If we look at biology and medicine, there's both. The NIH requires everyone funded on their training grants to be given instruction in basic bioethics, and at the same time there is a profession of bioethics that is involved in grant review and oversight committees because a lot of cases aren't simple and covered by the basics. Bioethics enters the picture from regulation rather the way independent financial auditing does.

Also even with CS you have this. To use security as the comparable system, everyone involved in an application should be engaged and aware of security as a component and goal. Anyone should feel empowered to raise security concerns. You still have security experts who are more knowledgeable than the average developer who build (or collaborate on) security critical subcomponents and who audit/red-team the system to ensure security.

The same can be true of ethics.

That's a great resource (that links to even more great resources) - thanks for posting it.

I disagree that professional ethicists aren't needed in an organisation like Google though. Just as security should be lived and breathed by every developer, you still need some experts to consult when things get gnarly, light the way when you need many years of study to understand the concepts, and spot things that laypeople would miss.

The large language models Timnit was studying are a great example of this; people like her were (and are) needed to help the engineers understand the breadth and scope of the issues. Everyone in the org having their hearts in the right place doesn't replace expertise.

I think the article is taking the stance that ethics should be a concern at the point of development, and those that create these large language models and those that use them should be accountable. Right now, those groups are not accountable, so instead a separate group of people is asked to take responsibility. This is where AI Ethics as a field has ended up, and in my opinion, stalled.

I don't think these two agree? The go suggests keeping a separation between who's doing the researching and who's checking its ethics. Like, the ethics researchers should not be accountable to people who are incentivized to ignore them.

Instead, the quote suggests that the separation is unnecessary, and that elevating some people to specifically look at ethics is bad since it's everyone's job