hi all, i just started a column with fast co and wrote an article about elon musk's AI panic.
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90137818/dear-elon-forget-killer-robots-heres-w...
would love some feedback :)
best, caroline
This is excellent, Caroline. What a powerful piece.
You may want to read Angele Christin's paper that just came out in Big Data and Society that complicates the notion of judges accepting algorithmic reasoning wholesale in making decisions.
http://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/SPgDYyisV8mAJn4fm7Xi/full
Best, Heather.
Dr Heather Ford University Academic Fellow School of Media and Communications http://media.leeds.ac.uk/, The University of Leeds w: hblog.org / EthnographyMatters.net http://ethnographymatters.net/ / t: @hfordsa http://www.twitter.com/hfordsa
On 26 August 2017 at 02:50, Caroline Sinders csinders@wikimedia.org wrote:
hi all, i just started a column with fast co and wrote an article about elon musk's AI panic.
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90137818/dear-elon-forget- killer-robots-heres-what-you-should-really-worry-about
would love some feedback :)
best, caroline _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
[The views below are my views and not necessarily the views of my employer, the Wikimedia Foundation.]
Hi Caroline,
Here are a few feedback points on my end:
* I'm not sure what the ultimate goal of the piece is: to raise awareness about the issues around machine learning and artificial intelligence, or to say that Elon Musk doesn't know the real challenges of AI, or to have a (friendly?) conversation with him, or something else. I would focus on one goal, and I would personally go with the first goal as it's an important one (and I know you know it:).
* Assuming that the goal is the first one:
** There are a few instances that you claim the future where machines can replace humans will never be here. You are basically claiming that artificial general intelligence (AGI) research will not result in what its aim is. This is a big claim: if you say it, you should prove it. :) I personally recommend staying away from this line of claim, because it's hard to prove, in fact, there may be such a future.
** In some dimensions, the future that Elon Musk is concerned about is very near (in some it's potentially very far, and it's good to plan for now: see the next point): the self-driving cars are one example. It is safe to say that they are here (it's the matter of when and not if). It is not hard to imagine all the traffic of a state in the U.S. such as California to be replaced with self-driving cars in some years, and these combinations of machines can cause serious harm. This can be due to ethical gaps, privacy and security gaps, etc. Once you enter the military world, there are even more real examples that again, are either being used or can be used relatively soon. The concerns around a distributed system of machines making decisions about what the next target is and how to react to it are very real and along the lines of what Elon Musk may be concerned about.
** The regulations have been forming in a reactive way in the past decades and this is a problem on its own, imo. It is reasonable to say that now that we have time and control over where we are heading, let's make sure we regulate things at a pace that we don't end up getting surprised and over-regulate, for example.
** I personally would skip the whole conversation style in this kind of article. In some of your audience, including me, it creates a first reaction of "yes, we taught him a lesson." which is (hopefully) quickly followed by: "but wait a minute, this person has so many great achievements and the media may have been exaggerating his views based on isolated comments." I cannot think that Elon Musk doesn't see many of the issues that the not-fully-informed/educated machine learning implementations can cause and you have listed. If the point of your piece is not to tell him he's wrong, then I would reconsider the style.
I hope this helps. :)
Best, Leila
-- Leila Zia Senior Research Scientist Wikimedia Foundation
On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 9:50 AM, Caroline Sinders csinders@wikimedia.org wrote:
hi all, i just started a column with fast co and wrote an article about elon musk's AI panic.
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90137818/dear-elon-forget-killer-robots-heres-w...
would love some feedback :)
best, caroline _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
On Sat, Aug 26 2017, Leila Zia wrote:
** I personally would skip the whole conversation style in this kind of article. In some of your audience, including me, it creates a first reaction of "yes, we taught him a lesson."
There's no accounting for taste, but I found the style offputting.
I'll comment on one claim in the article:
« Robots are never going to “think” like humans »
That is, in general, a non sequitor. Airplanes don't fly the same way that birds fly. AlphaGo apparently doesn't play Go the way humans do. Wikipedia isn't written the same way that Britannica is -- and no one really seems to mind ;-)
... and, yes, what does this post have to do with wikis?
Could we use some theorising about AI systems to understand and correct some of the infelicities of good old fashioned Web 2.0 systems?
What would the article look like if it was a broader call to action?
Hi Caroline,
The premise of this article seems to be that everyone needs to solve either the immediate or the distant problems. No one (and certainly not Elon Musk) would argue that there are no immediate problems with AI, but why should that keep us from thinking ahead?
In a company, too, you have plumbers who fix the bathrooms today and strategists who plan business 20 years ahead. We need both. If the plumbers didn't worry about the immediate problems, the strategists couldn't do their jobs. If the strategists didn't worry about the distant problems, the plumbers might not have jobs down the road.
Also, your argument stands on sandy ground from paragraph one, where you claim that AI will never threaten humanity, without giving the inkling of an argument.
Bob
On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 6:50 PM, Caroline Sinders csinders@wikimedia.org wrote:
hi all, i just started a column with fast co and wrote an article about elon musk's AI panic.
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90137818/dear-elon-forget- killer-robots-heres-what-you-should-really-worry-about
would love some feedback :)
best, caroline _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
OK ok. There's some hyperbole in this article and we are the type of people bent on citations and support. This isn't a research publication and Caroline admits in the beginning that she's going to get into a bit of a lecturing tone.
But honestly I liked the article. It makes a good point and pushes a sentiment that I share. Hearing about killer robots turning on humanity is sort of like hearing someone tell you that they are worried about global warming on Mars for future civilizations there when we ought to be more alarmed and focused on the coastal cities on Earth right now. We have so many pressing issues with AIs that are affecting people right now that the future focused alarm is, well, a bit alarmist! Honestly, I think that's the side of AI that lay people understand while the nuanced issues present in the AIs alive today are poorly understood and desperately in need of regulation
I don't think that the people who ought to worry about AIs current problems are "plumbers". They are you. They are me. They are Elon Musk. Identifying and dealing with the structural inequalities that AIs create today is state-of-the-art work. If we knew how to do it, we'd be done already. If you disagree, please show me where I can go get a tradeschool degree that will tell me what to do and negate the need for my research agenda.
-Aaron
On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 1:58 AM, Robert West west@cs.stanford.edu wrote:
Hi Caroline,
The premise of this article seems to be that everyone needs to solve either the immediate or the distant problems. No one (and certainly not Elon Musk) would argue that there are no immediate problems with AI, but why should that keep us from thinking ahead?
In a company, too, you have plumbers who fix the bathrooms today and strategists who plan business 20 years ahead. We need both. If the plumbers didn't worry about the immediate problems, the strategists couldn't do their jobs. If the strategists didn't worry about the distant problems, the plumbers might not have jobs down the road.
Also, your argument stands on sandy ground from paragraph one, where you claim that AI will never threaten humanity, without giving the inkling of an argument.
Bob
On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 6:50 PM, Caroline Sinders csinders@wikimedia.org wrote:
hi all, i just started a column with fast co and wrote an article about elon
musk's
AI panic.
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90137818/dear-elon-forget- killer-robots-heres-what-you-should-really-worry-about
would love some feedback :)
best, caroline _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Hi all!
Sorry for the delay- I had a super jam packed weekend and now upcoming week.
A few points- thank you for the feedback! In general, I love feedback and criticism and I definitely got it :) Two, didn't realize this was a *wiki only* related research channel, so I'll try to bear that in mind in the future when sharing things I am writing or have written.
But thirdly and lastly, this is not an academic article. This is an article published in design magazine about research related to ethics within product design, specifically products using utilizing machine learning and artificial intelligence. Though, I would love to write an academic paper on ethics of design utilizing machine learning *in* product design. If that sounds interesting to any of you, please get at me. I love to collaborate.
So- the tone of voice is *quite* snarky but I stand by it, again because this was written for Fast Company. I have much more academic writing, if you are interested in reading that, but it is on online harassment and automation. This article is designed to be a primer of information for product designers who may have heard Elon focusing on the dangers of AI. There are plenty of things to worry about in the future of AI, like the integration of artificial intelligence into the military or drones, for example. But publicly, there are no cases of that. There is, publicly, a variety of investigations done by ProPublica, which I link to in my article, about predictive policing and it's racial bias. The article itself is designed to be *approachable* for all readers, *especially non technical readers*. And this piece, in it's tone which I stand by, was designed to jokingly respond to Musk's hyperbolic freak out.
This is, instead, an article designed for lay people, and everyday designers, to think about what are the current issues with AI, examples of current issues with implicit bias in machine learning products right now, and other articles and videos to watch. What this is is a class syllabus wrapped in a layer of a very genial tone so everyday designers have something to chew on and some real information to grasp.
There aren't a lot of resources for everyday designers out there. There are not a lot of resources for start ups, product managers, designers, front end developers, etc on what is out there in this new and emerging field of artificial intelligence and how it exists currently within products already out in the world. Truth be told, this is an article I wrote for my old coworkers at IBM Watson Design- on why having a real conversation about ethically how you should design, ethically how you should build products using machine learning and what questions you should ask about what you are building and why. I saw and had *very few* of those conversations. I am writing for *those plumbers* who are out there making things right now, and have bad leadership and bad guidance, but are generally excited about product design and the future of AI, and they also have to ship their products now. Because, I am, also, a plumber. What I am doing *right now* at the Wikimedia Foundation is the fantastically weird but unsexy of job of designing tools and UI to mitigate online harassment while studying on wiki-harassment. It's not just research but a design schedule of rolling out tools quickly for the community to mitigate the onslaught of a lot of very real problems that are happening as we speak. I love it, I love the research that I'm doing because it's about the present and the future. Plumbing is important, it's how we all avoid cholera. Future city planning is important, it's how larger society functions together. Both are important.
I think we're really lucky to work where we all work and to be a part of this community. We get to question, openly and transparently, we get to solicit feedback, and we get to work on very meaningful software. Not every technologist or researcher is as lucky as we are. And those are the technologists I am most keen to talk to- what does it mean to fold in a technology that you don't understand very well, how do you design and utilize design thinking to make *something right now* and how do you do that without recreating a surveillance tool? It's really hard if you don't understand how to think about the threat model of your product, of what you intend to make and how it can be used to harm. There are so few primers for designers that exist on thinking about products from an ethical standpoint, and a standpoint of implicit bias. All of which are such important things to talk about when you are building products that use algorithms, and data, and the algorithm + the data really will determine what your product does more so than the design intends.
But you all know this already, it's lot's of other people that don't :)
Best, Caroline
Ps. the briefest, tiniest of FYIs, in online harassment and security, plumbers have a *hyper specific* connotation to them https://hypatia.ca/2016/06/21/no-more-rock-stars/.
On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 2:17 PM, Aaron Halfaker aaron.halfaker@gmail.com wrote:
OK ok. There's some hyperbole in this article and we are the type of people bent on citations and support. This isn't a research publication and Caroline admits in the beginning that she's going to get into a bit of a lecturing tone.
But honestly I liked the article. It makes a good point and pushes a sentiment that I share. Hearing about killer robots turning on humanity is sort of like hearing someone tell you that they are worried about global warming on Mars for future civilizations there when we ought to be more alarmed and focused on the coastal cities on Earth right now. We have so many pressing issues with AIs that are affecting people right now that the future focused alarm is, well, a bit alarmist! Honestly, I think that's the side of AI that lay people understand while the nuanced issues present in the AIs alive today are poorly understood and desperately in need of regulation
I don't think that the people who ought to worry about AIs current problems are "plumbers". They are you. They are me. They are Elon Musk. Identifying and dealing with the structural inequalities that AIs create today is state-of-the-art work. If we knew how to do it, we'd be done already. If you disagree, please show me where I can go get a tradeschool degree that will tell me what to do and negate the need for my research agenda.
-Aaron
On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 1:58 AM, Robert West west@cs.stanford.edu wrote:
Hi Caroline,
The premise of this article seems to be that everyone needs to solve
either
the immediate or the distant problems. No one (and certainly not Elon
Musk)
would argue that there are no immediate problems with AI, but why should that keep us from thinking ahead?
In a company, too, you have plumbers who fix the bathrooms today and strategists who plan business 20 years ahead. We need both. If the
plumbers
didn't worry about the immediate problems, the strategists couldn't do their jobs. If the strategists didn't worry about the distant problems,
the
plumbers might not have jobs down the road.
Also, your argument stands on sandy ground from paragraph one, where you claim that AI will never threaten humanity, without giving the inkling of an argument.
Bob
On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 6:50 PM, Caroline Sinders <
csinders@wikimedia.org>
wrote:
hi all, i just started a column with fast co and wrote an article about elon
musk's
AI panic.
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90137818/dear-elon-forget- killer-robots-heres-what-you-should-really-worry-about
would love some feedback :)
best, caroline _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 12:09 AM, Caroline Sinders csinders@wikimedia.org wrote:
What I am doing *right now* at the Wikimedia Foundation is the fantastically weird but unsexy of job of designing tools and UI to mitigate online harassment while studying on wiki-harassment. It's not just research but a design schedule of rolling out tools quickly for the community to mitigate the onslaught of a lot of very real problems that are happening as we speak.
Hey, this sounds very interesting Caroline! I realise the data and application are potentially quite sensitive, but to the extent that there are things you can share, it would be super interesting for my students in "Data Science for Design" at the University of Edinburgh to follow along with some of what you are doing.
In Week 6 of the Autumn term we're running a Data Fair and I've invited our University's Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, to come and present some real-world problems that Master's-level students in design can help out with. Again, given the sensitive nature of the problem you're tackling I have to wonder if there is any room for outside helpers on this particular problem -- but it's a fascinating one nonetheless.
Also in Week 6 there's a lecture on "data ethics". Your question, "how do you design and utilize design thinking to make *something right now* and how do you do that without recreating a surveillance tool?" is very much the kind of call to action (and to reflection) that I was asking about earlier on. Thanks for the intro to your project!
If there are ways to get involved without getting in the way, or other related resources that I can share with the students, please follow up with me here or off list.
-Joe
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