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Comment by chobeat | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that researchers and engineers rarely engage in the public debate except if they need to drive corporative interests.

The debate sees corporations and the tech elite on one side and artists, activists and philosophers on the other, with journalists split between the two. Engineers are used by either side but they don't have their own voice and mostly because they don't have informed opinions or the cultural means and interest to join a non-technical debate as a cohesive force.

The result is that the whole debate is conducted mostly by people that has no idea how this stuff really works and cannot separate marketing mumbo jumbo from the actual practice of building "AI" systems.

It's therefore very refreshing to see the work of artists like Hito Steyerl or ssbkyh that actually learn how to work with Deep Learning or other techniques to actually create critique of the existing narrative.

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> mostly because they don't have informed opinions or the cultural means and interest to join a non-technical debate

This is somewhere between slander and trying to explain away other social groups bullying engineers.

The truth is much simpler: engineers have responded to being bullied out of the debate by simply ignoring it, and implementing AI without concern for the results of that debate. Engineers have that power -- they can unilaterally change society by implementing a new kind of mind without approval or buy-in from other parties.

So I think my position is the reverse of yours: if business leaders, activists, etc want to meaningfully impact the AI debate, they should engage with the engineers actually building it -- rather than having a debate among themselves.

> The truth is much simpler: engineers have responded to being bullied out of the debate by simply ignoring it, and implementing AI without concern for the results of that debate. Engineers have that power -- they can unilaterally change society by implementing a new kind of mind without approval or buy-in from other parties.

Truth is never simple. Engineers have been "bullied" out of the debate (this is not really how I see it but ok) because they often hold beliefs that renders the debate impossible. The narrative of "engineer is a pure discipline" or that "tools have no political color" are still strong despite countless counter-evidence. In the case of software-engineers that are left alone in the hands of managers and their interests, the social devastation that follows is very evident just by looking at the news.

> So I think my position is the reverse of yours: if business leaders, activists, etc want to meaningfully impact the AI debate, they should engage with the engineers actually building it -- rather than having a debate among themselves.

This is a real and pressing concern for many of them but it's not easy. I'm an engineer and I'm trying to do just that, or at least bring the existing discourse to the engineers if I can't bring the engineers to the discourse. But believe me, the cultural and personal resistance is extremely strong, first of all because it forces them to re-evaluate the belief system and take responsability for what they are doing and what they did in the past. Staying in an ethical comfort zone where you can ignore the consequences of your action is much easier.

Well, but tools do have no political color. That's why The Open Source Definition has "No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor", period.

I can't be the only person who has seen FOSS people complaining bitterly that their work has been used in projects they object to.

"No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavour" - like FOSS itself - is an absolutely huge win for the corporates.

Related: I used to know someone who designed missile guidance systems. His work was a purely theoretical problem solving exercise for him until he saw a missile he had worked on being used in news footage of a war.

That was when he realised that even though he wasn't discriminating against some fields of endeavour, the technology he was building most certainly did.

I have sympathy for anyone who regrets his mistakes, as I certainly regret my own. However, it can't really have been a total surprise that a missile guidance system was used in a war?

Depending on the circumstances it could absolutely be.

For example, many defense research labs have “red team” projects where new capabilities are developed strictly to understand adversary capabilities, feasibility / cost to extend a legacy system with modern tech, and many similar things. Kind of like Myth Busters but applied to questions about an adversary’s capabilities.

Some of these research labs are even joined with academic institutions that carry with them a strict ethics mandate that any and all such work can only be theoretical or defensive in nature, to assess and defend against threats, anticipate new threats or debunk claimed capabilities from existing adversaries, but absolutely never to carry out an offensive agenda, enhance existing attack capability or anything similar.

In a situation like that, you absolutely could be greatly surprised & upset to learn your defensive “myth busters” research is turned around and repurposed by another team or something to enhance attack capabilities.

It could be similar with computer security as well. Imagine putting your best effort into developing an attack, exploit or malware because you think it’s purely to determine if something could be done by an adversary, or to highlight a weakness purely for defensive purposes... only to find that it’s used to directly attack someone else after the research leaves your hands.

Again, this isn't meant as harsh criticism, since I know how easy it is to fool oneself. However, we're talking about another level of cognitive dissonance entirely with defense research lab staff discovering only too late the purpose of "defense research". Maybe there was a sign on the door that said "for peaceful purposes only", but the main thing to remember about the war industry is that they lie.

I think you are imagining that it’s some small, throw-away comment, but it’s not necessarily.

MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory for example was originally opposed by the university president at the time with huge community backlash against the university becoming connected to a military research lab.

Part of the original charter of the lab was that its scope of operation was very, very strictly restricted to US air defense, and very strictly not the development of offensive capabilities. There was even a huge report commissioned by the university to detail exactly the defense needs and set boundaries around them in terms of what projects could possibly be approved for funding at the lab. The “no attack” component of this was a giant, first-order constraint of the whole multi-million dollar endeavor to even create the facility at all.

On the other hand, I do agree many other cases could be like what you suggested. Just saying not all.. and some of them would be directly, loudly predicated on “defense only” mandates where it would be a huge surprise if the research was subverted later.

The thread hypothesis is that regardless of the marketing, work in weapons-oriented research will create weapons. Does Lincoln undertake such research? Could it do so? You introduced LL into the conversation, presumably because you wouldn't be shocked to see weapons come from there too. I don't know much about LL, but I wouldn't be shocked either. I do believe you when you tell me that some people working there would be shocked.

Within the first 5-15 years of LL’s existence though, I would have been dramatically shocked if it engaged in projects that created offensive capabilities.

Aaaaaaaaaand here we go again.

The Definition deliberately enforces non-discrimination. The point of that is to make sure that licensors don't "color" the tool by putting restrictions in their license (thus excluding some potential licensees).

Surely you can see that this has no logical bearing on whether any given tool has inherent "political color". Some tools, like some foodstuffs, could conceivably be inherently incompatible with particular religions, for example. The OSD doesn't take any position on that possibility because it's not regulating the nature of the tool, just what the license contains.

This is rather like "bits have no colour", which is true if you only look at the bits. It relies on not looking at the context, and then declaring the context irrelevant.

Whether something is relevant context or not is a personal and political decision.

Bits don't have color. Nor does arithmetic. The people who use them do, and the things those people do with bits and arithmetic might. It depends on who you ask... and what their politics suggest the appropriate color-carrying context is.

But the leading researchers are very much on the hype train. I agree that lack of knowledge only makes it worse. But feel like there's a lot more going on.

Hype in of itself is a very attractive thing. For a practitioner it's hard to pass on a narrative that puts you in the center of the universe. Then world-is-about-to-end/change alarmism is very attractive too.

And on the other side skepticism and cynicism generally isn't something that spreads easily. Unless the hype is so absurd that the criticism itself becomes sensational. Which might be happening at the moment.

>Engineers are used by either side but they don't have their own voice and mostly because they don't have informed opinions or the cultural means and interest to join a non-technical debate as a cohesive force.

Not strictly true engineers do concern themselves with ethics and issues are discussed including in professional journals etc(For example look at what IEEE has to say about ethics of AI) it may not be public debate but it is not ignored.

One thing you are missing is Engineers work for companies which tend to place limits what you can communicate publicly. Pretty much everything has to be released via official channels which go through all the PR Spin.

I can think of at least two reasons for this. 1. The information could be considered stock market sensitive and 2. it's very easy for something you say informally 'off the cuff' to be taken as a company position by lazy media who can't distinguish between "engineer who works for company x says..." and "company x says..."

I am an Engineer (I don't work in AI) but my company places strict limits on what we can say on things like social media and to reporters, at conferences etc so yes that does exclude participation in 'the public debate'.

I don't know about software world (I am the non software type of engineer) but we had courses on professional conduct at university (which covered professional communication, alongside topics such as, Ethics, regulatory compliance, liability etc).

I whole-heartedly agree. This is one of the reasons I think that education about AI and ML is important (and, on the flip side, I also think that it wouldn't hurt to educate AI and ML researchers/engineers about humanist issues so that they can participate in non-technical debate).

I found there's not much to learn about "humanist" issues, in the sense of background knowledge of consensus of the field. United States and North Korea agree on nuclear physics: they use the exactly same number for cross section. They don't agree much on humanist issues.

"humanist issues" are about the management (not the solution) of unsolvable disagreements. The knowledge is different in nature from scientific knowledge but for no reason should it be considered inferior. By thinking this way you just exclude yourself from any discourse and just hinder your condition.

> United States and North Korea agree on nuclear physics: they use the exactly same number for cross section. They don't agree much on humanist issues.

This is true but concluding that therefore there's "not much to learn" seems like the worst possible way of resolving this conflict.

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