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monkey news from Africa (via India)

August 28, 2007

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Three very different sources of bias in AI, and how to fix them

Since our Science paper came out it's been evident that people are surprised that machines can be biased. They assume machines are necessarily neutral and objective, which is in some sense true -- in the sense that there is no machine perspective or ethics. But to the extent an artefact is an element of our culture, it will always reflect bias.

I think the problem is that people mistake computation for math. Math really is pure, has certain truth, it's eternal, it would be the same without any particular sentient species looking at it. That's because math is an abstraction that doesn't exist in the real world. Computation is a physical process. It takes time, energy, and space. Therefore it is resource constrained. This is true whether you are talking about natural or artificial intelligence. From a computational perspective there's little difference between these.

People are smart because we are able to exploit the selected "best of" other people&#…

Don't be evil. (Don't be brittle.)

When Demis Hassabis said he would join Google if they didn't work with the US military, I told BBC Newsnight that this was a red herring. "Murder kills five times more people than war" was a short way to say there's a lot more to ethics than just avoiding the military, an obvious example being avoiding selling arms to paramilitaries (or school children.) In fact, many military officers often really are major advocates for peace and stability, including policies like reducing developing-world diseases and poverty because they contribute to instability.

But by far the worst and most disturbing thing I heard in the many AI policy meetings I was invited to attend last year was in the only one in the US. That was the Artificial Intelligence and Global Security Summit on Nov 1, 2017 in Washington, DC, hosted by the Center for a New American Security. Note: the CNAS have videos and transcripts of all the talks and discussions linked on that page.

Despite it supposedly be…

Living with AGI

I was at a Chatham Rules meeting on AI and Law / Governance last weekend. Everyone was smart, but a minority openly believed in Artificial General Intelligence, AGI. This was mostly magical thinking, assuming that infinite computation could be had for free, one person even said they expected the world to be "post-scarcity" within 10 years. We will never be post-scarcity for time or space, though I can believe that given the limits the nature of our species sets on those two things, we can be effectively post-scarcity on energy, maybe soon. But even if we achieve that, that will only be the beginning of a solution for sustainability.

Still, it was interesting to see what work these individuals' beliefs about AGI was doing in their theory of governance. Earlier this year, I wrote that there were two definitions of AGI and addressed and dismissed them in a footnote, but now I see people are using a third definition we cannot entirely dismiss.

I want to delineate these her…

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