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Comment by vorhemus | Hacker News Reader

I know it's an unpopular opinion but I have the feeling that most of these "Ethics in AI" movements are either pure marketing or an easy way in for free rider into the hyped field of AI even though they have little to contribute except shallow papers or promoting their political agenda.

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"Ethics in AI" have deep implications for improving our AI systems. For example, bias in training data has an outcome of the performance of a system. Ethics in AI movements looks deeper into this process and does improve performance in AI systems.

Also because AI deeply interacts with human systems today at a large scale (think youtube recommendation algorithm) it will also have a large affect on society.

So not sure what "political" agenda there is there except acknowledging the obvious.

Google's AI ethics board in 2019, for example, was killed for explicitly political reasons. Many AI ethics commentators, including two of the board members, indicated that Kay Coles James should not be permitted to participate in AI ethics discussions because of her politics.

If attributes such as age or gender are strong features for certain dependent variables that improve the predictive performance of a model, then it must be allowed to use these variables. For example, it is well known that colorectal cancer is more prevalent in men over the age of 50 - so a statistical model used to allocate free colorectal exams would favor old men. Is that discriminatory? Likewise, for any given variable, one will find certain features that favor men or women, young or old; finding these dependencies is precisely the point behind statistical models.

On the other hand, if a model fails on certain populations because not enough training data including them was input because they're historically seen as a less important subgroup, then you've simply encoded your societal biases in your model. Understanding that difference and pointing out problem spots like that is a great job for an ethical AI researcher.

As you know, most AI is curve fitting or representational learning. So the question is, is the statistical distribution your model learning a static one, bound by natural laws like physics or biology, or are they human systems with changing distributions where the machine itself can cause effects and impacts. Your example is of the former, while the ML model predicting 'success at a job' or 'credit worthyness' falls in the latter category. The latter category is harder in every way and has ethical concerns because it necessarily can change (or usually keeps the same) the man made social systems.

As if high level AI researchers would not be aware of the issue of bias. The whole field is about studying bias, really.

I think that typical CS education is really narrow. Developing technology without even considering its ethical consequences does not absolve you of moral responsibility for those consequences. There's hundreds of years of thought on this subject, but unfortunately that thought is generally found in the "arts" so willful ignorance thereof seems to be a badge of honour in some CS circles.

In my opinion companies create such departments to stave off government regulation, by pretending to already do all they can about "Ethics in AI" without government intervention.

If those people were hired for that, they failed spectacularly in their jobs.

In a wider sense, the whole "Ethics in whatever" thing seems to just be a power grab.

For example my country has Ethics groups debating Corona measures. I live in a country that theoretically is a democracy. If "ethics experts" get to make decisions that control our lives, why bother with democracy?

Aren't most (all?) modern democracies some flavour of representative democracy?

We elect politicians who appoint bureaucrats who hire staff to run departments, who'll then take advice from committees and expect advisers.

It reads to me like you mean to imply direct democracy, which I suspect would be some magnitudes of order more terrifying than the incompetent fools and puppets presently steering the ships.

It's true that in theory it should be possible to elect another government that chooses not to delegate to the "Ethics Experts". I am not claiming we live in a totalitarian regime because the government decided to consult ethics experts.

It just seems that in this case, ethics are exactly what the people should be voting on - the value system of the society they want. So delegating to an ethics committee is at best propaganda and making excuses for not doing what the people want.

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