WHAT PEOPLE THINK ETHICAL ISSUES IN AI ARE: wow.... we're creating... new life........

WHAT ETHICAL ISSUES IN AI ACTUALLY ARE: techbros worshiping the almighty algorithm, not caring to look at what bad patterns the machines are picking up (racism, sexism, etc) and how to avert them, and overreliance on neural networks meaning that said algorithms are treated as magical black boxes where nobody wants to (or can, really) point out exactly how the equation works (and why it may be faulty)

basically if people would just carve off 5% of the sci-fi panic and anxiety and spend that energy being legitimately concerned about how if you tell a computer "learn the rules of this game", the rules it will come back to report to you will be dripping with systemic inequality that must be directly confronted instead of excused or praised as infallible because "a passionless computer did it"

we'd all be much better off

@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 @wigglytuffitout thr falling over thing was unexpected but it doesn’t come from any special cleverness in the AI, it comes from poorly specified rules. rules create an abstract space that a “solution” is a successful navigation of. a computer just hungrily navigated every corner, including surprising corners we don’t think are in the space because humans, especially adults, apply 1000 additional rules we’re not consciously aware of.

@zensaiyuki @wigglytuffitout ... I was literally using that as an example of using AI to unveil underlying assumptions about rules in the humans writing the code....

@InspectorCaracal @wigglytuffitout I got that, and it can be useful for finding legit solutions that a human would never think of. another great example is a circuit designing AI was able to save a part by not including an oscillator, but instead using electromagnetic interference from neighboring circuits for that function.

but the drawback is that these unconventional solutions don’t always reveal the gaps in our ressoning.