How else would you get folks incapable of getting a PhD in hard sciences to rule over the folks that do hard science? How else would you make those who manipulate real-world data to get their preferred outcome feel good about themselves while doing it, or at least to hide the ugliness captured by the data? Wouldn't getting famous from hard work and taking risks take too long when one can just shame some top ML honcho on Twitter and become the ethical AI celebrity overnight? I predict we will need a license to do ML research soon and that would have to be rubberstamped by some AI ethicist... Not like the most recent ML conferences aren't doing that already ("Your dataset has only two genders? Bye")

> How else would you get folks incapable of getting a PhD in hard sciences to rule over the folks that do hard science?

In most subfields of scientific/technical ethics, it's very common for ethicists to have advanced degrees in the scientific/technical area.

> I predict we will need a license to do ML research soon and that would have to be rubberstamped by some AI ethicist

Except insofar as ethics is a component of the education and licensing requirements for regulated professions like medicine and law, that's not a thing that has happened in the US for any field (and even there is practitioners, not separate ethicists, who are responsible for the content and validation.)

So, aside from sheet paranoia, what is this prediction grounded in?

> it's very common for ethicists to have advanced degrees in the scientific/technical area.

Maybe, I can't tell, I am missing hard data on the distribution of degrees among ethicists. The one from Facebook whose lectures I attended had no technical degree but multiple degrees related to philosophy and sociology. One of the first lecture statements was that "technology is inherently about power", which is obviously how people outside tech perceive us and what many SWEngs are naively missing as we tend to think it's all about fun and self-realization (well, OK, it's dystopian now after profit-sensing individuals invaded our field). So those people outside want to regulate us with "ethics", i.e. creating power structures they rule and we need to consult for permissions.

> sheet paranoia

Was this truly a line of thought you wanted me to follow in order to become unreasonable?

In any form of human co-operation we need to agree on some rules how that activity is carried out. It's not about some "ethicist" telling you what rules you must follow but majority of us agreeing to what the rules should be. The job of an ethicist then should be to point out problems in proposed and already agreed-to rules.

Yes, we already have those. They are called laws.

Ethics as is currently practiced in tech is using the mob to remove whoever you don't like.

To put it another way: the only person to lose their job over Epstein running a rape island was Stallman for being right but uncouth.

> Ethics as is currently practiced in tech is using the mob to remove whoever you don't like.

To the extent that that's even arguably true, it's irrelevant, since it's about the practice of basic organizational ethics within the tech community, and not about either the theory or pragmatics of any the discipline ethics of technology, or any of it's subdisciplines like AI Ethics, which is and are about the ethical implications of the application of technology, and not about the personal, non-tech-related ethics of people who happened to work in the field of technology.

> To put it another way: the only person to lose their job over Epstein running a rape island was Stallman for being right but uncouth.

Yeah, that is a very good illustration of how you are talking about something that has nothing to do with the Ethics of AI or any other ethics of technology subfields.

Pointing out that the interests of the supposed gatekeepers of morality are misaligned with society is a lot more worth while than doing the same for a group of people whose only crime is having a wage 50% higher than the median in the US.

that said, AI does seem to require some hard ethical thinking about how it should be used and by whom, and which limits ought to be implemented

and i dont expect a bunch of startup devs who only care about meeting a deadline or their next funding goal to really think about the philosophy of what they are doing

How is that different from linear regression?

Which also has ethical considerations: https://www.amstat.org/ASA/Your-Career/Ethical-Guidelines-fo...

>> Not like the most recent ML conferences aren't doing that already ("Your dataset has only two genders? Bye")

Hi. Are you saying that most recent machine learning conferences required datasets with more than two genders (where gender was applicable) otherwise they rejectd submissions?

Can you please name some of the recent machine learning conferences that did this?

Also, at which point did the rejection happen? e.g. was it during a preliminary review stage, during review? etc.

This is unhelpful reductionism. Like science, it's an ongoing project to minimize harm in a very real way. No one is pretending that we are done or that forcing ideas o people is a good idea. The point is just to systematically think about the consequences of our actions. Ethics provide tools for this.

> Like science, it's an ongoing project to minimize harm in a very real way.

What would this "very real" way be? Different people have widely different objective functions they are trying to maximize. The expectation that we should always attempt to pursue cosmic justice is completely unrealistic.

We already have a proper way of enforcing "very real" ways to curtail abuses, it's called passing laws.

There probably is a place for serious, proper discussion of what the proper working ethics for a software engineer are, but it's nowhere near as preminent as the zeitgeist is suggesting.

> We already have a proper way of enforcing "very real" ways to curtail abuses, it's called passing laws.

And how is it decided what should become illegal? Just passing laws banning unethical things? Now we are back to square one deciding what is and isn't ethical.

The ballot box.

But who writes the words that go on the ballots? Ballots are not like Ouija boards. Someone has to make a proposal for others to vote on. The person who writes that will be an ethicist, if not by title, then by the fact that they wrote the text of a proposal to ban something unethical.

Who ever pays the politicians the most money.

Could you expand upon the ethical implications of this?

No, they also pay the salaries of the ethicists at the universities.

Who's talking about cosmic justice? Don't be ridiculous. We can identify instances of harm and that's about it.

Every system dealing in dichotomies (including binary) will eventually fail in reality, which always is more nuanced. Exactly how it fails depends on our knowledge, biases and our ability to account for them.

The problem is that flawed, biased AI systems are presented as neutral and fair, when they can never be. Ethics is what you get when you genuinely care about other peoples reality, not just following the law.

One of the points of corporate ethics is to avoid pissing off the public so much that laws get enacted to regulate you.

I'd say its just the reverse. Like the strange and consistent finding that people are shockingly unmotivated by monetary incentive, it seems likely that straight up legal penalties would be less effective than soft social pressure. We are fundamentally social creatures, and things like signaling and status are usually in the drivers seat.

A law has to pass the rigorous test of court. Soft pressure just has to get a mob going on.

> Like the strange and consistent finding that people are shockingly unmotivated by monetary incentive

I find that hard to believe. Maybe again there's some strange societal pressure against voicing that money is a motivation.

I would guess what GP is referring to is something along the lines of this book: https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/

IIRC, the idea is just that money only goes so far up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Once our material well-being is taken care of, we want mastery and autonomy and incentives geared that way are more effective than money.

It's quite lucky that it's not people who do most of the harm in society, it's corporations.

You're talking about applied ethics, not ethics as a whole.

>A set of arbitrary unenforceable rules to shame practices that is decided by whoever convinced other ethicist to grant him a PhD.

As someone also skeptical of ethics, this isn't a very useful or helpful way to see it. You say ethics is arbitrary, but it's only as "arbitrary" as every other humen-made system, and there are some (good, in my judgement) theories on the connection to human evolution.

You say that ethical rules are decided by an ethicist going for a PhD, but historically, ethical discussion has happened outside the (formal) academy, never mind just to score a PhD. Why couldn't we say the same about sociology or economics, or even mathematics? It's not as though these people decide ethics for us - ethicists only decide ethics to the extent that artists decide what's blue or red. It's a process you are more than welcome to engage in from "the outside", and you don't need a degree in philosophy to do so. The fact that you may be ignored is irrelevant to the correctness of your theories.

If you disagree with an ethical theory, even a popular one, it's your freedom to refuse to obey them when imposed for the reasons you put forward. It may even be a moral responsibility to do so.

You say ethics is unenforcable. This is quite clearly either trivially true, or false - ethics has been and is enforced by levaging moral responsibility both on the conscience of the actor, and what society will tolerate (usually when ethics may process to law). Shame and guilt are also motivating factors.

You speak as though there is no ethics behind making bad practices illegal, but law is filled to the brim with such debates that often hinge on ethics, or principles we will or won't give up for ethics. To take a recent example, debate around freedom of speech or religion. The whole reasoning behind those "self-evident" freedoms is our ethical reasoning.

Ethical reasoning is neither static, nor ever in the best possible state. Ethical discussion (mind you, led mostly by people who aren't experts in ethics) over the past 100 years alone has changed so much. To dismiss it on the grounds that it changes is to your own detriment as someone who, like everyone else, is part of the constant ethical dialogue. By refusing to engage with the philosophy PhDs in reasoned argument, you're giving up your "vote", so to speak.

When I see an argument or position in philosophy which is too narrow, built on false premises, ignorant of previous research, or simply logically fallacious, I don't throw my hands up and sneer at those careerist PhDs in their ivory tower. I don't give away my seat at the table, bury my head in the sand and insist they're wrong for reasons I refuse to articulate. Instead, I form my principles for myself, and if questioned why I don't follow the current trendy theory, my answer is simple - "It's wrong, and here's why..."

Ethics is not a trend. For 50 years those who do nothing and know nothing are yapping about ethics. I suggest that we start this discussion when a machine makes the first unethical move. Saves lots of energy and grant money.