[liberationtech] The Invention of "Ethical AI"

[Steve Phillips]

There are those of us who sincerely care about aligning AI with human
values so that it doesn't make anti-human decisions as it becomes more
powerful, and there are serious efforts in the AI safety/AI alignment
communities to tackle this extraordinarily difficult technical challenge.

But "AI ethics" is a much more vague notion, and not one I've seen
connected to meaningful action.

--Steve



On Monday, December 23, 2019, Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio at gmail.com> 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>
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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