quit worrying about if AI is going to be creating new consciousness

start worrying about AI learning how to enforce things like redlining and the glass ceiling

worry about it because *it's happening now*.

@wigglytuffitout facetious one-liner aside, that's actually the root of the problem

AI is seen as a black-box magical Future Invention, and as such, the questions of the actual mechanics and process of developing it are generally ignored by the populace because it's not Real AI Yet. And that's bad.

@InspectorCaracal the worst part is that this is also pretty popular *within the people programming AI right now*.

neural networking is a cool buzzword that sounds sci-fi and high-tech, and it also processes data in a way that makes it very, very, very hard, if not nigh impossible, to go "okay, i told you to learn the rules of the game. can you tell me what rules you learned?" and have the program show you what it's doing. BUT IT SOUNDS SO COOL IT MUST BE INFALLIBLE..........

@wigglytuffitout I was very excited about neural nets until I realized that 99% of neural nets you hear about are just the same statistical analysis algorithm being fed different data to try to get it to be able to independently replicate the data you fed it

which.... okay.......?

@wigglytuffitout That last point can't be emphasized enough. **IT'S HAPPENING NOW**. People got all up in arms about the racist webcam years ago, but what they don't realize is that that racist webcam's cousin is now making important decisions in areas like the court system or the housing system. And it's not much better about not being racist. If anything, it might just be a bit worse.

@wigglytuffitout And, of course, the techbros love to say "Oh, it's just learning from the data." Yeah, guess what? The data contains **years** of prejudice. That computer ain't learning from some pure, neutral set. It's not like trying to teach it to recognize the number three. It's learning from our shittiness. The computer can't tell right from wrong, so if you feed it all the wrong of the past centuries, without feeding it *massive* corrections...

@wigglytuffitout This. So many people need to get into the field thinking about this because not enough people in the field care enough.

@wigglytuffitout (That said a conscious AI might recognize the problems too and wipe out all the techbros, so hey, bonus.)

@wigglytuffitout @Pyretta you may find this worthy to boost.

@wigglytuffitout I wanna see an extant AI given a scenario with the social rules of today and see what it does and how that unveils people's assumptions

like that one where the AI was given the problem of getting to point A from point B as fast as possible and they built a very tall structure that fell over and landed on point B

@InspectorCaracal the worst part is that for a lot of these social rules, the technology is being developed by people so sheltered and so lazy about it that they do not question if something's a bad choice

they don't know enough to look at, say, AI handling assessing risk of mortgages, to view the results and go "wait a second fellas, i think this is just redlining with extra steps". they go "oh, the computer has shown us the truth!" and are pleased to have their own racism reaffirmed.

@wigglytuffitout see that's why I don't want it to be a neural net like what I was talking about, that's literally just designed to recreate the things you fed it

i want a problem-solving AI that you give the rules and the goal and let it figure out the how, then you look a the how

and then everyone will look at the how and it will be totally fucking bizarre and they'll be like "what the fuck" and it'll be because they assumed A and B and C were just inherent

@wigglytuffitout like with the falling over thing, the programmers just assumed that the solution would inherently involved a mobile entity that traversed the distance linearly

but that wasn't actually put into the rules, and the giant tower thing falling over actually fit the rules

it forces people to evaluate the fact that the rules they think are the rules are not necessarily all of their rules

@InspectorCaracal anyway it's about this point in Said Family Member's soapbox rant about how the majority of AI programming these days is shit that i claim the soapbox for myself, and start yelling about how this is what you get when you divorce STEM completely from the liberal arts and raise graduates on the idea that silly social sciences where you have empathy for other people or look at history and its effects are completely not needed when you have the ability to crunch numbers

@wigglytuffitout YEAH!!!

@InspectorCaracal fortunately said family member completely agrees with me on this part so it then becomes a soapbox duet, which, as we all know, is integral to all good family Anger Bonding (tm) moments