Moreover this person didn’t provide s majority view. Presumably the other panelists would have good arguments against her controversial views.
In a sense (and this is a gross exaguration, but just to frame the concept), an ethics panel formed by Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and David Berkowicz would not be an improvement over nothing at all. It would be a step backwards, and the world would be worse for tolerating it.
This is not to say that any of the people involved in this particular episode are abominable monsters, far from it, but to drive home the point, whether you pick the right people or the best people really matters, and it does make a difference.
In some respects, I'm not sure I'd want individuals with a vested interest and enthusiasm for AI to play watchdog over appropriate, responsible behavior.
In a way, an ethics board in something of a no fun zone. It would likely make more sense to invite members from areas that might run counter to industry wonks, in ways that AI experts might prove tone deaf to self policing concerns. Does that make sense?
We don't want to stifle the best parts of progress, but an ethics board shouldn't be made of people inclined to rubber stamp Skynet, because they'd tend toward seeing AI as progress by default.
And even if it weren't deliberately deceptive, not having an ethics council that wasn't going to work and looking publicly like you have no oversight is still likely better than having one taking up the role of one and causing competitive inhibition (the way certain drugs can physically take the place of biological molecules and prevent them from functioning).
If you disagree with that statement then I think the question is: Was this ethics board bad enough that it was worse than no ethics board?
And, I trust that you're being charitable enough to believe that the people that wanted the board removed asked the same, very basic, ethical question.
On the other hand - it might be easier to think they didn't ask or think about that question and discard their position based on what could frankly be called a strawman.
The current environment is so overly toxic that I doubt it will be possible for any process that might produce reasonably useful results to be run in an open manner. This is particularly troubling given the number of very plausible potential problems posed by AI in the near-ish future. Unfortunately it also seems unlikely to me that any government regulation that emerges will be at all competent.
> do you yourself actually care other than the fact that a specific group of people complained?
Yes, I want a diverse set of views on such a council, representing multiple areas of the political spectrum - that is, left, moderate, and conservative views rather than just the far-left. There are also a wide range of opinions out there on topics like the use of AI for military purposes or on the modern transgender movement (which is the subject of controversy relating to this council). Only 8% of America are progressives after all (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...). And all this is still without consideration of the worldviews that exist around the globe, which is important given Google has customers globally.
You may want it, but a lot of googlers definitely won't. A lot of people on the far left define ideological disagreement as "violence" and would be very vocally attack anybody that holds view they disapprove. And Google management is not invested in this project enough to spend a lot of political capital on it - plus they themselves are probably on the left side, so why would they battle for including somebody who they don't even agree with?
The ship had already sunk:
https://www.facebook.com/floridi/posts/10157226054696031
It seems they included a couple of women as token disenters but the plan didn't work exactly as intended.
is there no other person in computer science, mathematics, privacy research or some professor that is a conservative that holds none of this baggage and says shitty things? and like one of staff at vox said, why bring someone who is entrenched in the political culture war in the first place?
you want a set of diverse views. assuming she wasn't actually anti-trans, anti-lgbtq, do you think this woman knows enough about ai to represent the views of conservatives?
let's say this ethics council actually had power and could dictate what google or alphabet as a company could do in regards to ai. do you trust her to understand the topic at hand to then also address conservative concerns? let's say they make a ruling and she was too ignorant to the issue at hand (maybe those sneaky leftists used language that hid their leftist agenda). what is the likelihood of outrage by the "far-right" that the council was setup to be some pro-left google cabal because they brought someone with zero knowledge of the situation to represent the conservative side?
As one interesting aside, this is the exact same reason that protests no longer have the effect or meaning that they used to. During things such as the social rights movement organizing and getting your message out was really hard. Imagine trying to organize people when your biggest form of advertising something would be either calling people on a phone manually entering those 7-10 digits each time, by doing things like stapling a sign to a utility poll. And on top of this travel was also quite expensive. What that means is that every protester would generally represent far more people than himself simply because those other people were either unaware or unable to attend.
But today you can reach nearly every single interested individual, and organize with extreme efficiency due to the internet. And a domestic plane flight or bus is incredibly cheap. Because of this a million people protesting today don't necessarily represent all that many people other than themselves. So it creates quite the spectacle but has lost the very meaning that protests used to bring.
Maybe perfect coverage at smaller companies, but even then I kinda doubt it.
[1] - https://www.littler.com/nlrb-creates-right-use-corporate-e-m...
[2] - https://blogs.findlaw.com/technologist/2019/01/google-doesnt...
Google is increasingly clearly driven primarily, if not exclusively, by money + influence. An increasingly large number of voices have been calling for something like an ethics panel. And this was an appeasement to them and to those that feel Google puts its self interest ahead of ethics. And this panel would have been nothing but a self inflicted thorn for Google. They're not going to tell them how to make more money or gain more influence. Instead they would be more like to proposed Google temper their actions or even outright avoid certain potentially very profitable endeavors. And this would have been coming from a relatively authoritative group operating from within Google itself, making it quite difficult to ignore. And by the time they started making these recommendations it would have been difficult to torpedo the panel since it would appear that they were being torpedoed for what they said (which would be true), and that'd be some horrifically bad press for an already beleaguered company.
Now Google gets to not only pull the plug, but to also claim that claim they've tried to form an independent ethics panel of experts before but 'unfortunately' their employees were opposed to it. And at Google since we deeply care about the voices and opinions of our employees, we've decided that instituting such a panel is clearly not a productive idea. And they can now reference this incident anytime outside forces propose instituting third party panels. On top of this all they also get to gain some goodwill back from their employees. Those 2,000 (who undoubtedly have been part of every single one of the recent walkouts/etc) are going to think they had a real and genuine impact.
But I'd expect they miscalculated two issues. The first is only having 2,000 people show up on the outrage wagon. "Caving" to that many people does look quite peculiar. And I think the bigger mistake they're making is in miscalculating what they just did to those 2,000. This isn't going to appease them - it's going to give them a sense of entitlement and empowerment leading them to even more actively and aggressively protest against future actions.
They're not a traditional company in a couple of ways.
Human ethics is hard, messy and forever changing. Codifying human ethics into systems that can be tested and implemented are what politics and economic philosophy are all about. It's ungodly hard and not something that can be taken lightly.
Given that conservatives make up between 35-40% of American adults, and that the way Senators and Electoral College votes are allocated gives them more political power than just the number would suggest, I fear that this alienation by Silicon Valley will prove to be detrimental in the long-term.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/225074/conservative-lead-ideolo...
In the near term, I think this will cause more conservatives to embrace the need for a government AI ethics oversight panel as opposed to a Silicon Valley selected one.
There are numerous conservatives you could find to do the job who wouldn't have set off this controversy.
Vox's article implies Google was in the wrong. Reuters makes no such implications.
I have no opinion on the topic at hand, but I am saddened that journalism these days falls far too often into the trap of being lynch-mob. I would've preferred to see the objective and factual article win over the opinion piece.
What we really need is a solution to the problem of `building diverse expert opinion` that doesn't rely on a panel of flawed humans, because in the 21st century it's obvious the public will refuse to trust said expert panel when it conflicts with their worldview in an entirely unrelated way (eg a members view on climate change).
I don't think there's a point fighting against the public outcry on this, as many commenters here seek to do. People don't trust authority the same in the information age, and the world needs to adapt to that.
I guess it's good enough if it sparks discussion and a debate about ethic more generally
AI interactions with humans could be considered a class of medical experimentation as a thought experiment. Would have interesting output, and the system already exists...
Lovely.
the woman in question that runs the drone company is ex-military, so i would feel like she would be in favor of militarizing drones (albeit to be fair her drone company currently does not do that) and thus probably shouldn't be on the board in the first place
If there is no one on the board with the relevant knowledge and experience to competently represent a given use case, then the board will likely be unable to produce results relevant to such use cases. For example, if I form a board to hash out software version control system best practices but actively exclude experts on distributed VCS such as git and mercurial, then the resulting "best practices" are unlikely to prove useful for anyone actually using a DVCS in reality.
My point here is that excluding her almost certainly won't actually do anything to prevent the development of militarized AI. Rather, it will simply reduce the likelihood that anything the board puts out has influence on such matters.
There is more than one way to do something; the repercussions of those pathways may differ significantly.
The military will use drone warfare regardless of what a group of Google employees think. The US military is in dire need of ethics in AI [1]
[0] "Summary of Information Regarding U.S. Counterterrorism Strikes Outside Areas of Active Hostilities" [PDF] https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Press%20Release...
[1] "Does the U.S. Face an AI Ethics Gap?" https://www.rand.org/blog/2019/01/does-the-us-face-an-ai-eth...
... or somebody with a reputation of unethical behavior being on an ethics committee.
The Heritage Foundation literally falsified studies to go after LGBT people and claim they are unfit to have children. This isn't just about being ignorant of the facts or having behavior that proves you to be unqualified. This is about being completely counterproductive to the goals of the committee. That is exactly like having a flat-Earther on a space exploration committee. Furthermore, this inane argument about intellectual diversity to have ignorant people on an expert panel applies just as well to flat-Earth believers as it does to the Heritage Foundation.
>...rational people can have the same inputs...
Not everyone is equally well informed and well intentioned.
Resorting to ostracisation is proof that your point of view is unreasonable, which then makes their point of view seem more reasonable as there is no counter.
This society seems obsessed with the idea of ostracisation and deplatforming its ultimately a breeding group for fascism and bigotry.