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Google Quietly Disbanded Another AI Review Board Following Disagreements (wsj.com)
Google is disbanding a panel in London to review its artificial-intelligence work in health care, WSJ reported Monday, as disagreements about its effectiveness dogged one of the tech industry's highest-profile efforts to govern itself. From a report: The Alphabet unit is struggling with how best to set guidelines for its sometimes-sensitive work in AI -- the ability for computers to replicate tasks that only humans could do in the past. It also highlights the challenges Silicon Valley faces in setting up self-governance systems as governments around the world scrutinize issues ranging from privacy and consent to the growing influence of social media and screen addiction among children. AI has recently become a target in that stepped-up push for oversight as some sensitive decision-making -- including employee recruitment, health-care diagnoses and law-enforcement profiling -- is increasingly being outsourced to algorithms. The European Commission is proposing a set of AI ethical guidelines and researchers have urged companies to adopt similar rules. But industry efforts to conduct such oversight in-house have been mixed. Further reading: Google Cancels AI Ethics Board In Response To Outcry.
Sorry, but why would we trust multi-billion dollar companies to self regulate, when their clear goal is maximizing profits and getting as much of your data as possible.
I wouldn't trust any company to self regulate, let alone anything like Google or Facebook who have demonstrated time and time again they don't care about your privacy.
We need to be regulating them, not just trusting they'll do the right thing ... because we know they won't.
When I read the first three words of that headline, I was shocked, until I read the rest.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Google is a little duplicitous in its dealings. Its real customers, the advertisers know exactly what they're getting and what the terms are, but the people having their data sucked up aren't always told what's happening and are often quite horrified when they find out what companies like Google, Facebook, etc. have collected about them.
I don't particularly trust either group. I think the best approach is to enshrine certain guarantees of privacy into the constitution or law and let the men with gavels smack them around for non-compliance.
Sorry, but why would we trust multi-billion dollar companies to self regulate
Because if they do not they die, or are punished rather badly.
their clear goal is maximizing profits
Here's the problem with being afraid of that - you have no idea what that actually means. In fact, even GOOGLE does not know what that really means.
No-one knows what actions would truly "maximize profits". Certainly not the people outside the company's top execs who have no inkling of the roadmap for the company, and very little ability to understand what will even be possible in five years or longer. But for those inside the company, even then actions are just an educated guess.
So companies may be trying to "maximize profits" but since there is no one sure way to do so, instead what they are really doing is trying to follow a mission statement to move a company forward toward one or more end goals. Often those goals can have some altruistic purpose to help people, alongside the goal to help the company.
getting as much of your data as possible.
Some but not all, Google for sure this is indeed true of.
We need to be regulating them
Oh so you'd like the citation much worse? You'd like all other companies to end up like pharmaceutical companies, the most heavily regulated industry there is?
The problem with using regulation as the only tool to shape company actions is that if a company is large enough it can easily control the regulations that supposedly control them. Then not only can they do what they like without worry about government, but they use regulations as a tool to ensure competitors cannot function well, thereby removing the only real force that actually changes company behavior - market pressure. If you can't have some small company come up and compete against you, a company will do what it likes forever - the more regulation the better.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To your first point, I would say that Google has been deceitful. I'm sure they've informed you of exactly what they do with the information collected through their services which you and others provide voluntarily. They've broken no laws so there's little the government can do. There's also the cynical take that governments don't mind companies amassing these large caches of data, so long as they let the government peek at it. It's like having a secret police that you don't need to maintain for yourself.
The second point is what we already have. The sad reality is that a large segment of the population places a very low value on their privacy, and there are other segments that actively wish to erode privacy rights as long as it harms some other group which they detest.
All I can say is that hopefully the next generation of founding fathers learn from the mistakes of history and enshrine better protections into their constitution and seek to build a nation that's willing to stand up for and defend those rights.
Or, you know, maybe it's dumb to expect people to negotiate a million complex conditions on every trivial thing they do, therefore the whole "contracts for everything" paradigm is an impossible, unsustainable pipe dream, and therefore the right answer for low value interactions with massive imbalances of information and leverage is just to set standard rules that people don't have to think about.
"We didn't ask you if it was ok to do AI."
"We asked you to tell us how it's ok for us to use AI to enslave humanity!"
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Its real customers, the advertisers know exactly what they're getting
Advertisers know what they're getting in the sense that they bid for clicks from users who have searched for a particular word or are looking at content related to a particular topic, so they know what they'll pay for clicks, and they know how successful they are at converting those clicks to sales (from their own statistics), but that's about all they know. They don't get any information about users, at least from Google (and I assume the same is true of Facebook).
but the people having their data sucked up aren't always told what's happening and are often quite horrified when they find out what companies like Google, Facebook, etc. have collected about them.
Are they horrified when they find out what companies have collected about them, or are they horrified by what other people speculate the companies might have collected about them? In my experience, when people see what's on myactivity.google.com, for example, they're pretty underwhelmed. Note that I'm not claiming the information showed there is complete -- for one thing, if Google has information that is probably about you because it came from your IP, for example, it can't show you that because that data might not be about you and showing it to you might violate the privacy of whoever it's really about.
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And when the men with gavels fail, there's an amendment between the first and third that exists explicitly for turning a corrupt government off and back on whether it likes it or not.
When. Not 'if'.
Question everything
This is what happens when a significant majority of your workforce does not wish to hear any opposing viewpoints and actively punish anyone who does not toe the party line. They create a self-imposed echo chamber so that "all is well" in their tiny little world.
-- Will program for bandwidth
I generally agree with your assessment, and my problem isn't people willingly turning over information to these companies. I don't use Facebook and I've been moving away from Google (which is getting easier given how much less useful their search has become over the years), but the problem is that these companies are able to collect a large amount of personal information about me even when I don't use them and give them my business.
The only real problem I have with your argument is that the same could be said about free speech. There are quite a few people who think it shouldn't even exist and that the government should in fact clamp down on certain types of speech. I don't think that some people believing that a fundamental right shouldn't exist or be protected weakens the government's duty to uphold that right.
I went to myactivity.google.com.
They wanted me to log in to see anything.
And what would you have them show you without logging in?
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You actually think this would work? We already have a 1st and 2nd amendment that are routinely ignored. If you put "shall not be infringed" and it is routinely infringed, what makes you think that having privacy as a constitutional right or even just a common law would make any difference?
The electoral college is also "enshrined in the Constitution," but that hasn't stopped anybody from trying hard to work around it.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Careful not to oversimplify this. The bigger problem is incompetence in bureaucracies. This issue is going to crop up regardless whether there's an outside regulator. The downside to having an external regulating body is that in the case of incompetence-induced disaster, the company can shrug and say "well, we were just following best practices as defined by the National FOO Organization" and that's an argument that sometimes lets a company dodge charges of incompetence. It gets particularly bad when you have industry ex-leaders, former c-levels and former board members in charge of the regulating bodies (because they have "experience.")
I don't necessarily have a good answer here. The problem is instutionalized incompetence is something I could rant about for days (Feynman's appendix in Challenger Report is a good starting place.) I just don't think external regulation is going to solve the problem. If it gets more people looking at decisions and commenting on them I suppose that is an improvement because it can increase the odds that someone will pipe up, but I worry about it becoming a rubber stamping pass-the-buck mechanism that actually decreases responsibility.
"given how much less useful their search has become over the years"
This is one good thing about Google's descent into overt evil: it seems to have destroyed the company's ability to make good products. Google Search results have been getting less and less useful, and have really gone downhill fast in recent years. Likewise the new Fischer Price UI for Gmail is craptastic. Maps is still awesome - so I eagerly await the next version that ruins it too.
Google has always been a surveillance company, but they used to do a good job of pretending to be a product company. At one time the quality of their baitware was head & shoulders above competing, less-malicious software products.
Google has always had contempt for its users - it's unavoidable when their whole business model is based on stalking, snooping, and selling the details of people's private lives to repressive governments. When Google was still growing, they paid lip service to caring about their users. Now that Google has vast monopoly power, this lip service is no longer necessary. Big Brother Google is part of the totalitarian security state and you, the user, are nothing but a deplorable prole.
Google: Be Evil.
Fuck you, plebs, that's why!
EVERYONE KNOWS the gestapo has direct real time access to Big Brother Google's mass surveillance data.
Then everyone knows something that isn't true (even if you replace gestapo with US law enforcement / government).
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