Anyone can have an opinion. When a person's title at a company is "Nuclear Weapon Ethics" and they go around giving talks, I would 100% expect them to have some sort of practical experience and knowledge in that domain.

Just because you know a thing or two about ethics doesn't mean you are equipped to discuss a particular domain.

How can you possibly begin to discuss AI Ethics if you have no idea how it works or what's -realistically- possible?

> How can you possibly begin to discuss AI Ethics if you have no idea how it works or what's -realistically- possible?

What matters for ethics is the effects things have on people. You generally don't have to know how something works in order to understand what effects it has--someone who does understand how it works can figure that out and tell you.

For example, if you had to decide between on the ethics of using a nuclear weapon and using conventional weapons to destroy some legitimate military target you wouldn't need to know anything about the physics of nuclear weapons.

All you'd need to know about the nuke is how powerful it is, the long term illnesses it can cause, how it can affect people far away from the blast, how it can make the area unsafe for humans for a long time, and so on. To decide the ethical issues you are concerned with what happens, not how it happens.

If we ever get to general AI, and are dealing with ethical questions like whether it is murder to restore a robot to factory settings, whether it is slavery to own a robot, or whether a robot can own property then we will probably need ethicists who are also AI experts.

And then you’re dependent on experts to tell you that information.

In this case “using a nuclear weapon” is easier to reason about for a non expert. What about “using nuclear technology for renewable energy”? If the person doesn’t really understand the pros and cons of this by nature of being a domain expert, they’re just relying on whatever information they may have (incorrectly) learned or been indoctrinated about.

Otherwise smart ethics people may make stupid decisions because they think they understand what they’re talking about, but actually do not.

Just take existing domain experts and train them in ethics.

So only insiders can be on ethics boards?

How about pushing this to congress. None of them know hardly anything about anything. They delegate a lot of their thinking.

So two problems.

1. People who are practitioners are more likely to be for the technology than against it. Tristan Harris is a good example of what you're looking for. 2. Going to the logical extreme on this doesn't work.

P.S. Should we apply this to journalism? Because seriously journalists these days don't even know how to make phone calls to even pretend to fact check.

Yes, only people who know how the tech works should be discussing it. It’s far easier to train a skilled person in ethics than to take an ethics person and train them in that domain.

I don’t buy your argument that all experts are necessarily proponents. Even within a domain there are disagreements.

The government issue is real and also slightly tangential. We need to make working in the public sector more attractive.

And yes it should apply to journalism, but discerning that falls onto individual people. It’s a bit of a different issue.

> Yes, only people who know how the tech works should be discussing it.

Well then we disagree. Being an engineer or a technician does not make you a good ethicist. And that's what we need.

Training an ethicist that is impartial or thoughtful from the beginning about the technology may also be easier than the opposite. They may be similar...

But training an engineer in ethics I think is a good step. Some fields, like medicine, have it somewhat built in. We can debate how effective or serious that actually is.

Being a technician or engineer does predispose you to thinking what you are working on or working with is ethical. I did list Tristan Harris as a good counter-example and someone that certainly can speak to the ethics of the issue. But his example is also a good example of engineers/technicians not being good candidates for being impartial because he has to be a type of activist.

> I don’t buy your argument that all experts are necessarily proponents. Even within a domain there are disagreements.

I said likely, not exclusively.

People can definitely say what should be allowed and what is not without achiving that result currently.

>How can you possibly begin to discuss AI Ethics if you have no idea how it works or what's -realistically- possible?

That's what other members of the board are there for. Let's flip your question: How do you expect a tech person to comment reasonably about AI ethics when all they've taken is an undergrad course in philosophy (and even that may be a stretch).

The notion that a person on the board must be an expert in every aspect involved is ridiculous.

It’s not ridiculous to expect people to understand the topic that they are discussing. You can take domain experts and train them in ethics. It’s impossible to discuss something–and the ethics around it–if you don’t fully understand how it works.

I wouldn’t want John Stuart Mill on that board because he wouldn’t know what he was talking about, and therefore would be unable to properly evaluate things.

To what degree? There's a difference between knowledge of what's practical, and experience in implementation.

I'm getting the sense that the goalposts are ready to slide here, but I wouldn't expect an expert on "when to not do a new Holocaust" to be able to model interactions between uranium atoms.

Not having any familiarity with the subject is obviously its own disqualification as an expert in a given area of ethics. And a nuclear physicist could lack understanding of ethics, international politics, history, military, who's even armed... This would be far more disqualifying.

A more realistic area where experts would be needed might be “should we be using nuclear energy sources”?

In this case I don’t care how trained an ethics person is in ethics or history. They literally are not equipped to discuss this topic without being fed information from somewhere, which leads to its own issues.

I would much rather take domain experts and train them in philosophy, ethics, and history to an extent. That is far easier and better than the other way around.

Nope, and it seems like nuclear physicists back in the day could have used some stronger opinions on the ethics of making nuclear weapons.

During WWII, Germany was also trying to build the bomb. All things considered, it's probably better that the Manhattan Project beat them to it.

Sure, but it didn't stop there.

You can have opinion on anything without knowing anything. This is what forums like this is about :). But if you want to give an informed opinion, you do need to understand the tech. For example, how do you decide what restrictions to put in export of nuclear power tech if you have no clue how it can be re-purposed to make a bomb?

International efforts against proliferation have been somewhat successful, even though they ultimately rely on politicians, not nuclear physicists. And in any case, a lack of knowledge regarding dual-use technology has never been the problem.

How do we let only tech people decide ethics if they don't care about ethics like we have seen in Facebook?