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> 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?

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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"?

Thanks for the references. I will check them out once I get a chance. I do know one of these papers and from my understanding the modeling bias is on underrepresented features or the long tail, which again can be thought as a data problem that can be solved with better data collection.

I do agree that in the real world datasets are often biased because they represent the real world... and there are indeed modeling approaches to address such issues. (e.g., designing a loss function to up/down weight of certain types of examples). There's nothing new about this, it's been known in ML for decades.

marshmallow_12 1946 days ago

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.

> 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 1946 days ago

>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.

> if you're saying i'm a racist

I wasn't, sorry if that's what you interpreted.

> The status quo however should be changed by people,not people with machines

I'm not sure I understand what this means. People/companies own machines (and ML models) and use them. So shouldn't we make sure that the machines' decisions align with what people/companies _want_ them to do? (i.e. that the people's ethics align with the ML model's ethical consequences; I'm 100% sure that people who deploy "racist models" don't do it on purpose or out of malice)

> You can't call something ethical just because you think it should be; it must be argued out

On one hand this sounds like a strawman. No one thinks that something is ethical because someone randomly declared it so.

On the other hand... ethics are a human construct, and will continue to evolve as our culture evolves over decades and centuries. Shouldn't we construct ML models which are flexible in that they can align themselves with the ethics we collectively decide? We don't know how to do that yet!

> Using AI to shut out some more of that argument will only create a universal standard, not necessarily the correct one.

You seem to be under the impression that the fields of AI ethics is dedicated to brainwashing people into some particular unpopular moral philosophy. This is simply untrue. Within the field of AI ethics there is a lot of diversity of thought and disagreement on how human morals should be "encoded" so that AI can "align" with these morals. And I'm using the plural of morals because obviously there will never be a humanity-wide consensus on ethics, and if AI is to be deployed in the world it needs to reflect this diversity.

Here's an example of AI people disagreeing if you don't believe me: https://jacobbuckman.com/2021-02-15-fair-ml-tools-require-pr...

marshmallow_12 1946 days ago

Ethics and morals don't exist. Full stop.

Codifying ethics perpetuates falsehood. Every single generation in history believed that the "had it" only to be denigrated as hopelessly misguided by the next generation. We are making the same mistake, only less people are killed right now, so it looks like we are more successful. Remember the Pacifism of the inter-war years? it bred fascism. The pendulum swings.

AI ethics cannot hope to remain in style for long, while they will almost certainly exist for far too long. Accepted standards of 2 years ago, are already out of date.

I'm lost for a solution.

I do think that the less AI is claimed to be ethical, the less it will be trusted, which is the best cure i can think of. Honesty is the basis of the whole of scientific inquiry, and is probably scarcer in google's ethics research department than anywhere else in the building. (programs don't run if the math's wrong, economics as well)

fock 1946 days ago

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

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.