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 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.)
QueerPaladin 
@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
@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
The algorithms corporations implement will be just extensions of themselves.
@wigglytuffitout I admire how many good good words you have managed to put in one single toot and thank you for it.
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*.