There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’

https://onezero.medium.com/theres-no-such-thing-as-ethical-a-i-38891899261d

by wellokthen • 6 years ago

40 54 6 years ago

onezero.medium.com

kragen2• 6 years ago

https://archive.fo/tbGNL

But it quotes Evgeny Morozov as if he were something other than a notorious troll, so don't bother reading it.

herbfan• 6 years ago

Why? The article is fine.

This is the fact that there is no such thing as ethical A.I, any more than there’s a single set of instructions spelling how to be good — and that our current fascinated focus on the “inside” of automated processes only takes us further away from the contested human contexts within which values and consequences actually exist.

This rings true. A.I. is just another tool in the computational toolbox. We need expert practitioners just like we need expert statisticians, mathematicians, programmers, doctors, etc. Do all those other disciplines also have an ethics problem?

kragen2• 6 years ago

There are ways to interpret the statement you've quoted in which it's obvious (if by "AI" we just mean "deep learning" or something), and ways to interpret it in which it's just wrong (if by "AI" we mean what people usually mean by "AI", namely AGI). You seem to be interpreting it in the first sense, and additionally you have a considerably more jaundiced view of how widely applicable deep learning is likely to turn out to be than some of its prominent practitioners — Karpathy famously called it "Software 2.0," which to me seems perhaps a bit optimistic.

As far as I can tell, though, the article doesn't say anything both true and nonobvious, which to me is a necessary but not sufficient criterion for it being worth reading. Reliance on Morozov was just a particularly glaring sign of this.

avmich2• 6 years ago

I think the article can serve as a good opinion and an introduction to the subject. Certain ideas seem questionable enough - maybe the matter is inherently more complex than something which can be put in an article.

Does, for example, author argue that something which human can do the machine cannot?

di4na• 6 years ago

Not really but he would be right if he did.

He argues that deep down the goal of the machine is to take decisions in humans contexts. Which by definition only can make sense for a human.

Ofc we can argue about a fictional theoretical human like machine to the point it is undifferentiated from a human... but then we created a human. Not a machine anymore.

avmich2• 6 years ago

Not a machine anymore.

It's like failing to see the difference between human and machine. One can argue then there is no difference right now. So?

It's a time-honored discussion if machine can do all a human can. On the other hand, religion also has an associated long-living discussion. If we decide according to our beliefs, we should invent another mechanism - something other than reasoning, because it's not used here - to get to agreement.

whymauri• 6 years ago

This is the belief that A.I. codes are recipes for automating ethics itself; and that once a broad consensus around such codes has been achieved, the problem of determining an ethically positive future direction for computer code will have begun to be solved.

I can think of literally nobody who believes this. I don't think anyone working in ethical AI would pretend that ethics can be "solved."

willberman• 6 years ago

For any point of view on AI, I can probably find a decent number of non technical people who hold that POV. Technical illiteracy is a significant problem imo.

curiousgal• 6 years ago

There always seems to be a disconnect between tech philosophers and the technology they write about. Maybe they should try to actually work on 'AI' before preaching about it.

To confirm your point a simple example is when working on an automated classifier for loan applications. One way to make the system more ethical, that is less descriminating based on certain features like race or gender, is to often lower the threshold of acceptance for the marginalized classes and raise it for the other ones. Anyone who had to do that sees how it poses a dilemma of equality vs fairness or even fairness vs cost. So indeed, ethics cannot be solved.

msla• 6 years ago

One way to make the system more ethical, that is less descriminating based on certain features like race or gender, is to often lower the threshold of acceptance for the marginalized classes and raise it for the other ones.

Or don't input those values at all. Is it even legal for a human to take those things into consideration? Regardless, the AI morally shouldn't, so there's no reason for the data to even be in the input.

billjings• 6 years ago

This seems to be a limitation of the tool, yes?

RobPfeifer2• 6 years ago

How would you do that without including a variable that raises a flag with the regulators? There are ways to improve access to credit for marginalized classes but this is generally done by adding variables that are independent of those related to protected classes.

behnamoh2• 6 years ago

A few points:

1. I mean I'm all in favor of ethics, but it's like saying "I believe in God/god". Everyone seems to have their own interpretation of it. When people are talking about ethics/God/etc., how can they be sure that they're talking about the same thing? Centuries of debating over what is "ethical" has got us no where. Kant got close, but then there are caveats to his definition of ethics, too.

2. Who says AI should behave according to "our" ethics (whatever those are)? Sooner or later, with the emergence of ASI (artificial super intelligence) we'll have to accept the superior form of consciousness the ASI is. Expecting it to behave according to our rules is like monkeys asking us not to take away all the bananas because for them, it's unethical.

3. Even without AI, people have all sorts of biases and prejudices against certain ethnicities/races/colors/etc. You're not happy with the results that AI provides? Fine, hire some people instead and see where that leads you. The only thing you lose is the higher performance of AI.

4. Expecting AI systems to have no bias (while employees replaced by the AI certainly were prone to bias) is equivalent to expecting technology to change our world for the better. That doesn't always happen. You think smartphones are necessarily a good thing? Think about where they produce those gadgets and how they treat the workers.

5. At the end of the day, companies will stick with whatever "works" for them, regardless of what label we put on it (good/bad/ethical/fair/...). If it adds value, then most of the time it's enough. If being ethical (according to some definition) doesn't bring in more cash, companies are unlikely to invest in it. At least, with explainable AI, there is benefits for the firm to improve the accuracy of the AI in the long term. But pushing companies to adopt some ethical/unbiased/fair AI that doesn't add value for them is itself unethical (in my book).

yamrzou4• 6 years ago

What if it turns out there is reason people discriminate using those features (for example that people of race X tend to fail repaying their loans), and the classifier just learned that reason from the data. Why should we be expected to "fix" the reality for the classifier?

joe_the_user2• 6 years ago

No one would say that they believe in automating ethics if you pin them down and ask them honestly. But lots of institutional speak still talks as that's the goal. Some portion of Nick Bostrom's book effectively argues for something like that, for example.

coddle-hark2• 6 years ago

Not sure what the author meant there but we do have a problem of offloading the ethical burden of our systems onto the algorithms themselves and it should be taken more seriously. Like when Google shipped an AI for moderating hate speech which turned out to be biased against minorities [1]. Google would have been sued if that bias had been coded in procedurally, but because they used "AI" their response was basically "we'll take another look at the training data". The damage caused is the same in both cases though, and it shouldn't take a team of independent researchers to prevent Google from shipping racist products.

[1] https://fortune.com/2019/08/16/google-jigsaw-perspective-rac...

ekianjo2• 6 years ago

The damage caused is the same in both cases though, and it shouldn't take a team of independent researchers to prevent Google from shipping racist products.

Your comment reads like "company X should not be shipping products with issues affecting users" - as long as it was not intentional and they take corrective actions, things are working as well as they can.

smegma2• 6 years ago

Forgive me for only reading the abstract.

The results show evidence of systematic racial bias in all datasets, as classifiers trained on them tend to predict that tweets written in African-American English are abusive at substantially higher rates.

Wouldn't we need to know the true rate of abusive tweets by race in order to conclude this? Is this addressed at all, e.g. with human labelled data, or am I mistaken in thinking this is necessary?

teapourer• 6 years ago

And yet, when it comes to the ways in which A.I. codes of ethics are discussed, a troubling tendency is at work even as the world wakes up to the field’s significance. This is the belief that A.I. codes are recipes for automating ethics itself; and that once a broad consensus around such codes has been achieved, the problem of determining an ethically positive future direction for computer code will have begun to be solved.

Is anyone actually claiming that AI programs will "automate ethics"? The post seems rather pointless.

nine_k• 6 years ago

If you need a refresher on the perils of ethical AI, Asimov's "Three laws of robotics" stories are as fresh as 60 years ago [1].

I'd like to remind that humans themselves are not that good at ethics, both in philosophy and in daily life; they are worse yet on agreeing what ethics to adhere to. You can imagine how well it could be automated then.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

mirimir3• 6 years ago

Yes, for sure.

Also see Ian Banks' "Culture" novels.

scollet2• 6 years ago

Good reference. I think "I Have No Mouth and Must Scream" is also standard material for futurist "AI" engineers.

Edit: on the contrary

mirimir3• 6 years ago

That is an extremely disturbing story.

joe_the_user2• 6 years ago

There are a couple of different issues.

1) The author's point. That we don't agree on what's ethical so how can we program it?

2) But also, today's AIs aren't mechanism for understanding and balancing a multitude of interests and requirements. They are effectively pattern recognition machines, matching data with categories (or outcomes or etc). So even if you had some criteria formulated, an AI couldn't really do that. I mean, if you true, unlimited intelligence, you might just say "decide like the US supreme court would" and the might be able to do. But we don't even have something that could remotely be challenged that we.

Animats• 6 years ago

Ethics for AI has roughly the same problems as ethics for corporations. That's not encouraging.

scollet2• 6 years ago

Not to mention fuzzy ownership interpretations. If it (the "AI") does something like incorrectly target a hospital instead of a bunker, who is responsible?

SpicyLemonZest2• 6 years ago

It kinda seems encouraging to me. Corporations are hardly perfect, but even the worst modern corporations don't go around committing genocide, in the way that bad corporations used to and modern governments still do from time to time. I think there's reason for optimism that we can learn better control strategies.

darawk• 6 years ago

Or ethics for humans, for that matter.

Causality1• 6 years ago

"Ethical AI" is just another buzzword. Companies are not ethical entities. They exist only to create profit and they will create the maximum amount of profit. Even laws and regulations only factor into it as numbers on a spreadsheet, and any profitable activity will continue as long as it generates maximum profit.

ganzuul2• 6 years ago

A univeraally useful question: What does it take to make it work?

In this case the AI will need to convince all of us to follow the ethical code it designs. It can do this by suppressing information or by making morally defensible decisions.

Having a good track-record of moral decisions key, so AIs need to be public persons and not subject to corporate secrecy.

mirimir3• 6 years ago

I love how William Gibson reveals Eunice in Agency.

I'd for sure love to be her friend.

ganzuul2• 6 years ago

I will need to read that. :)

yamrzou4• 6 years ago

Depending upon your priorities, your ethical views will inevitably be incompatible with those of some other people in a manner no amount of reasoning will resolve. Believers in a strong central state will find little common ground with libertarians; advocates of radical redistribution will never agree with defenders of private property; relativists won’t suddenly persuade religious fundamentalists that they’re being silly. Who, then, gets to say what an optimal balance between privacy and security looks like — or what’s meant by a socially beneficial purpose? And if we can’t agree on this among ourselves, how can we teach a machine to embody “human” values?

Those who build the machine will embody it "their" ethical values. Problem solved.

at_a_remove• 6 years ago

Whenever I hear this, I ask, "Whose ethics?"

When people say that we ought to or should or make some other pronouncement about how we must make AI "ethical," I ask again, "Whose ethics?"

lone_haxx0r• 6 years ago

At this point, each time I read "ethics" I think of someone proselytizing their political ideology in the most obnoxious way possible.

I do have ethics, they're the product of my own analysis and are consistent with my world view in other issues not related to my job. I don't go around telling everyone else how to conduct their lives. If they have their own ethics, good for them. If they don't, I don't care, it's their life.

stuntkite• 6 years ago

There is no such thing as an "ethical hammer" either.

There’s No Such Thing As ‘Ethical A.I.’

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