University of Helsinki free MOOC on the Ethics of AI

https://ethics-of-ai.mooc.fi/

by ignoramous • 6 years ago

144 50 6 years ago

ethics-of-ai.mooc.fi

1cvmask• 6 years ago

Humans are “flawed” and “biased” (product of their environments and learnings) and thus anything they create and “control” is by definition “flawed” and “biased”. AI is just a set of the many tools humans have created. The biases can be both positive or negative.

It is like people who talk about human rights while ordering bombings of children far away. The ethics of AI is similarly flawed. It might solve some problems here but might inadvertently or deliberately accentuate others depending on your perspective. It is a sense a cost/benefit solution where we may never even be aware of the costs but just the benefits (those who incur the costs may not have a voice or be muzzled).

I am all for AI by the way. I simply see it as a tool. It is up to societies to formulate acceptable policies and measure the costs and benefits.

Humans were good and bad before AI and I see nothing changing there.

holstvoogd• 6 years ago

What is you point? The fact that humans have shit ethics does not mean we need not address ethics in AI. Especially if the AI is then used to justify the biases.

And that comparison is completely ridiculous.

HexagonalKitten• 6 years ago

Right, like we extensively worked out the ethics of automobiles before we allowed them.

Can you imagine if we let cars contribute to inequity by allowing rich people to own them and not poor people? Or if it was possible to just aim a car at people without the self-driving stopping you.

mhh__• 6 years ago

The point is that things like AI can multiply the effect of any human bias. Humans were fundamentally just "bad" after as before the invention of the machine gun (technically mostly modern artillery, but I'm being poetic), but there probably wouldn't have been as many dead at the Somme without it.

We are seeing every day how AI can be used to censor and suppress, that means we need to be increasingly systematic in how we approach biases both in practice and as a concept (the latter aimed really at those who apply political dogma to what is ultimately a scientific question).

teataster• 6 years ago

This is one of the best criticisms of AI that I have read.

Leaving science alone and working on our own biases should be the way forward.

But with censorship on the rise in every corner of the world and political spectrum, I would say things are bleak.

abdullahkhalids• 6 years ago

To follow up (from a different debate, but this point still stands)

A core, not side, effect of technology is its ability to magnify power and multiply force — for both attackers and defenders.
For the most part, though, society still wins. The bad guys simply can’t do enough damage to destroy the underlying social system. The question for us is: can society still maintain security as technology becomes more advanced?

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/03/when_technolo...

simion314• 6 years ago

The idea is the AI developers should be first of all aware of the potential problems, I would say that maybe AI should be done by competent engineers that studied this domain including data science,statistics and ethics and maybe this engineers should be responsible similar how other professionals can lose their right to practice if they don't respect the rules.

The excuse that the data is garbage so is not my fault is terrible, detecting if the data is garbage is part of your job IMO.

My criticism applies for AI people that work on projects that have large consequences or affect a large number of people, for small we can keep the "no warranty disclaimer"

LunaSea• 6 years ago

Yet another example of wrong interpretation of statistical bias.

Not that I expected much better from an AI Ethics course clearly not tought by serious machine learning experts.

andi999• 6 years ago

I was always wondering if a lot of bias is not just application of bayes theorem (appliedby human or by AI)

908B64B1972• 6 years ago

Ethics is a trend.

It's whatever is trendy to say or think at the moment. A set of arbitrary unenforceable rules to shame practices that is decided by whoever convinced other ethicist to grant him a PhD.

Of course, all that is done without going through the rigor of making these practices illegal. That would have a real impact. And require real work.

ravi-delia• 6 years ago

I'd say its just the reverse. Like the strange and consistent finding that people are shockingly unmotivated by monetary incentive, it seems likely that straight up legal penalties would be less effective than soft social pressure. We are fundamentally social creatures, and things like signaling and status are usually in the drivers seat.

908B64B1972• 6 years ago

A law has to pass the rigorous test of court. Soft pressure just has to get a mob going on.

Like the strange and consistent finding that people are shockingly unmotivated by monetary incentive

I find that hard to believe. Maybe again there's some strange societal pressure against voicing that money is a motivation.

konjin7• 6 years ago

It's quite lucky that it's not people who do most of the harm in society, it's corporations.

pengstrom2• 6 years ago

This is unhelpful reductionism. Like science, it's an ongoing project to minimize harm in a very real way. No one is pretending that we are done or that forcing ideas o people is a good idea. The point is just to systematically think about the consequences of our actions. Ethics provide tools for this.

qsort• 6 years ago

Like science, it's an ongoing project to minimize harm in a very real way.

What would this "very real" way be? Different people have widely different objective functions they are trying to maximize. The expectation that we should always attempt to pursue cosmic justice is completely unrealistic.

We already have a proper way of enforcing "very real" ways to curtail abuses, it's called passing laws.

There probably is a place for serious, proper discussion of what the proper working ethics for a software engineer are, but it's nowhere near as preminent as the zeitgeist is suggesting.

oehtXRwMkIs• 6 years ago

You're talking about applied ethics, not ethics as a whole.

timonoko• 6 years ago

Ethics is not a trend. For 50 years those who do nothing and know nothing are yapping about ethics. I suggest that we start this discussion when a machine makes the first unethical move. Saves lots of energy and grant money.

claudiawerner• 6 years ago

A set of arbitrary unenforceable rules to shame practices that is decided by whoever convinced other ethicist to grant him a PhD.

As someone also skeptical of ethics, this isn't a very useful or helpful way to see it. You say ethics is arbitrary, but it's only as "arbitrary" as every other humen-made system, and there are some (good, in my judgement) theories on the connection to human evolution.

You say that ethical rules are decided by an ethicist going for a PhD, but historically, ethical discussion has happened outside the (formal) academy, never mind just to score a PhD. Why couldn't we say the same about sociology or economics, or even mathematics? It's not as though these people decide ethics for us - ethicists only decide ethics to the extent that artists decide what's blue or red. It's a process you are more than welcome to engage in from "the outside", and you don't need a degree in philosophy to do so. The fact that you may be ignored is irrelevant to the correctness of your theories.

If you disagree with an ethical theory, even a popular one, it's your freedom to refuse to obey them when imposed for the reasons you put forward. It may even be a moral responsibility to do so.

You say ethics is unenforcable. This is quite clearly either trivially true, or false - ethics has been and is enforced by levaging moral responsibility both on the conscience of the actor, and what society will tolerate (usually when ethics may process to law). Shame and guilt are also motivating factors.

You speak as though there is no ethics behind making bad practices illegal, but law is filled to the brim with such debates that often hinge on ethics, or principles we will or won't give up for ethics. To take a recent example, debate around freedom of speech or religion. The whole reasoning behind those "self-evident" freedoms is our ethical reasoning.

Ethical reasoning is neither static, nor ever in the best possible state. Ethical discussion (mind you, led mostly by people who aren't experts in ethics) over the past 100 years alone has changed so much. To dismiss it on the grounds that it changes is to your own detriment as someone who, like everyone else, is part of the constant ethical dialogue. By refusing to engage with the philosophy PhDs in reasoned argument, you're giving up your "vote", so to speak.

When I see an argument or position in philosophy which is too narrow, built on false premises, ignorant of previous research, or simply logically fallacious, I don't throw my hands up and sneer at those careerist PhDs in their ivory tower. I don't give away my seat at the table, bury my head in the sand and insist they're wrong for reasons I refuse to articulate. Instead, I form my principles for myself, and if questioned why I don't follow the current trendy theory, my answer is simple - "It's wrong, and here's why..."

bitL2• 6 years ago

How else would you get folks incapable of getting a PhD in hard sciences to rule over the folks that do hard science? How else would you make those who manipulate real-world data to get their preferred outcome feel good about themselves while doing it, or at least to hide the ugliness captured by the data? Wouldn't getting famous from hard work and taking risks take too long when one can just shame some top ML honcho on Twitter and become the ethical AI celebrity overnight? I predict we will need a license to do ML research soon and that would have to be rubberstamped by some AI ethicist... Not like the most recent ML conferences aren't doing that already ("Your dataset has only two genders? Bye")

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

How else would you get folks incapable of getting a PhD in hard sciences to rule over the folks that do hard science?

In most subfields of scientific/technical ethics, it's very common for ethicists to have advanced degrees in the scientific/technical area.

I predict we will need a license to do ML research soon and that would have to be rubberstamped by some AI ethicist

Except insofar as ethics is a component of the education and licensing requirements for regulated professions like medicine and law, that's not a thing that has happened in the US for any field (and even there is practitioners, not separate ethicists, who are responsible for the content and validation.)

So, aside from sheet paranoia, what is this prediction grounded in?

saargrin• 6 years ago

that said, AI does seem to require some hard ethical thinking about how it should be used and by whom, and which limits ought to be implemented

and i dont expect a bunch of startup devs who only care about meeting a deadline or their next funding goal to really think about the philosophy of what they are doing

YeGoblynQueenne• 6 years ago

> Not like the most recent ML conferences aren't doing that already ("Your dataset has only two genders? Bye")

Hi. Are you saying that most recent machine learning conferences required datasets with more than two genders (where gender was applicable) otherwise they rejectd submissions?

Can you please name some of the recent machine learning conferences that did this?

Also, at which point did the rejection happen? e.g. was it during a preliminary review stage, during review? etc.

croissants• 6 years ago

I just read all of this. I think the whole course -- which is actually pretty short, like an hour or two of reading sans exercises, and for the most part clearly written -- would be a good assignment for a single day of a first-year university computer science course. It does offer a reasonable, albeit almost entirely nontechnical, overview of why people should care about AI ethics, and what caring about it "means".

As for my reaction to it, I'll borrow a useful distinction the course makes near the beginning about three types of ethics:

1) Meta-ethics studies the meaning of ethical concepts, the existence of ethical entities (ontology) and the possibility of ethical knowledge (epistemology). 2) Normative ethics concerns the practical means of determining a moral (or ethically correct) course of action. 3) Applied ethics concerns what a moral agent (defined as someone who can judge what is right and wrong and be held accountable) is obligated or permitted to do in a specific situation or a particular domain of action.

In this language, the course is almost entirely about 1) with a few gestures in the direction of 2) and 3) near the end. I'm not totally unsympathetic to this; there are still people out there who are not convinced AI (or algorithmic) ethics is a "thing" (response: any apparatus that makes choices that matter involves ethics!), so I get why justifying the topic itself seems necessary.

But in the other direction, I think people sometimes conflate "ethicist" with "person who will know what to do" -- that is, someone with expertise in 2) and 3) above. In my limited experience, ethicists seem to "work on" mostly 1). I hope there will be more work on the 2) and 3) parts of AI ethics in the near future.

By the way, if you want a more technical look at this topic (albeit framed more narrowly as "fairness and machine learning"), there is a nice draft textbook on the topic [1]. It probably has enough material for a semester-long upper-level computer science course.

[1] https://fairmlbook.org/

bra-ket3• 6 years ago

I think it's premature to talk about "AI ethics" when AI is nowhere to be seen.

In the US this whole "ethics" trend is being used as a tool to politicize and censor research[1].

[1] https://spectator.us/militant-liberals-politicizing-artifici...

galaxyLogic3• 6 years ago

That story is from the magazine The Spectator right? According to Wikipedia "The Spectator is politically conservative and supports the Conservative Party" .

Being openly "conservative" means biased. Although they are entitled to their opinions it is good to be aware that they have a (conservative) bias. They do not try to be objective, they try to be conservative.

And what is "conservative bias"? It of course means conserving the status quo, conserving the power of the rich and powerful, conserving inequality. That kind of thing is what I think ethicists should be studying.

Note that to the conservatives, since by default they want to conserve things, don't want change, they don't want ethicists snooping around asking questions about what if anything might be unethical about the existing power-structures. No Sir :-)

So it seems to me that for a conservative magazine to criticize "ethicists" is very self-serving for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spectator

bra-ket3• 6 years ago

Bias is natural and inevitable, and it has to be acknowledged in research. The problem is, liberals want to shut down anyone who disagrees with their own bias. It's not about 'snooping around asking questions', but more like slandering and aggressively silencing people for having a different opinion.

You'd think it would never affect you as a liberal but it was funny to watch Google's very progressive & liberal research leads labeled 'racists', and evil incarnates for standing in the way of the activist mob. I mean they're are still trying to 'cancel' Jeff Dean, of all people, for firing some activist [1], and Nando de Freitas for merely supporting both sides[2].

If this is your ethics discourse, I'd rather AI be unethical.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1f2kYWDXwhzYnq8ebVtuk...

[2] https://twitter.com/NandoDF/status/1336030085640548354

caniszczyk• 6 years ago

There's also a free course from the Linux Foundation on this topic: https://www.edx.org/course/ethics-in-ai-and-big-data

commonturtle• 6 years ago

This view on bio-ethicists reflects my views on ethics as an academic field in general: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/fr...

Some quotes:

I realized quickly that the incentives are all wrong if what we want is people who will think hard about humanity’s pressing ethical dilemmas and who will suggest intuitively appealing solutions.
Since almost all ethicists are academics, they have to publish, and in order to publish you have to be novel, and since the basic principles of ethics are little changed for millennia the incentives to do thorough homework on the basis of principles which are widely understood and accepted is not great.
Furthermore, if you decide to be a utilitarian, then basically all ethical issues will boil down to cost/benefit analyses which you have to outsource to technocrats, so your unique expertise as an ethicist will be worth little.

zcw100• 6 years ago

I just finished the course and what a complete pile of garbage. It seems to reinforce group think more than anything. They ask for a lot of free form responses that are graded by peers and it's obvious that there is a correct and an incorrect point of view. I'm not sure which I'm more afraid of, unaccountable corporations or self appointed technocrats.

They talk about ethics washing but don't seem to consider that this course is a part of that cycle.

philosopherofAI• 6 years ago

I am sorry, but I don´t follow your reasoning. Why do you think the course provides an example of ethics washing? As I understand the term, ethics washing means - roughly - that someone claims to be ethical, while (s)he is really not committed to implementing ethical principles in practice. I don´t think it is a fair accusation in the context of free online moocs. Correspondingly, I don´t understand your other concerns either. The course is an introductory, free online course for anyone interested in the state-of-art ethics of AI. As I see it, it is not meant to be a mind blowing course for professional philosophers doing AI ethics. One might expect professionals to know the field already. And it is not meant to provide a list of dogmas or principles for true believers; if you want to have your correct answers or to get the correct codes of conducts, this clearly isn´t your course. As a philosopher I found it very strange to claim that it´s "obvious" that there is a correct/incorrect point of view. Instead, I find it obvious that most of the questions are really complex. And what comes to the peer reviews, I see your point. I have a background in AI ethics - I am not an expert, but know some stuff - and I have also lectured online, so I know how difficult it is to design an introductory course for a non-specified target group. But as I see it, the peer reviews are meant to provide feedback and possibility to learn from others. Of course, in the best possible world, there would be a teacher commenting all the answers, but it is in contradiction with the mooc ideology. But your claim that the course "reinforces" group think - that´s crap. How exactly is it supposed to do that? Or, do you honestly find other people intellectually so... "under developed" that their thoughts can be manipulated simply by asking them to read or evaluate someone else´s answers? If this is the case, then - indeed - it is necessary to worry. And yes, if this is the case, then we are very glad that you are worrying it.

University of Helsinki free MOOC on the Ethics of AI

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