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Comment by Eyas | Hacker News Reader

You can blame users for expecting AI to solve everything, but that doesn't mean we give Engineers and Researchers free reign to package, publish, and distribute AI software that falls short of its promise (and introduces dangerous patterns along the way).

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>that doesn't mean we give Engineers and Researchers free reign to package, publish, and distribute AI software that falls short of its promise

And who is going to monitor and enforce this? You?

Ideally we would have a professional organization, like literally every other discipline that calls itself Engineering, both to educate, license, and enforce ethical and safety norms, and to support engineers asked to violate those boundaries by providing a public avenue for grievance against companies trying to behave unethically or unsafely.

Perhaps by "give free reign to [x]" they just mean "not consider morally liable for [doing x]"?

Trying to build in safeguards before deploying anything is an unreasonable standard, and would severely cripple the good work that many of us are trying to do.

I have worked on crime analysis software to help people. It is important to me to minimize the number of people getting hurt. And when the data shows that most people getting in fights on the subway are black, what then? What would you have us do?

We should dig deeper and find real solutions, not delude ourselves that these problems exist.

And the world isn't as rosy as we might imagine it is. There's are some really uncomfortable truths out there. But I think we should confront and understand these things.

Not relevant to my point, which is responding to "And who is going to monitor and enforce this? You?".

My comment is not arguing for or against the claim that the software should or shouldn't have whatever safeguards. It was extremely limited in its scope.

So, I'm not sure why you chose my comment to respond to with your "darkly hinting" comment mr. "apostacy".

At a minimum, the engineers and researchers. Deploying an AI sentencing model or AI lie detector should be treated with the same seriousness as deploying a new train or bridge; engineers shouldn't be willing to sign off on such a thing without strong, well-founded reasons to believe it won't hurt anyone.

Let's stop calling them engineers then.

Certainly, but it's important to acknowledge the distinction. If people think that Tay turned racist because Microsoft engineers encoded their racial bias, or even just programmed it poorly, they're going to be tricked by a succession of new projects claiming they fixed the biases from the last one.

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