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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31234 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.

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.

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