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
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 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...