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by nickvincent
1764 days ago
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It just isn't true that "The point of ethics is to shame people or practices" or that ethics has "no value production". In general, a primary factor reviewers in computing conferences are asked to consider is the degree to which a submission make a "substantial contribution" to the community. What is or isn't a substantial contribution is subjective and entirely dependent on the prevailing ethical perspectives in various communities. Papers -- a key unit of academic progress (for better or worse) are entirely subject to concerns of ethics. Certainly, there are interesting argument around how much time and paper space should be spent on speculating about negative impacts, and people are having those conversations. The fact that ethics is "trending" is because more researchers would like tackle ethical challenges explicitly, instead of falling back on the default of a given community. For instance, here is a paper that quantitatively (with reproducibility!) analyzes the values in ML papers. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15590 This is one way to have a very empirically-grounded discussion of the topic. IMO, many researchers can and do debate topics of ethics in AI, and in doing so move the field forward (and increase likelihood that computing will have more positive impacts than negative ones). |
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The trouble isn't that ethics is trendings, it is that it is happening in 2021.
Rant: The world has gotten poisoned by social media, and that has enabled screwball US academic philosophy to leaked out. In the current climate, philosophers are either cracked or cancelled. Most people who wax lyrical on ethics in AI (and basically anybody who actually calls themselves "an ethicists") are insufferable.
To think about ethics in technology you need to step outside the narrow confines of our current cultural assumptions of right and wrong, because they're are prone to fashion and hysteria. Right now, if you try to do that you run the risk of ending your career.