ethics

Better, Nicer, Clearer, Fairer: a critical assessment of the movement for ethical artificial intelligence and machine learning

I will present this paper in the FATE (fairness, accountability, transparency, ethics) reading group tomorrow (2023-10-25). You can view the slides I’ll use here. There are unresolved tensions in the algorithmic ethics world. Here are two examples: Is inclusion always good? Gebru: “you can’t have ethical A.I. that’s not inclusive… [a]nd whoever is creating the technology is setting the standards” Nelson: “… I struggle to understand why we want to make black communities more cognizant in facial recognition systems that are disproportionately used for surveillance.
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Team Human interview with Dennis Yi Tenen

You can view this episode here, and you can download a transcript I made with whisper-medium here. I accept responsibility for errors in the transcript, alongside OpenAI, all people whose voices exist on the web, and the rest of humanity. :) writing technology permalink DYT: You know, it took humans like centuries to perfect the technology of a dictionary and it took hundreds, thousands of people, probably like millions of hours to actually get to the point where you can easily look up a word.
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the inherent subjectivity of reality

These are some thoughts I’ve had while listening to a Lex Fridman interview with Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at UC Berkeley working on mathematical quantum physics. In the information age, we like to see everything as computation. But what do we mean when we say that something is computation? We mean that a physical system with predictable interactions has a meaningful result. If we somehow learned that the universe was computational in nature, the only thing that adds is that the universe’s state is meaningful somehow.
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for a socially beneficial and responsible development of AI

These are my notes from a conversation between Yoshua Bengio and Kate Crawford held at Mila on 2023-03-20, announcing the release of a new book created as a joint report between Mila and UNESCO called Missing links in AI governance (link). There were news articles in French (Le Devoir), but not as many in English unfortunately (Datanami). Bengio: What motivates you to do what you do? This topic has turned from an academic move to a societal one really quickly, and it’s scary.
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Army of none: autonomous weapons and the future of war

The examples in this book make it clear that there is no easy line we can draw between autonomous and non-autonomous weapons (and by extension, autonomous AI agents). There is a smooth gradient of autonomy, which makes the question of allowing autonomous weapons much more nuanced. It’s probably the case that higher-level alignment becomes important proportionally to the level of autonomy and intelligence. He analyzes the Patriot fratricides,In a military context, the word fratricide means the killing of someone on the same side of a conflict.
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