[tinyhouse]

I think you're very wrong. Yes, there's hype around ML etichs. Trends in ML come and go. Do you see any VC investing in etichs in ML startups? As I said, it's an esoteric academic field.

How do you even compare between the two? MSR closed an entire lab out of the blue of some great researchers who didn't do anything wrong. Here you have two employees going against their company and shitting on it publicly. The only researchers who will not want to work at Google after this saga are the ones Google better off without.

[manux]

> Do you see any VC investing in etichs in ML startups?

Perhaps you should pay less attention to VCs and more attention to governments and academic institutions, who for example in Canada are investing 10s of millions of dollars into AI ethics/FATE/AI for good research.

Sometimes, the point isn't just to make money, it's to actually improve humanity.

[tinyhouse]

The point is not just making money. The point is solving real world problems. AI ethics focus on esoteric problems that don't solve any real world problems. AI ethics research has very little impact if at all on real issues.

[manux]

> AI ethics focus on esoteric problems that don't solve any real world problems

I'm not sure now what you think AI ethics research is. Do you think systemic discrimination is not a real world problem?

[tinyhouse]

Systemic discrimination is indeed a real world problem. That's exactly the problem. AI ethics doesn't help solving systemic discrimination for the simple reason that AI is not causing systemic discrimination.

AI systems are trained on data. There's an abundance of English data which is why systems are often biased to work better on English. Similarly, an image recognition system might be biased if you don't provide it with data representing all demographics. There's nothing new about this and you don't need AI ethics research to solve these issue.

Focusing on AI ethics thinking it has impact on systemic discrimination, instead of focusing on real issues that cause systemic discrimination, is my main issue with all of this.

[manux]

> you don't need AI ethics research to solve these issue.

what are you talking about? This is exactly the kind of research that's classified as AI ethics. "Solving these issues".

> instead of focusing on real issues that cause systemic discrimination

Identifying which ML models _actually running in production_ cause systemic discrimination (e.g. as you mentioned poor image recognition, bail predictions, etc.) is exactly focusing on real issues that... cause systemic discrimination.

> AI is not causing systemic discrimination

This is simply not true. Bad ML models have an impact on systemic discrimination right now, in that they amplify it.

> instead of focusing on real issues that cause systemic discrimination

It's a fallacy to think we can't do both, there's enough humans. Both making better AI and making better societal systems.

[tinyhouse]

> Identifying which ML models _actually running in production_ cause systemic discrimination (e.g. as you mentioned poor image recognition, bail predictions, etc.) is exactly focusing on real issues that... cause systemic discrimination.

There's nothing systemic about these issues. I already mentioned it's a data problem. Nothing new. It's very easy to build a fair image recognition system by representing all demographics. And even then AI systems will continue to make mistakes. Some AI ethics researchers cherry pick on those mistakes to justify their entire research.

[manux]

> It's very easy to build a fair image recognition system by representing all demographics.

I wish it was easy. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated, as it tends to be [1,2,3,4].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.03058

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05248

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.11600

[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.12101

> Some AI ethics researchers cherry pick on those mistakes to justify their entire research.

This is a weird statement. This is like saying police cherry pick on criminals to justify their existence.

Do you not believe in harm reduction? Don't you think some part of AI research should be dedicated to minimizing how many "AI systems will continue to make mistakes"?

[marshmallow_12]

why on earth should i care any more or less about systemic racism just because some charlie tells me it's unethical? Inventing ethics for machines helps cure exactly nothing. Only that i may be deemed by a machine to be an inferior human and less worthy than a "superior" being. Pushing technology that enforces your ideology is a horrible idea.

[manux]

> Pushing technology that enforces your ideology is a horrible idea.

But that's what we're all doing. By being "against AI ethics", you are effectively pushing technology that enforces _your_ ideology.

Your ideology seems to happen to be different than mine, but you would be naive to think that the status quo is somehow "ideology-free".

Do you still think it's a horrible idea? Try being a bit less deontological and a bit more consequentialist. Doing nothing has consequences too.

[marshmallow_12]

>Your ideology seems to happen to be different than mine.

if you're saying i'm a racist, i'm not. Is everything that some people say are racist actually racist? No. Is racism a problem? absolutely!

The status quo, however, should be changed by people,not people with machines. Doing nothing, that involves not using obscure algorithms to force people to think a certain way is better, in my opinion. You can't call something ethical just because you think it should be; it must be argued out. Using AI to shut out some more of that argument will only create a universal standard, not necessarily the correct one.

[fock]

So, could you tell me for example, what this relatively often cited paper solves or where it's actually applied to solve a real world problem? https://openreview.net/forum?id=Sy2fzU9gl

[tinyhouse]

I don't know this paper but it doesn't matter. I didn't say only ethics in AI research doesn't solve real world problems. It's a research field mostly for academia not industry IMHO. Obv many ethics researchers would disagree with me on this and that's OK. Partly because they would rather have the option to work at Google with FAANG salary vs a middle tier university in the middle of nowhere.

[pyrale]

You seem to have an already strongly formed opinion on the topic, and it seems it would be very hard for people to have you even acknowledge that they may have valuable diverging views.

Starting from that point, what do you expect from a discussion? What kind of information would lead you to think again about the situation?

[tinyhouse]

I'm happy to change my view if someone shows real world issues AI ethics research is helping in solving.

[xiphias2]

I'm much more scared about the singularity (AI safety) in the ethics field than models having bias, while the models are improving accuracy over time.

People say that AGI is still far away, but I haven't seen any results of being able to contain the harm AGI can do to us humans.

What these researchers are doing is the easy part of AI ethics.

[jack_riminton]

Why would a VC invest in an ethics startup?

How much money something can make is not a good arbiter of how important it is

e.g. the hippocratic oath