Charitably, I think what they are trying to say is that the output of an AI ethics researcher is not directly related to the application of a measurably skill.

It is instead related much more closely to a person's sense of right and wrong.

Of course AI ethics researchers have skills. They have skill in researching, they have knowledge of AI, and presumably education in formal logic and ethics. They have skill in writing and communicating the results of their findings.

However the product they produce is not writing and it's not research. It's the commentary on the research, the recommendations based on the results they have found. It's very subjective.

It's very different than a skilled hacker applying their skill and knowledge to uncover a zero-day exploit in your software that needs to be fixed. That's a much more objective process.

So their product is peer review? That sounds like they're incredibly valuable

That depends ... Peer review is known to be a "lottery" because it is so subjective. Also known to be gained by writing papers about hot topics, etc.

I agree that his statement is inflammatory, but we can steel man the statement into something truthful and palatable:

It is far easier to evaluate a security researcher's output than an ethics researcher.

I think many of us are familiar with this concept, as many of us likely preferred math over english in school as we preferred being deterministically evaluated.

Is it? If the security researchers don't find vulnerabilities, does that mean they don't exist? If the AI ethics researchers embarrass you, aren't they doing their jobs?

Just as a security researcher’s job is to find vulnerabilities and promote best practices, it’s not to hack and then publicly shame their employer. Ethics researchers should be the same, no? Find ethical issues and promote best practices, embarrassing your employer seems counterproductive except perhaps as a last resort.

This depends. Google project zero routinely discovers vulns in Google products.

However they're empowered to fix them, essentially no questions asked. So you don't often get p0 posts about unfixed bugs in Google products.

I imagine that depends on your contract?

Since you, the employer, decide what the job is, maybe or maybe not. If you define the job as, "develop ideas and frameworks where we can accomplish our goals in the most ethical way possible," then publicly embarrassing the company might not be doing your job.

A good ethicist & communicator will probably be able to embarrass you if you're doing something wrong, but so will a comedian.

I don't think OP is claiming that there ethicists have no skill, but rather that it's fundamentally a lot more difficult to evaluate.