[liberationtech] The Invention of "Ethical AI"

[L Jean Camp]

If you are interested in this the USACM, and the corresponding body in
Europe, are active in the issue. The most resent example of USACM
activity was responding to a Federal Request For Comments by HUD, which I
bring to your attention.  (A request for comments precedes a notice of
proposed rulemaking which precedes rulemaking, and requires addressing the
comments. So RFC is the best time to try to push for change. Later it also
provides a record to challenge any rule that does not respond to the
comments.)

So the proposed HUD changes, for our dystopian future, would make it
impossible to take civil or regulatory action (e.g., sue or sanction)
against a company that uses AI to discriminate in mortgage rates. Basically
recreating red-lining.

Here is another one where a bogus AI system looks at faces to determine who
to hire:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/22/ai-hiring-face-scanning-algorithm-increasingly-decides-whether-you-deserve-job/

EPIC has asked the FTC to investigate this::
https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/epic-s-ftc-complaint-about-hirevue/9797b738-e36a-4b7a-8936-667cf8748907/

So there are organizations working if not for Ethical AI at least against
Odious AI.




On Tue, Dec 24, 2019 at 2:50 AM Steve Phillips <steve at tryingtobeawesome.com>
wrote:

> 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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-- 
Prof. L. Jean Camp
http://www.ljean.com


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