[liberationtech] The Invention of "Ethical AI"

[Charles M. Ess]

I'm happily participating in the ethics of AI aspects affiliated with 
the The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software 
Program–Humanities and Society
<https://wasp-hs.org/>
As the Intercept article notes, some of the AI/ethics work in humanities 
and social sciences is more independent of and nuanced than the MIT / 
Google, etc.-driven approaches.  One can be happy and encouraged about 
that - but those larger forces are despicable and obviously difficult to 
challenge or counter.
- charles

On 24/12/2019 00:39, Paola Di Maio wrote:
> I have been working on AI Ethics participated in some institutional 
> efforts (like IEEE)
> and I can confirm that all the efforts I participated in were piloted 
> and superficial, designed to create
> an impression that ethics is a concern, but avoiding and failing totally 
> to address it
> I felt I was going mad for a while
> PDM
> 
> On Tue, Dec 24, 2019 at 5:57 AM Yosem Companys <ycompanys at gmail.com 
> <mailto:ycompanys at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     I missed this piece on how the field of AI ethics was seemingly
>     borne out of tech giants' lobbying and funding of academia. -- YC
> 
>     ****
> 
>     I learned that the discourse of “ethical AI”... was aligned
>     strategically with a Silicon Valley effort seeking to avoid legally
>     enforceable restrictions of controversial technologies. A key group
>     behind this effort... made policy recommendations in California that
>     contradicted the conclusions of research I conducted with several
>     lab colleagues, research that led us to oppose the use of computer
>     algorithms in deciding whether to jail people pending trial. ... I
>     also watched MIT help the U.S. military brush aside the moral
>     complexities of drone warfare, hosting a superficial talk on AI and
>     ethics by Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state and
>     notorious war criminal, and giving input on the U.S. Department of
>     Defense’s “AI Ethics Principles” for warfare, which embraced
>     “permissibly biased” algorithms and which avoided using the word
>     “fairness” because the Pentagon believes “that fights should not be
>     fair.”
> 
>     https://theintercept.com/2019/12/20/mit-ethical-ai-artificial-intelligence/
> 
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-- 
Professor in Media Studies
Department of Media and Communication
University of Oslo
<http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html>

Co-chair & Editor, Internet Research Ethics 3.0
<https://aoir.org/reports/ethics3.pdf>

3rd edition of Digital Media Ethics out soon!
<http://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509533428>

Postboks 1093
Blindern 0317
Oslo, Norway
c.m.ess at media.uio.no