Government audit of AI finds no AI
venturebeat.com
venturebeat.com
In my town there was a local scandal of sorts where some people got exposed as promoting white nationalism but then they were called white supremacists in all the reporting.
I got some very aggressive responses when I suggested that Japan is historically very Japanese nationalist but that doesn’t mean they think Japanese people are a supreme race.
There must be some sliding scale correlating nuance with hostility, it makes things very confusing to understand and discuss. I’ve even seen people lately claim that striving to always do better and improve your life or maintain a high standard of living or make a better life for your kids is actually racist!
That being said, does anyone know what they actually mean by white supremacist in this article?
>In April 2020, news broke that Banjo CEO Damien Patton ... pled guilty to involvement in a 1990 shooting attack on a synagogue in Tennessee.
The former is self-concern, the latter is dividing the world into whites and non-whites. similar to japanese people making a distinction between japanese and non-japanese, it is not automatically supremacist, but being concerned for the survival of your race (or preferring politics that keeps your nation and your race aligned) does seem awfully close to thinking that it’s better to keep your race in charge.
so to me, i would need someone to explain how being white nationalist is distinct from white supremacy. is a nationalist just concerned with whites becoming a minority? why, if not the assumption of superiority?
The next question though is when someone claims race nationalism, are they being sincere or just trying trying to make their race supremacy more marketable?
There is a difference here - one can convert and change their religion (not so for genetic origin…) but it’s too similar in my opinion and shouldn’t get the “acceptable” pass that it does.
Oh, it absolutely happens. We have whole flame-wars about it.
If we reversed your statement to "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for black children.", a reasonable reader would assume the speaker thought said group was being persecuted, not that they desired supremacy.
Its entirely reasonable for someone who holds that belief to be concerned about racial persecution without the desire for racial supremacy.
That's only reasonable because of a common understanding that black people have been persecuted because of their race. No such reasonable, common understanding exists for white people in America; it is at best an unreasonable and niche understanding espoused by people who believe they're being persecuted by Jews and Asians (whether "Tiger Family" or "H1-B”).
So you think minorities tend to be treated fairly, and complaints about racism and prejudice are mostly without merit? Not just in the US, but globally, e.g. in India [1], China [2], or the Middle East [3].
Or do you think that whites will be the exception? While other minorities were maligned preceding their persecution, whites are showered with universal praise, so there is no resentment or animus they should fear from any group, now or in the future.
[1] Human rights activists said that the moves to change Kashmir’s status were only the first steps in a broader plan to erode Kashmir’s core rights and seed the area with non-Kashmiris, altering the demographics and eventually destroying its character. Previous laws barred outsiders from owning property. - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/world/asia/india-pakistan...
[2] Decline of Cantonese in younger generations [..] In elementary and secondary schools, the medium of instruction is mandated by law to be Mandarin. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangzhou_Television_Cantonese...
[3] the Treaty of Lausanne set the boundaries of modern Turkey and made no such provision, leaving Kurds with minority status in all of the new countries. Recent history of the Kurds includes numerous genocides and rebellions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurds
It's all very peculiar to me but I've only been around for a third of a century.
> Patton pled guilty to involvement in a 1990 shooting attack on a synagogue in Tennessee
Doesn't seem very ambiguous to me.
Is the difference enough to warrant a distinction? Merriam Webster doesn’t bother to make one.
The definition of white supremacist is quite clear:
> “supporting the belief that white people constitute a superior race, typically to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups.”
There’s nothing that necessitates actively claiming the belief. After all, Jim Crow laws were enforced under the guise of separate but equal, but nobody would say they weren’t white supremacist.
White nationalism is a particular expression of white supremacism.
I'm having trouble seeing how you can look at that and claim well maybe it's not really white supremacy.
2. Yes Japan is very racist. Other countries can be racist too.
3. You are making up straw man arguments:
>I’ve even seen people lately claim that striving to always do better and improve your life or maintain a high standard of living or make a better life for your kids is actually racist!
Source?
4. If you find yourself spending a lot of time trying to argue you are a not racist...
So, Gandhi was fascist?
-The state of Utah makes some kind of contract with Banjo utilizing AI to improve public safety
-Banjo received a whole load of money and
-Did absolutely nothing with it.
-It took the auditors a whole year to work that out.
Am I being too harsh? Can anyone fill in the gaps?
Not too off topic: since the 1980s, I have referred to symbolic AI (expert systems, non-neural NLP, etc.), neural networks, and now deep learning models as “AI” and use AGI when referring to progress towards “real AI”. I only mention this because so many people now use the term machine instead. After 40 years of using the term “AI” I don’t feel like changing.
re: the article: the real story is a (allegedly, from the article) cheating contractor selling snake oil. Part of the life cycle of machine learning models is the evaluation of checking that the model stays valid in time, looking for data drift in the original training and test data, etc. That these models NEVER passed verification, is repugnant to me.
> In what many are calling the future of the automotive industry, a revolutionary driverless car unveiled Tuesday requires zero functional technology to generate profit. “While many companies in the autonomous vehicle sector have unveiled models to generate funding with little feasible technology, what sets X-Course apart is that we make money without any self-driving technology whatsoever and absolutely no plans to ever develop it,” said X-Course CEO Patrick Medill, adding that his company had shattered industry experts’ previous belief that companies could only succeed in the self-driving space by at least pretending to develop new technologies.
In short, this idea that public servants are ineffective has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it's also a meme that is incredibly convenient for legislators and lobbyists, because it's so easy for them to co-opt for their own gain.
This is spot on and something I’ve also felt when working close to government.
> But in a surprise twist, an audit and report released last week found no bias in the algorithm because there was no algorithm to assess in the first place.
The not-so-secret dirty secret is that "AI" for many or most companies today is akin to "sex" for high-school students:
Many claim to have it, but few actually do.
Beyond that I think that branding things as "AI" in the way we do today gets around the John McCarthy truism: "As soon as it works, no one calls it AI any more."[2]
1. https://twitter.com/matvelloso/status/1065778379612282885 2. https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/138907-john-mccarthy/fu...