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It was discovered by others, not them; they fixed the issue only retroactively when it was called out in public. This lack of oversight is part of what I mean with applying things with caution.

And why would they have assumed in the first place that the model _would_ generalize across human races, or any other factor for that matter?

With all the bird shit they must be breathing in that room, they must be in for a surprise.

Yes, thank you. Analyzing the effects of our technology should be part of the engineering process. The physicists back where I studied all go through a mandatory ethics class. Us software crowd, well...

It's more like applying the technology with caution and accountability when you already know beforehand that the output is not error-free.

Excellent. One problem in my mind that I don't see discussed enough -- and also not in your other post -- is that there is a large divide between those who use the technology (the cops in this case) and those who supply it, and there is no accountability in any of the two groups when something goes wrong. Like you write in your other post, "the system works (according to an objective function which maximizes arrests.)", and that is as far as the engineer goes. On the other hand, the cop picks up the technology and blindly applies it. To make any improvement to the system would require both groups to work together, but as far as I know, that is not happening. A recent example can be found in the adventures of Clearview AI. So from that perspective, I do think that the engineers (and the cops, and everybody else) are out to lunch, each doing their own work in a bubble and not paying enough attention to (or caring about) the side effects of the applications of this technology.

Also, the lack of thought and accountability that I mention above I think is fairly general from my experience, even outside of policing. That is why I don't generally agree with the lunch statement. Guys are having a hell of a party as far as I can tell -- at the expense of horror stories suffered by the victims of these systems.

> The deepmind team etc type of group who actually know what they’re doing and the boundaries of what they are working with.

You claim that they "know what they are doing and the boundaries of what they are working with" -- and yet they recklessly make public a racist vision product?

If you are an ML practitioner and you think you're not part of the target audience, then you're probably part of the target audience.

Where does Google Vision Cloud sit in your categorization?

https://algorithmwatch.org/en/google-vision-racism/

I'm not entirely sure I'd fancy a second life as the pigeon in figure (1).

> But I also don't think the engineers working in this space are as out to lunch as the author seems to imply.

Are you at all close to this space? It sounds you may be underestimating corporate politics and the lack of rigour and ethical thought with which these systems are applied. The example Cory puts on policing -- and the many other examples you can find in Evgeny Morozov's book or "The End of Trust" -- are solid proof of this.

I found this to be a very succinct, sober analysis of ML ("AI") techno-solutionism. Cory is a great writer and knows how to explain ideas in a simple, no-nonsense way. This article reminded me of Evgeny Morozov's "To Save Everything, Click Here", where you can find many more examples of how focusing on the quantitative aspect of a problem and ignoring the social, qualitative context it around it often goes wrong.

https://bookshop.org/books/to-save-everything-click-here-the...

We can only hope.

Looks like I got downvoted for not spending enough time on Reddit.

I don't know, it's all a big pass for me.

Oculus never took off. The other two you mentioned were already vastly popular (Whatsapp was the most popular thing in the EU back then, now taken over in part by Telegram.) The purchases were made not out of a grand vision for the future, but simply to hinder and squash competition. The internal emails that have leaked from the company over time show as much.

As long as it gets you a blog post.

Did you also notice how the TLDR is at the end of that whole rant?

People are dealing with their own problems.

An education also does not amount to knowing trivia.

This guy truly lives in his own universe.

To enter the Facebook metaverse, you need to abandon whatever preconceptions you had about humanity, ignore all social and political problems around you, and trascend all previously established limits of ignorance, arrogance and technological naivete past the gates of cyberhell. Oh, and you need love ads because, oh boy, are you getting some.

I guess I get part of your point, but let me also joke a little:

> To see a counter-example, look at China. Their system is completely opaque and politicians can easily stymie even the strongest business entities. The judiciary is not independent but subject to the latest dictator’s whims.

To see a counter-example, look at America. Their system is completely opaque and corporations can easily stymie even the strongest of political entities. The legislative is not independent but subject to the latest corporation's whims.

The issues with the "free" paradigm you point out are interesting indeed, and I think I have read some of your points elsewhere. I have also thought that the "free" model -- advertising -- is a creator of bad products, and like you said, it distorts many of the assumptions that make the market work.

I had also exaggerated my point on "all for-profits" and "simple" truths. Like I commented below, I do not believe that all for-profits or capitalism are necessarily evil; it's just that the American version of it often makes it look that way.

> Under capitalism, most systems are for-profit. Even governments and charities operate to raise capital to fund projects.

I think we're mixing things up here. A non-profit raises funds to run its operations; it does not seek to make profit, it does not have any private ownership of the means of production (the literal meaning of capitalism), and it does not seek to grow its profits YoY, rule out competition to sooth investors, and the usual day-to-day business of for-profits. That it needs money to run does not equate it to actual for-profit corporations in a capitalist society.

I agree with your last point though. For-profit corporations are not necessarily evil if they can put ethics before profit; it's just that American Big Tech chooses not to do so.

I also applaud your move.

Some are more ethical than others, so I don't think that generalization holds in practical terms. Corporations that draw their revenue from surveillance, however, are off to a bad start on the spectrum of ethics.

Simple truths. If we just took for-profit corporations for what they are, things would be easier to comprehend.

As far as I understand it, Facebook is a private, not public, space, and they can technically delete anything they want on their own platform. The big mistake is for us to pretend that they are a public space and that they owe us some kind of fairness and equal treatment. Why do we expect this? The sole reason for their existence is profit, they owe us nothing. Rather than taking the platform for granted as the new norm of social and political life, I think we would all be better off destroying it and creating a true, public cyberspace in its place.

Facebook does not need to be fixed, it just needs to be destroyed.

How would Apple benefit from this conspiracy? Apple these days is throwing out the "secure" and "private" PR to differentiate themselves from their surveillance capitalist neighbors. They would never do anything that hurts their PR, and they would always do the bare minimum security and privacy to support it. If they knew of these vulnerabilities ahead of time, I am positive they would have patched them. This is not to say that they are doing everything they can, but I don't see your proposed conspiracy following profit-maximizing corporate logic. Apple isn't there to screw you; they're just there for the big buck.

This is a really good point here. Most corporate development that I have experienced is centered around "features" and speed. "I'm working on a new feature", "there has been a feature request", "the feature has a bug." The only time the complexity of the project is considered is by the time it fails and the team is canned.

Syonyk still has a point even though this thread has gone sideways.

Plot twist: extended ASCII?

Beat me to it. The macho effect is there for sure, but on what grounds do you claim you can write secure C? As far as I know, you can't really prove anything about C unless you severely restrict the language, and those restrictions include pointer usage. So at best, you can do a hand-wavy read through code and have some vague notion of its behaviour.

Their petty war for how to exploit people online is pathetic to watch. The more general fight for privacy _is not_ inconsequential. It would indeed be mistaken to think that these corporations are the ones carrying the privacy fight. That is what the likes of Apple are basing their PR on these days; pure marketing trash.

In regards to your third paragraph, to me none of that matters. Mass surveillance on the Web is wrong, period. Meanwhile, all parties involved in this drama, except for non-profits like the EFF, are instead debating how people ("users") should be best exploited online for profit, while regulators arrive late to the party and focus on other less consequential matters such as antitrust and miss the forest for the trees.