Hacker News Reader

Comment by baylearn | Hacker News Reader

Agree with this point:

Sixthly, moral and ethics are set arbitrarily. The U.S. domestic politics dominate every discussion. At this very moment, thousands of Uyghurs are put into concentration camps based on computer vision algorithms invented by this community, and nobody seems even remotely to care. Adding a "broader impact" section at the end of every people will not make this stop. There are huge shitstorms because a researcher wasn't mentioned in an article. Meanwhile, the 1-billion+ people continent of Africa is virtually excluded from any meaningful ML discussion (besides a few Indaba workshops).

View on HN

Maybe I am misunderstanding but... Why does a community need a moral stance on external issues? If everyone is there to do/learn/advance machine learning, isn't that the end of it? It isn't their purpose to engage with Chinese or other issues.

Edit: I think it makes sense to have a stance on Machine Learning moral issues in a machine learning group. I just don't think you need to have a stance on every issue ever.

I say this as someone always a bit frustrated that HN and Reddit etc are very US centric.

If a community has a stance on US politics which interact with it only incidentally — which the community very much does have, to the point of distraction, it is alleged — then the community can damn well afford to have a stance on international politics when the advancements the community builds are key tools in building the engines of tyrannical repression.

I think it's fine to take a stance on things central to the groups main function: don't supply ML Tech for immoral use. But beyond that? That's a lot of issues you need to make stances on before you can actually do any machine learning work...

This issue isn't beyond that. The question is how a commitment to not supply ML tech for immoral use is compatible with supplying it to a country that's genociding the Uighurs.

> don't supply ML Tech for immoral use. But beyond that?

There's a lot to that and it goes beyond the scope of what researchers can handle by themselves. It's an effort that involves more than just the researchers, though they will take a central role.

For one thing, how do you evaluate whether a usage is "immoral"? How do you enforce correct usage? These are difficult questions with multifaceted answers which no one has yet elucidated (yes, it has to be more than "I'll know it when I see it").

This is exactly my point. You can get general agreement to "do no evil". But every step you take to be specific makes the amount of discussion and detail exponentially more difficult. So you can't have a specific stance on everything. You either take a specific stance on a small number of issues central to the community or a general stance, or you spend all your time creating and amending stances and do nothing else.

> Maybe I am misunderstanding but... Why does a community need a moral stance on external issues? If everyone is there to do/learn/advance machine learning, isn't that the end of it? It isn't their purpose to engage with Chinese or other issues.

Because its wrong to write-off the mistreatment of other human beings as an external issue. It never is: we're all human and we all share the same planet.

So any group anywhere needs to have a stance on every injustice everywhere? Isn't that exhausting?

You just need to take a stance on injustice classes, after that its simply classification. Surely you can muster that much moral effort?

Sorry, what's a class in this context I'm more than happy to say something like "injustice everywhere is bad and we should oppose it and not let our technology be used to support it". But I feel that's a bit less than people expect?

> Isn't that exhausting?

Eventually, but this is a unique time right now. People are paying attention to injustice.

I would say that much of these "stances" are inauthentic and done just for PR reasons. We'll see who is being genuine and who is phony soon enough.

No, people are paying attention to some injustice. They don't give a damn about other injustices unless they can wrap those back into one of their causes. They'll visit Native Americans when its something about environment, but ignore them when it comes to police violence.

That's quite a stretch from taking a stance on the ways the products you are developing might be weaponized. The discussion is more analogous to groups making cruise missiles and the like.

Of course it's exhausting. It would be less exhausting if more people paid attention to these things instead of viewing it as someone else's problem.

That's not true though is it? The more people get involved, the more opinions you need to weigh and the more consensus you need to get to even 1 stance.

Getting 10 people to agree a stance on the 10 issues facing you is much much easier than getting 7bn people to agree on the billions of possible issues in the known universe.

That's sort of my whole point: eithe limit the issues you have to take a stance on, or watch the amount of time taken up with stances grown exponentially.

It is true because there is no alternative. Dismissing the exponential growth and required time commitment won't make it go away, if anything it amplifies the problem and increases the number of discussion that need to happen in the end. If you have no consensus then the stance will just be taken for you by whoever screams the loudest, in modern times that is social media and advertising.

So you accept its impossible to do mathematically, But insist we still need to do it because we have no alternative? Doesn't this mean that no community can ever actually function beyond very small sizes? They will just get stuck answering infinite moral quandries?

I can't speak for what the best method of organizing for the ML community should be, but society at-large is already stuck answering these infinite moral quandaries.

So why are you insisting we do the impossible at either level?

Presumably actually working in a prison camp is actually exhausting.

How the technology you develop is used is an "external issue"? Ivory tower much?

Would you say the issues are more "rhizomatic"? ;)

> Why does a community need a moral stance on external issues?

Some communities choose to do so. Einstein, Szilard, Pauling (and others) formed the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists to argue against nuclear weapons at the dawn of the Atomic era. And many scientists have taken a stand against nuclear weapons since then.

Their actions have, at least, influenced the proliferation of these weapons and informed the public about their dangers. Would you argue that it wasn't "their business?"

One could make a case that machine learning has negative consequences/possibilities that are similar in scope to nuclear weapons. The people who work with and understand machine learning are in the best position to take a stand against abuse of these technologies. I would say it's their responsibility to speak out, otherwise a despot will do it for them.

> Their actions have, at least, influenced the proliferation of these weapons

How? The number of nuclear weapons was growing rapidly until the 80s, to the point where dozens of bombs were aimed at single targets.

> informed the public about their dangers

Seeing the effects of bombs informed the public, not a committee

> How? The number of nuclear weapons was growing rapidly until the 80s.

It's hard to assess their impact, but that doesn't mean it was insignificant. Could we have been in a worse position? Definitely. Someone might have "pushed the button" by now were it not for decades of work from organizations (some of whom consisted of scientists) lobbying against nuclear weapons and their proliferation.

> Seeing the effects of bombs informed the public, not a committee

The nuclear tests demonstrated that the weapons work. There are other effects such as "nuclear winter" that have not been (and hopefully never will be) demonstrated. Sadly, because of Chernobyl, we do have examples of what happens to contaminated areas. Understanding and communicating the effects beyond "blast radius" is best done by scientists and health experts.

Not every community does. The ML community generally believes they're obligated to have moral stances on external issues because they believe machine learning has great potential to cause harm if not properly controlled.

Thanks. I guess I can admire the intent and the recognition of consequences of important tech. Honestly though, I'm glad I'm not responsible for organising that sort of response...

The world is changing vigorously. Trust is breaking down domestically and internationally. For some, it was never trust but an oppressive stability. People are anxious about who they are dealing with because who rises to power now will determine which subcultures will enjoy great political prominence and who will have their voices silenced in the near future. The battle is over values, standards, and world views. A lot is at stake.

Technology is the ultimate medium now. Technologies like machine learning shapes discussions like money and GDP figures continues to shape discussions about the state of societies the world over.

Ignore the strategically important position that technology holds now and in the future of our society at your own peril. To be so willfully blind to the changing times, I can’t imagine a less engaged worldview.

If your research is used to create such ill that on net throwing every researcher in your field into the sea would be a lesser evil the question of external issues at least deserves a look lest you miss an opportunity to avert harm.

Note I do not support tossing ml researchers into the sea and lots of industries are worse.

> thousands of Uyghurs are put into concentration camps based on computer vision algorithms invented by this community

I saw this repeated frequently in the last few days, and I think I've missed some important info. I know that China uses face recognition for surveillance purpose, and that it detains a substantial share of the Uighur population for supposed violations of the law. I miss a link between the two: is China using AI to detect who is Uighur and arrest him/ her for this very fact? Does anyone have more info?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveill...

Thank you, but this article seems to say that the technology is used to track Uighurs (I suppose for the reason that some of them have been engaging in terrorist activities) and not to incarcerate them.

Despite the scale- which we considered worrying in itself and for understandable reasons- this seems to be an automated version of "I suddenly see a lot of mafioso-looking guys congregating here, let's keep an eye to see if there's anything dodgy going on"- which has been practiced with skilled eyes since forever. And it's a whole different thing from "if I see anyone looking Jewish I'll round them up and send them to a concentration camp".

> Thank you, but this article seems to say that the technology is used to track Uighurs (I suppose for the reason that some of them have been engaging in terrorist activities) and not to incarcerate them.

That's a weird suggestion. It's undisputed that they have put millions into detention camps, so are you suggesting they all have been engaging in "terrorist activities"? So why suggest ("suppose" ) that they have been engaging in terrorist activities?

> Despite the scale- which we considered worrying in itself and for understandable reasons- this seems to be an automated version of "I suddenly see a lot of mafioso-looking guys congregating here, let's keep an eye to see if there's anything dodgy going on"- which has been practiced with skilled eyes since forever. And it's a whole different thing from "if I see anyone looking Jewish I'll round them up and send them to a concentration camp".

The article literally said they are looking for (tracking) Uighurs because of their ethnic appearance. That is looking for "Jewish" , not looking "mafioso-looking" in your example above

> That's a weird suggestion. It's undisputed that they have put millions into detention camps

No, the article talks about "tracking" Uighurs, not rounding them up. The Uighurs are 25 million and mostly live in the Xinjiang region, so there is no real need of AI to round them up. If what you want is to find them and imprison them, you can just go in any street of Kashgar: they make up 5/6 of the population.

What the linked article says is:

"The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on their appearance and keeps records of their comings and goings for search and review. " (Italic mine)

> The article literally said they are looking for (tracking) Uighurs because of their ethnic appearance.

No, the article says they're tracking Uighurs through their ethnic appearance. Not "because" of it.

> That is looking for "Jewish" , not looking "mafioso-looking" in your example above

The point is whether you're looking for a visible trait because that is in and by itself the fault (and so after detecting it you immediately proceed with an arrest), or because it is somewhat predictive of something else, and it merely helps in narrowing your search.

It's not only incarcerating them it's ripping the organs out of their still living bodies to give to more wealthy factions of society.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com