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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31226 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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So, this feels up the motte's alley- https://www.romecall.org/the-call/

I apologize for the Vatican's web design. TLDR important figures from the major Abrahamaic religions have signed a call for AI ethics which has also been signed onto by representatives from, among others, IBM, Microsoft, and the Italian government.

It's not 100% clear to me what any of this means, per se-

Now more than ever, we must guarantee an outlook in which AI is developed with a focus not on technology, but rather for the good of humanity and of the environment, of our common and shared home and of its human inhabitants, who are inextricably connected. In other words, a vision in which human beings and nature are at the heart of how digital innovation is developed, supported rather than gradually replaced by technologies that behave like rational actors but are in no way human. It is time to begin preparing for more technological future in which machines will have a more important role in the lives of human beings, but also a future in which it is clear that technological progress affirms the brilliance of the human race and remains dependent on its ethical integrity

and

in this context and at a national and international level, to promote “algor-ethics”, namely the ethical use of AI as defined by the following principles:

• Transparency: in principle, AI systems must be explainable;

• Inclusion: the needs of all human beings must be taken into consideration so that everyone can benefit and all individuals can be offered the best possible conditions to express themselves and develop;

• Responsibility: those who design and deploy the use of AI must proceed with responsibility and transparency;

• Impartiality: do not create or act according to bias, thus safeguarding fairness and human dignity;

• Reliability: AI systems must be able to work reliably;

• Security and privacy: AI systems must work securely and respect the privacy of users.

Are more like typical Francis-era Vatican boilerplate than anything concrete. But as a milestone it's probably the first time anyone even attempted to define AI ethics, isn't it? Anyways, I'd be interested in hearing from Motteizans who know a lot more about AI than I do(which, to be clear, is that it's hilarious to feed ChatbotGPT black nationalist conspiracy theories) about what this probably means.

Applause lights galore.

Yudkowsky was complaining about this meaningless stuff back in 2007

Here is the pretend speech he gave, consisting of nothing but applause lights:

I am here to propose to you today that we need to balance the risks and opportunities of advanced artificial intelligence. We should avoid the risks and, insofar as it is possible, realize the opportunities. We should not needlessly confront entirely unnecessary dangers. To achieve these goals, we must plan wisely and rationally. We should not act in fear and panic, or give in to technophobia; but neither should we act in blind enthusiasm. We should respect the interests of all parties with a stake in the Singularity. We must try to ensure that the benefits of advanced technologies accrue to as many individuals as possible, rather than being restricted to a few. We must try to avoid, as much as possible, violent conflicts using these technologies; and we must prevent massive destructive capability from falling into the hands of individuals. We should think through these issues before, not after, it is too late to do anything about them . . .

That's basically what they're saying in this. But some of it is even worse than that. I polluted my hard drive by downloading their 'paper':

This Call is a step forward with a view to growing with a common understanding and searching for a language and solutions we can share.

I swear I'm not making this up. It's not all that bad, but if there's only a little bit of shit in my meal, I won't eat the rest of it (even if you remove the shit). What sort of cook lets shit get into the meal? What else is there that I've missed? Who let Kamala Harris's speechwriters get their hands on a crayon?

Another thing I observed from the 'ethics' page is what looks like a potential 'three laws':

  1. AI must not discriminate against people

  2. AI must serve humanity

  3. AI must sustain the environment (including agriculture)

3a. AI must tell people when they're dealing with AI

3b. AI must not exploit people

Yes, they're not even organized enough to decide whether they want three requirements, four or five. I would've thought that telling AI to sustain the environment would include having it deal with agriculture - but I suppose that needed special emphasis. I would've thought serving humanity included not exploiting us.

It is time to begin preparing for more technological future in which machines will have a more important role in the lives of human beings, but also a future in which it is clear that technological progress affirms the brilliance of the human race and remains dependent on its ethical integrity.

A more technological future! A more technological future! I help proofread useless books that few will read and I do it to a higher standard than this. They can't even string a sentence together and they want to impose their ideology on the world for all eternity? I hope Gnon or some powerful entity punishes these people. I hope someday they realize just how out of their depth they are. Apologies for getting less and less courteous but this paper really does make me angrier the longer I spend with it.

I'm really not sure the Vatican has the cultural clout to demand these sorts of things any more. Globally, they're the mad old gentleman in the corner of the pub mumbling to himself.

Though I will say it's sort of a shame, as I'm much more receptive to this specific list than I am of the other proponents of "AI ethics", who seem mainly interested in ensuring that AI never gives wrongthink answers to common cultural battleground questions, like how neutered ChatGPT etc seems to be.

Cultural clout to demand these things? Not really, no, and if it had been a Vatican press release on their take on AI ethics I wouldn’t have thought it top-level comment worthy. But it was signed on by lots of influential people who were not affiliated with the Vatican, so I think it probably reflects what the AI ethics crowd will coalesce into holding as their stated aims over the course of the next few years as it becomes a bigger issue.

I apologize for the Vatican's web design.

It's been horrible for so long, it is now one of the traditions of the Church which cannot be changed without calling a general ecumenical council 😁

They 'refreshed' the website about a decade or so ago, not that you can tell!

https://www.vatican.va has some deliciously shitty web design if you poke around a bit. The home page is pretty bad but not too crappy, but if you click around a bit you'll end up on pages such as this one, describing the pontificate of John Paul II. The way that they use alert boxes for information when you hover over the years are so utterly baffling that I'd immediately assume it was some sort of joke or shitpost if I saw it on any other website.

They should just go the Berkshire Hathaway route

It just needs a few animated "under construction" gifs and a webring banner to be complete.

Flashback to 1996!!

But as a milestone it's probably the first time anyone even attempted to define AI ethics, isn't it?

I don't think it's the first time. There are a few serious attempts to do this which mostly fall short and also fall into the trap of being super careful to obfuscate what they are actually saying so the rest of academia doesn't cancel the researchers.

I vaguely recall seeing /r/sneerclub sneering at someone who gave a talk where he put these multiple disparate ideas into the same powerpoint and said "can't catch em all".

Why would academia cancel the researchers? Is believing in X-risk from AI cancellable?

The academics doing AI ethics tend to be doing simpler things, e.g. trying to figure out what a "fair" lending algorithm is.

The technical challenge is finding an algo which spots hidden patterns that predict loan repayment except for the biggest pattern that predicts repayment (namely that blacks are much less likely to repay them, holding all else equal). But stating it in such explicit terms is a cancellable offense.

AND doing that without including the race variable during training.

The effect size is very strong, so it's pretty easy to find features correlated with race that capture it. One public graph I've seen is fig 7 in this paper which shows a 10-20% racial gap in non-delinquency (i.e. at a FICO score of 600, 40% of blacks and 20% of asians go delinquent for the particular loan product in that dataset).

If you train on all variables except race and black people are ceteris paribus less likely to repay, won't that just create a distinct cluster unexplained by any visible variables? Sounds simple enough to then take an average of all such clusters.

You pretty much need to include it as a variable and then 'correct' for it -- otherwise any half-decent AI will just route around its absence, as you suggest.

If you just leave race out of the input set, most likely the system will find some proxy for race which works, and your model will still show "bias". (A very strict reading of "ceteris paribus" would mean you couldn't find such a proxy, but that's not what is meant). If you leave race out of the input set, and train it with the goal of being "unbiased", you can get an "unbiased" predictor (that is inferior at prediction), but it's a little too obvious.

It kind of sounds like the whole discriminating against black people thing was a bright idea the AI hit upon when it was instructed not to discriminate against poor people.

Sounds simple enough to then take an average of all such clusters

Why would you do that if you want to make money on the loans you give?

Because the algorithms are not being written by greedy bankers.

Found this part the most interesting and Luddite:

“AND THAT DOES NOT HAVE AS ITS SOLE GOAL GREATER PROFIT OR THE GRADUAL REPLACEMENT OF PEOPLE IN THE WORKPLACE.”

I thought the entire goal of AI was to remove humans from the workplace. Keynes grand idea of the zero hour work week with all prices going to marginal costs. Granted a lot of humans lose purpose without some manual labor. Maybe we learn to cook and hobby work.

But the grand idea of AI is the elimination of work, marginal costs and prices going to zero. Poverty eliminated. Though a world without poor is a difficult world for religion.

Yes, that’s the goal that you can expect governments and religious institutions to oppose.

Keynes grand idea of the zero hour work week with all prices going to marginal costs.

Which, back in the 1970s, the kind of futurist forecasting envisaged would be in place by 2000 since with increasing automation and productivity, we would all have so much leisure time due to a four hour work day/three day work week, we wouldn't know how to use it all.

Remind me how that turned out, again? "AI will replace workers but that won't matter since something something post-scarcity something something we'll all have UBI and can work as we want, not as we are driven to". Does anybody really expect for-profit businesses to throw money at workers for not working, or rather that they will put the profits into retained earnings?

For-profit companies would put all their profits into retained earnings.

That doesn’t interfere with zero costs products in a capitalist world. (With proper antitrust law etc).

The more realistic scenario is that companies retain prices, expand their profits with the new automation and there is a worldwide wave of unemployment and accompanied crime rise with a expected semi-luddite movement rising from the disgrunted masses of newly unemployed people in free fall in the socio economic brackets. The post scarcity deluxe gay communism utopianism was always a pipe dream.

The more realistic scenario is that companies retain prices, expand their profits with the new automation and there is a worldwide wave of unemployment and accompanied crime rise with a expected semi-luddite movement rising from the disgrunted masses of newly unemployed people in free fall in the socio economic brackets

Why is this more realistic?

because in the other scenario you are assuming that companies are going to finance the same employees that they cut to maximize profit margins. And unless the Woke mind virus becomes a terminal case in the minds of their CEO's I don't see how they would justify doing it. Granted the unemployed can go into the wealthfare state arms, but I don't think that is sustainable.

Does anybody really expect for-profit businesses to throw money at workers for not working, or rather that they will put the profits into retained earnings?

While I don't agree with them wholeheartedly, isn't this the premise of the "bullshit jobs" folks say is already happening? Given the relative simplicity of it's product, does Facebook really need tens of thousands of software engineers? I guess Elon is willing to take that bet with Twitter.

I think long term we might see changes to improve efficiency, but it's not as if there aren't forces the opposite direction: managers that see status scaling with direct reports, not all technology is implemented immediately, and sometimes bureaucracy stands in the way. Sometimes unions drive this: NYC subways are still driven by hand despite computer controlled systems elsewhere.

Given the relative simplicity of it's product, does Facebook really need tens of thousands of software engineers?

Facebook isn't simple, and if you get caught in one of its circular bugs, there is no human support person who can help you out. I've had three clients in the past year get locked out of some Facebook for Business service or seemingly simple feature due to miscommunication between complex related services or a seemingly easily solvable security issue -- if there were any human beings capable of looking into them. There aren't. It's all completely impersonal and complicated and extremely frustrating when you're the one trying to get some kind of relief.

This is an interesting topic because, broadly, most people sympathize with workers fired from jobs because they’ve been made redundant, but also that automating the blue collar tasks which need to be done is not going so fast, so there’s jobs for these people to go into.

It would be great if we could all go into art, but at that point I think AI would be better than us at that too.

I think this is true at some levels, but depends on a narrow definition of "art." Sure ML can produce well-tempered pieces, but people don't go to art museums to see "Dutch woman with head covering and visible earring in the style.of the Dutch Golden Age." There is a hard-to-quantify notion of authenticity in art that isn't quite the same.

I think AI art may well develop into its own medium or genre, but I don't see it replacing everything else in the same way that photography hasn't replaced painting (although it had a profound impact on preferred styles, moving away from realism) or sound recording hasn't eliminated live musicians even if some events do use an iPod and a speaker. There is a very human quality that keeps people paying to see live music performances.

I don't know what AI art will do in a decade, but I think there will still be a place for human artists.

Well, my point was conditional on AI removing people from the workplace. Conditional on that I expect it to be generally better than people at art as well.

I think there will still be a place for "artists" but it will essentially be social in nature. I suppose to some extent it already is.

The notion of authenticity may be hard to quantify but the number of people actually going to see those authentic art pieces rather than consuming media products is much easier.

I propose that any AI that fails these tests be declared an Abominable Intelligence.

This is weaksauce. Where's my Orange Catholic bible? Zensunni Catholics and Budislamists would have the decency of spelling out the conclusions from such principles and command a holy djihad on anyone who makes black box AI (or AI at all really).

Jesus, at least go for the moderate position and hang anyone who publishes models that aren't open source including weights and training datasets! They are nakedly trying to enslave you through machines, after all.

I think there would actually be a definite social improvement if most religions could agree that none of their participants ought to be judged by an unexplainable automated system and this proclamation clearly shows that they believe in such a principle, just not strongly enough to actually matter in the slightest.

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That creates a loophole of Tolkienesque proportions. All the AIs are women.

But was it eowyn or merry that kills the witch king? Merry using the special dagger created by remnants of the northern kingdom was important.

Merry isn't a man either though. It's less nonsense than the old Macbeth where "of woman born" doesn't apply to C-section babies.

It's less nonsense than the old Macbeth where "of woman born" doesn't apply to C-section babies.

A man did the Caesarean on Macduff, so it's yet another example of a man getting the credit for a woman's work.

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Y'know, Ubisoft built a lot of their earlier fortunes off of Tom Clancy, I wonder how much they owe to Dan Brown with Assassin's Creed.

I was goin to say it looks like every crypto scam site I've ever seen.

This fails right away because modern AI is inherently unexplainable in any meaningful sense. You can explain the models, but once they're trained, you can't explain exactly what causes it to do one thing over another most of the time.

The «in principle» clause does a lot of work here, I think. We can explain generally black-box models in principle, i.e. investigate behavior of specific subnetworks. Some links from this excellent thread:

etc. And of course we have stuff like OpenAI Microscope and can reason about attention maps and so on.

It's more like neuroscience than classical computer science, of course. And I suppose that by the standards of the Pope we do not understand human brain even «in principle».

I see this as an instance of a broader pattern: "All changes must be Pareto improvements". Demands for higher standards are fine, but the implicit "... or else there should be no AI at all" feels destructive.

I'm a bit more curious that these princples would not feel out of place coming from a generic California university or tech company. But the Vatican? Is this Pope Francis' modernizing reformist influence? I would have expected something like "we should ensure the benefits of AI make their way to the global poor" and "we as a community need to take care of anyone displaced by technology". In particular, the "Transparency", "Reliability", and "Security and privacy" points feel odd here.

Also, I am relieved to have made it out of university before "Algorethics" becomes a freshman compsci class requirement

I see this as an instance of a broader pattern: "All changes must be Pareto improvements".

No, the typical demands to not have "bias" (which usually means "disparate impact") tend to eliminate even pareto improvements.

Consider a lending algo which currently approves X% of blacks and Y% of whites. Now suppose AI comes along and approves (X+1)% of blacks and (Y+3)% of whites. That's a pareto improvement but it introduces "bias".

What this is a broader pattern of is "we want to make vague and incoherent demands so that we have an excuse to exercise power over you".

"we want to make vague and incoherent demands so that we have an excuse to exercise power over you".

That's what alignment looks like, no? I don't think AI researchers or AI itself should have power over AI.

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