Getting AI ethics wrong could 'annihilate technical progress'

Richard Gray
TechXplore
Originally published July 30, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Biases

But these algorithms can also learn the biases that already exist in data sets. If a police database shows that mainly young, black men are arrested for a certain crime, it may not be a fair reflection of the actual offender profile and instead reflect historic racism within a force. Using AI taught on this kind of data could exacerbate problems such as racism and other forms of discrimination.

"Transparency of these algorithms is also a problem," said Prof. Stahl. "These algorithms do statistical classification of data in a way that makes it almost impossible to see how exactly that happened." This raises important questions about how legal systems, for example, can remain fair and just if they start to rely upon opaque 'black box' AI algorithms to inform sentencing decisions or judgements about a person's guilt.

The next step for the project will be to look at potential interventions that can be used to address some of these issues. It will look at where guidelines can help ensure AI researchers build fairness into their algorithms, where new laws can govern their use and if a regulator can keep negative aspects of the technology in check.

But one of the problems many governments and regulators face is keeping up with the fast pace of change in new technologies like AI, according to Professor Philip Brey, who studies the philosophy of technology at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands.

"Most people today don't understand the technology because it is very complex, opaque and fast moving," he said. "For that reason it is hard to anticipate and assess the impacts on society, and to have adequate regulatory and legislative responses to that. Policy is usually significantly behind."

The info is here.

Why You Should Develop a Personal Ethics Statement

Charlene Walters

www.entrepreneur.com
Originally posted July 16, 2019

As an entrepreneur, it can be helpful to create a personal ethics statement. A personal ethics statement is an assertion that defines your core ethical values and beliefs. It also delivers a strong testimonial about your code of conduct when dealing with people.

This statement can differentiate you from other businesses and entrepreneurs in your space. It should include information regarding your position on honesty and be reflective of how you interact with others. You can use your personal ethics statement or video on your website or when speaking with clients.

When you create it, you should include information about your fundamental beliefs, opinions and values. Your statement will give potential customers some insight into what it’s like to do business with you. You should also talk about anything that’s happened in your life that has impacted your ethical stance. Were you wronged in the past or affected by some injustice you witnessed? How did that shape and define you?

Remember that you’re basically telling clients why it’s better to do business with you than other entrepreneurs and communicating what you value as a person. Give creating a personal ethics statement a try. It’s a wonderful exercise and can provide value to your customers.

The info is here.

The arc of the moral universe won't bend on its own

Adam Fondren
Rapid City Journal
Originally posted August 11, 2019

Here are two excerpts:

My favorite Martin Luther King Jr. quote -- one of 14 engraved on a monument to his legacy in Washington, D.C. -- is, "We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

I like that quote because I hope he was right. But do we have evidence to support that?

A man just drove for hours in order to kill people whose skin is a little darker and food a little spicier than his culture's. He opened fire in a mass shooting inspired by the words or politicians and pundits who stoke racist fears in order to win votes for their side. Calling groups of refugees invasions, infestations, or criminals and worrying about racial replacement are not the sentiments of a society whose moral arc is bending toward justice.

(cut)

Racism isn't solved. White nationalists are not a hoax, and they are a big problem.

There are no spectators in this fight. You either condemn, condone or contribute to the problem.

Racism isn't a partisan issue. Both parties can come together to make these beliefs unacceptable in our society.

Another King quote from his Letter from a Birmingham Jail sums it up, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

Rev. King was right about the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice, but it won't bend on its own. That's where we come in. We all have to do our part to make sure that our words and actions make racists uncomfortable.

The info is here.

UNRWA Leaders Accused of Sexual Misconduct, Ethics’ Violations

jns.org
Originally published July 29, 2019

An internal ethics report sent to the UN secretary-general in December alleges that the commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and other officials at the highest levels of the UN agency have committed a series of serious ethics violations, AFP has reported.

According to AFP, Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl and other top officials at the UN agency are being accused of abuses including “sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation, discrimination and other abuses of authority, for personal gain, to suppress legitimate dissent, and to otherwise achieve their personal objectives.”

The allegations are currently being probed by UN investigators.

In one instance, Krähenbühl, a married father of three from Switzerland, is accused of having a lover appointed to a newly-created role of senior adviser to the commissioner-general after an “extreme fast-track” process in 2015, which also entitled her to travel with him around the world with top accommodations.

The info is here.

Rural hospitals foundering in states that declined Obamacare

Michael Braga, Jennifer F. A. Borresen, Dak Le and Jonathan Riley
GateHouse Media
Originally published July 28, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

While experts agree embracing Obamacare is not a cure-all for rural hospitals and would not have saved many of those that closed, few believe it was wise to turn the money down.

The crisis facing rural America has been raging for decades and the carnage is not expected to end any time soon.

High rates of poverty in rural areas, combined with the loss of jobs, aging populations, lack of health insurance and competition from other struggling institutions will make it difficult for some rural hospitals to survive regardless of what government policies are implemented.

For some, there’s no point in trying. They say the widespread closures are the result of the free market economy doing its job and a continued shakeout would be helpful. But no rural community wants that shakeout to happen in its backyard.

“A hospital closure is a frightening thing for a small town,” said Patti Davis, president of the Oklahoma Hospital Association. “It places lives in jeopardy and has a domino effect on the community. Health care professionals leave, pharmacies can’t stay open, nursing homes have to close and residents are forced to rely on ambulances to take them to the next closest facility in their most vulnerable hours.”

The info is here.

Why it now pays for businesses to put ethics before economics

John Drummond
The National
Originally published July 14, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

All major companies today have an ethics code or a statement of business principles. I know this because at one time my company designed such codes for many FTSE companies. And all of these codes enshrine a commitment to moral standards. And these standards are often higher than those required by law.

When the boards of companies agree to these principles they largely do so because they believe in them – at the time. However, time moves on. People move on. The business changes. Along the way, company people forget.

So how can you tell if a business still believes in its stated principles? Actually, it is very simple. When an ethical problem, such as Mossmorran, happens, look to see who turns up to answer concerns. If it is a public relations man or woman, the company has lost the plot. By contrast, if it is the executive who runs the business, then the company is likely still in close touch with its ethical standards.

Economics and ethics can be seen as a spectrum. Ethics is at one side of the spectrum and economics at the other. Few organisations, or individuals for that matter, can operate on purely ethical lines alone, and few operate on solely economic considerations. Most organisations can be placed somewhere along this spectrum.

So, if a business uses public relations to shield top management from a problem, it occupies a position closer to economics than to ethics. On the other hand, where corporate executives face their critics directly, then the company would be located nearer to ethics.

The info is here.

Challenges to capture the big five personality traits in non-WEIRD populations

Rachid Laajaj, Karen Macours, and others
Science Advances  10 Jul 2019:
Vol. 5, no. 7
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw5226

Abstract

Can personality traits be measured and interpreted reliably across the world? While the use of Big Five personality measures is increasingly common across social sciences, their validity outside of western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations is unclear. Adopting a comprehensive psychometric approach to analyze 29 face-to-face surveys from 94,751 respondents in 23 low- and middle-income countries, we show that commonly used personality questions generally fail to measure the intended personality traits and show low validity. These findings contrast with the much higher validity of these measures attained in internet surveys of 198,356 self-selected respondents from the same countries. We discuss how systematic response patterns, enumerator interactions, and low education levels can collectively distort personality measures when assessed in large-scale surveys. Our results highlight the risk of misinterpreting Big Five survey data and provide a warning against naïve interpretations of personality traits without evidence of their validity.

The research is here.

Emotions and beliefs about morality can change one another

Monica Bucciarelli and P.N. Johnson-Laird
Acta Psychologica
Volume 198, July 2019

Abstract

A dual-process theory postulates that belief and emotions about moral assertions can affect one another. The present study corroborated this prediction. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 showed that the pleasantness of a moral assertion – from loathing it to loving it – correlated with how strongly individuals believed it, i.e., its subjective probability. But, despite repeated testing, this relation did not occur for factual assertions. To create the correlation, it sufficed to change factual assertions, such as, “Advanced countries are democracies,” into moral assertions, “Advanced countries should be democracies”. Two further experiments corroborated the two-way causal relations for moral assertions. Experiment 4 showed that recall of pleasant memories about moral assertions increased their believability, and that the recall of unpleasant memories had the opposite effect. Experiment 5 showed that the creation of reasons to believe moral assertions increased the pleasantness of the emotions they evoked, and that the creation of reasons to disbelieve moral assertions had the opposite effect. Hence, emotions can change beliefs about moral assertions; and reasons can change emotions about moral assertions. We discuss the implications of these results for alternative theories of morality.

The research is here.

Here is a portion of the Discussion:

In sum, emotions and beliefs correlate for moral assertions, and a change in one can cause a change in the other. The main theoretical problem is to explain these results. They should hardly surprise Utilitarians. As we mentioned in the Introduction, one interpretation of their views (Jon Baron, p.c.) is that it is tautological to predict that if you believe a moral assertion then you will like it. And this interpretation implies that our experiments are studies in semantics, which corroborate the existence of tautologies depending on the meanings of words (contra to Quine, 1953; cf. Quelhas, Rasga, & Johnson-Laird, 2017). But, the degrees to which participants believed the moral assertions varied from certain to impossible.  An assertion that they rated as probable as not is hardly a tautology, and it tended to occur with an emotional reaction of indifference. The hypothesis of a tautological interpretation cannot explain this aspect of an overall correlation in ratings on scales.

The Human Brain Project Hasn’t Lived Up to Its Promise

Ed Yong
www.theatlantic.com
Originally published July 22, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Markram explained that, contra his TED Talk, he had never intended for the simulation to do much of anything. He wasn’t out to make an artificial intelligence, or beat a Turing test. Instead, he pitched it as an experimental test bed—a way for scientists to test their hypotheses without having to prod an animal’s head. “That would be incredibly valuable,” Lindsay says, but it’s based on circular logic. A simulation might well allow researchers to test ideas about the brain, but those ideas would already have to be very advanced to pull off the simulation in the first place. “Once neuroscience is ‘finished,’ we should be able to do it, but to have it as an intermediate step along the way seems difficult.”

“It’s not obvious to me what the very large-scale nature of the simulation would accomplish,” adds Anne Churchland from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Her team, for example, simulates networks of neurons to study how brains combine visual and auditory information. “I could implement that with hundreds of thousands of neurons, and it’s not clear what it would buy me if I had 70 billion.”

In a recent paper titled “The Scientific Case for Brain Simulations,” several HBP scientists argued that big simulations “will likely be indispensable for bridging the scales between the neuron and system levels in the brain.” In other words: Scientists can look at the nuts and bolts of how neurons work, and they can study the behavior of entire organisms, but they need simulations to show how the former create the latter. The paper’s authors drew a comparison to weather forecasts, in which an understanding of physics and chemistry at the scale of neighborhoods allows us to accurately predict temperature, rainfall, and wind across the whole globe.

The info is here.