[liberationtech] The Invention of "Ethical AI"

John Young jya at pipeline.com
Thu Dec 26 19:05:27 CET 2019


"Ethical" is a marketing, manipulative term, applied to exploitive, 
deceptive initiatives. While a few who adopt it may have beneficial 
intentions, best to be wary of evolution of initial good will 
transformed into clothing PR-extolled shenanigans.

There is a long history of ethics, philosophically and practically, 
the purpose its invention, used to cosmetize and flummox, heirarchy 
simulating equality. If a venture needs ethical glossing, it is 
confessing aim to allure and entrap. In that sense, ethical AI, is 
bogus, faith-based.

The critique below is properly skeptical.

At 04:33 AM 12/26/2019, you wrote:
>On Mon, Dec 23, 2019 at 06:06:14PM -0800, Steve Phillips wrote: > 
>But "AI ethics" is a much more vague notion, and not one I've seen > 
>connected to meaningful action. That seems to be the point, to take 
>it on a meta level such that there is no effective action. Yet I see 
>a pretty simple and straightforward way to make AI ethical: AI must 
>*never* be fed private, personal or otherwise non-anonymized data of 
>human beings, not even under the auspices of "consent". Only then 
>can AI do the useful things like predicting the spread of diseases 
>without turning human society into a chess game for the owners of 
>the AI. Those who are allowed to grab the data become the masters of 
>the planet. Even if you kid yourself that you own your own data. 
>This principle of uncollectibility of personal data needs to be cast 
>into regulation, refined and defined in a sane way as it is of 
>higher importance than democratic constitutions. -- Liberationtech 
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