A small group of activists could volunteer to be our ethical conscience. They prefer story telling and emotional appeal to logic, and being warriors all day long, are very tired of everyone else not understanding. And we can't understand unless we go through the same ideological retraining they have, so anything we do is by default failing to reach them. But since they know better, it should be their job anyway to give us the ethical approval. /s
Take the example of predicting terrorism threats based on facial queues of stress or fear. Machines lack context, which a qualified human would otherwise take into consideration. You can be stressed out because you might be accompanying a child, or fearful that you might miss a flight. If a TSA agent deports someone simply because a machine recommended it, that would be inhumane.
People like to argue that more regulation will adversely affect automation and/or growth/scaling of technologies and businesses. Growth is important but it must not cost us our humanity.
If a TSA agent deports someone simply because the machine recommended it, then that is a problem. But if a TSA agent deports someone simply because they were having a bad day, then that is also a problem.
I guess I don't care what tools those in authority are using (their intuition or a mechanical intuition or a database lookup), but what I care about is whether or not innocent people without the ability to navigate an appeal system are being erroneously penalized.
And ultimately, it's the responsibility of management to make sure that the people/tools they assign are doing a good job. If they fail, then management needs to find new people/tools. If management fails to do that, then all the AI regulation in the world isn't going to do much good.
However, if they hire a bunch of power hungry sociopaths who are very good at hiding their malicious oppression and who also bring in donuts every Thursday to stay on their bosses good side, then the situation could easily lead to worse outcomes for the people who have to deal with this system.
If we create a computer system that oppresses 1% of innocent people, then that is a problem. However, I don't consider it a win to ban the computer system and replace it with a human system that oppresses 10% of innocent people. Like, the situation isn't better because humans are oppressing humans instead of a computer doing the oppression.
That's why I was focused on management. I don't care that things are going badly for some specific technology related reason. It's management's job to fix it regardless. If management can't rely on the technology for regulatory reasons, then they might rely on people who do just as bad of a job. And hey, that scenario is even better for management because if they hire a bad actor who gets caught then that person faces the consequences and not them.
You're saying "I don't trust AI, I want human supervision", but this works both ways. Sometimes we don't trust the humans and would prefer a neutral AI. Humans do terrible things to other humans. Who's going to review my appeals? What are their biases? Are they any more trustworthy than a model?
"Your honor, we investigated the source code and discovered that there was technically no AI being utilized. It was a poorly formatted series of if-statements. Honestly, I wouldn't even consider this a program. How it avoids crashing the moment it's run is beyond me."
Like, does AI mean some statistical method is used? That large data sets were used? Are you using some declarative language like prolog?
Ultimately the only definition I can see them coming to will reduce to "person uses computer to do thing I don't like." And somehow I don't think that's going to actually help.
Like, if you ban reading people's emotions you effectively have to also ban any human interaction.
It's also reasonable to ban anything that claims to be better at it than a human.
Although, I do like your comment about scale. If you have a system that's 99% successful, then if you apply it to everyone in the US then you're failing 3 million people. That's a problem.
Of course, your system might be mechanical OR it might just be a group of people each one just "doing their job." From a result oriented point of view, you might end up with a mechanical system that oppresses less people than a people system.
I don't feel good about either one, but I also don't feel good about causing wide scale misery because at least it's people screwing over other people instead of a machine screwing over people.
[Of course it's worth noting that I don't trust the technology at all. It's just that I also don't trust the human solution that it claims it can replace.]
I suppose the benefit of a human actor is that you can theoretically fine or jail them if they're found to be malicious or sufficiently incompetent.
However, on the other hand, human actors can explain why they're doing the right thing. Even when they are in fact doing the wrong thing. An AI that is broken incomprehensibly can still be determined to be broken. The human actor causing issues can produce very convincing arguments to avoid termination. Also they can bring in donuts every Thursday to stay on the bottom of the termination list.
[And to be clear. I don't trust the technology at all. I just also don't trust the human system either. A system isn't better because innocent people are oppressed by humans instead of by a computer.]
Or maybe it more directly tries to sense emotion by using your webcam to look at your facial expression.
That would be acceptable collateral damage, if it couldn't be permitted without opening the door for the creation of systems that used the information against the analyzed people's interests.
I'd be willing to at least consider a carefully crafted exception. The problem being that when you write such an exception, it tends to be awfully easy to introduce loopholes that, in practice, allow using uninformed pseudo-consent, or false consent with no real alternative available, to use information against people.
I.e. my point is that such a ban would have to be very extensive and invasive, with obvious censorship of small, simple segments of code and whole avenues of basic knowledge. Given some data, you can get a crude emotion detector from facial images or text messages - not state of art but somewhat accurate - with something like ten lines of code, with no previous skill on "emotion analysis", just applying generic ML approaches. I can't imagine how such a ban could be implemented, as so many people would still be able to easily make such systems whenever they wanted to, so the ban wouldn't be effective.
Perhaps you could regulate the application of automated decision making to decisions about people and requiring some review-and-override mechanisms (GDPR has some limited aspects of that), but it's a very different area than just banning knowledge and skills that already exist and are relatively widespread.
I am aware of a healthcare company which currently has a model in production which alerts healthcare providers if a person displays suicidal intent. They have several confirmed instances deaths being prevented because of the interventions taken due to alerts from their model. While I don't think ML should be used to manipulate people's emotional states, I think this is a case where having a model that can read people's emotions is a good thing.
make a committee to vote to fund a study to create a subcommittee to vote to fund a study on something from a decade ago with a small, non-representative sample size, reaching predetermined conclusions that justify the need for the committee and all related subcommittees, instead of getting anything done.
y'know, government.
But stating your policy opens up another angle of attack: those who wish to undermine your ideas can attack your implementation rather than the concept.
I agree that she's still better than most US politicians. I have some faith in politicians from Western Europe to do half the correct thing, or at least not be swayed by arguments coming from money too much. Not that much faith, but still..
Yeah, it's frustrating when people do this. But if you want to have real solution at the end of the day, then you'll need to hammer out all of your implementation issues.
If you produce an implementation that is flawed, then people will be able to evade the spirit of your regulation rendering it useless.