Pentagon seeks 'ethicist' to oversee military artificial intelligence

David Smith
The Guardian
Originally posted September 7, 2019

Wanted: military “ethicist”. Skills: data crunching, machine learning, killer robots. Must have: cool head, moral compass and the will to say no to generals, scientists and even presidents.

The Pentagon is looking for the right person to help it navigate the morally murky waters of artificial intelligence (AI), billed as the battlefield of the 21st century.

“One of the positions we are going to fill will be someone who’s not just looking at technical standards, but who’s an ethicist,” Lt Gen Jack Shanahan, director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) at the US defense department, told reporters last week.

“I think that’s a very important point that we would not have thought about this a year ago, I’ll be honest with you. In Maven [a pilot AI machine learning project], these questions really did not rise to the surface every day, because it was really still humans looking at object detection, classification and tracking. There were no weapons involved in that.”

Shanahan added: “So we are going to bring in someone who will have a deep background in ethics and then, with the lawyers within the department, we’ll be looking at how do we actually bake this into the future of the Department of Defense.”

The JAIC is a year old and has 60 employees. Its budget last year was $93m; this year’s request was $268m. Its focus comes amid fears that China has gained an early advantage in the global race to explore AI’s military potential, including for command and control and autonomous weapons.

The info is here.

Cruel, Immoral Behavior Is Not Mental Illness

James L. Knoll & Ronald W. Pies
Psychiatric Times
Originally posted August 19, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

Another way of posing the question is to ask—Does immoral, callous, cruel, and supremely selfish behaviors constitute a mental illness? These socially deviant traits appear in those with and without mental illness, and are widespread in the general population. Are there some perpetrators suffering from a genuine psychotic disorder who remain mentally organized enough to carry out these attacks? Of course, but they are a minority. To further complicate matters, psychotic individuals can also commit violent acts that were motivated by base emotions (resentment, selfishness, etc.), while their psychotic symptoms may be peripheral or merely coincidental.

It bears repeating that reliable, clinically-based data or complete psychological autopsies on perpetrators of mass public shootings are very difficult to obtain. That said, some of the best available research on mass public shooters indicates that they often display “rigidness, hostility, or extreme self-centeredness.” A recent FBI study found that only 25% of mass shooters had ever had a mental illness diagnosis, and only 3 of these individuals had a diagnosis of a psychotic disorder. The FBI’s cautionary statement in this report is incisive: “. . . formally diagnosed mental illness is not a very specific predictor of violence of any type, let alone targeted violence…. declarations that all active shooters must simply be mentally ill are misleading and unhelpful."

Psychiatric and mental health treatment has its limits, and is not traditionally designed to detect and uncover budding violent extremists. It is designed to work together with individuals who are invested in their own mental health and seek to increase their own degrees of freedom in life in a pro-social manner. This is why calls for more mental health laws or alterations in civil commitment laws are likely to be low-yield at best, with respect to preventing mass killing—and stagnating to mental health progress at worst.

The info is here.

Ohio medical board knew late doctor was sexually assaulting his male patients, but did not remove his license, report says

Richard Strauss

Laura Ly
CNN.com
Originally posted August 30, 2019

Dr. Richard Strauss is believed to have sexually abused at least 177 students at Ohio State University when he worked there between 1978 and 1998. A new investigation has found that the State Medical Board of Ohio knew about the abuse by the late doctor but did nothing.

A new investigation by a working group established by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine found that the state medical board investigated allegations of sexual misconduct against Strauss in 1996.

The board found credible evidence of sexual misconduct by Strauss and revealed that Strauss had been "performing inappropriate genital exams on male students for years," but no one with knowledge of the case worked to remove his medical license or notify law enforcement, DeWine announced at a press conference Friday.

The investigation revealed that an attorney with the medical board did intend to proceed with a case against Strauss, but for some reason never followed through. That attorney, as well as others involved with the 1996 investigation, are now deceased and cannot be questioned about their conduct, DeWine said.

"We'll likely never know exactly why the case was ultimately ignored by the medical board," DeWine said Friday.

The allegations against Strauss — who died by suicide in 2005 — emerged last year after former Ohio State athletes came forward to claim the doctor had sexually abused them under the guise of a medical examination.

The info is here.

Three things digital ethics can learn from medical ethics

Carissa Véliz
Nature Electronics 2:316-318 (2019)

Here is an excerpt:

Similarly, technological decisions are not only about facts (for example, about what is more efficient), but also about the kind of life we want and the kind of society we strive to build. The beginning of the digital age has been plagued by impositions, with technology companies often including a disclaimer in their terms and conditions that “they can unilaterally change their terms of service agreement without any notice of changes to the users”. Changes towards more respect for autonomy, however, can already be seen. With the implementation of the GDPR in Europe, for instance, tech
companies are being urged to accept that people may prefer services that are less efficient or possess less functionality if that means they get to keep their privacy.

One of the ways in which technology has failed to respect autonomy is through the use of persuasive technologies. Digital technologies that are designed to chronically distract us not only jeopardize our attention, but also our will, both individually and collectively. Technologies that constantly hijack our attention threaten the resources we need to exercise our autonomy.  If one were to ask people about their goals in life, most people would likely mention things such as “spending more time with family” — not many people would suggest “spending more time on Facebook”.  Yet most people do not accomplish their goals — we get distracted.

The info is here.

The Ethics Of Hiding Your Data From the Machines

Molly Wood
wired.com
Originally posted August 22, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

There’s also a real and reasonable fear that companies or individuals will take ethical liberties in the name of pushing hard toward a good solution, like curing a disease or saving lives. This is not an abstract problem: The co-founder of Google’s artificial intelligence lab, DeepMind, was placed on leave earlier this week after some controversial decisions—one of which involved the illegal use of over 1.5 million hospital patient records in 2017.

So sticking with the medical kick I’m on here, I propose that companies work a little harder to imagine the worst-case scenario surrounding the data they’re collecting. Study the side effects like you would a drug for restless leg syndrome or acne or hepatitis, and offer us consumers a nice, long, terrifying list of potential outcomes so we actually know what we’re getting into.

And for we consumers, well, a blanket refusal to offer up our data to the AI gods isn’t necessarily the good choice either. I don’t want to be the person who refuses to contribute my genetic data via 23andMe to a massive research study that could, and I actually believe this is possible, lead to cures and treatments for diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and who knows what else.

I also think I deserve a realistic assessment of the potential for harm to find its way back to me, because I didn’t think through or wasn’t told all the potential implications of that choice—like how, let’s be honest, we all felt a little stung when we realized the 23andMe research would be through a partnership with drugmaker (and reliable drug price-hiker) GlaxoSmithKline. Drug companies, like targeted ads, are easy villains—even though this partnership actually could produce a Parkinson’s drug. But do we know what GSK’s privacy policy looks like? That deal was a level of sharing we didn’t necessarily expect.

The info is here.

The Sacklers were drug dealers who put money over morality.

Chris McGreal
The Guardian
Originally published September 17, 2019

If only we could feel Purdue Pharma’s pain.

The directors and owners of the company that did so much to create America’s opioid epidemic are professing distress and bewilderment at the rejection of what they claim are its good faith efforts to help the victims.

Even as Purdue announced plans late Sunday night to file for bankruptcy, its top officials were making unctuous claims that their concern was to combat an epidemic that has claimed more than 400,000 lives. Anyone who stood in the way was depriving suffering Americans of the help they need, they claimed.

Members of the Sackler family who own Purdue have offered to turn over the company to a trust which would funnel future earnings to treatment and other measures to deal with the tragedy. They would also sell Mundipharma, a British-based sister company, and hand over the payment. The Sacklers even said they would give up a part of the huge profits of OxyContin, which made the family multibillionaires.

Some of the state attorneys general and cities suing Purdue have accepted the deal as the best prospect for getting anything out of the company and said the bankruptcy filing was part of the arrangement.

Other attorneys general rejected the move, claiming it was an attempt by Purdue’s owners and executives to hang on to the bulk of the profits of drug dealing and buy their way out of individual accountability. Some of those states are also suing the Sacklers directly.

The info is here.

The crossroads between ethics and technology

Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler
Techcrunch.com
Originally posted August 6, 2019

Here is an excerpt:

The first relates to ethics. If anything is clear today in the world of technology, it is the need to include ethical concerns when developing, distributing, implementing and using technology. This is all the more important because in many domains there is no regulation or legislation to provide a clear definition of what may and may not be done. There is nothing intrinsic to technology that requires that it pursue only good ends. The mission of our generation is to ensure that technology works for our benefit and that it can help realize social ideals. The goal of these new technologies should not be to replicate power structures or other evils of the past. 

Startup nation should focus on fighting crime and improving autonomous vehicles and healthcare advancements. It shouldn’t be running extremist groups on Facebook, setting up “bot farms” and fakes, selling attackware and spyware, infringing on privacy and producing deepfake videos.

The second issue is the lack of transparency. The combination of individuals and companies that have worked for, and sometimes still work with, the security establishment frequently takes place behind a thick screen of concealment. These entities often evade answering challenging questions that result from the Israeli Freedom of Information law and even recourse to the military censor — a unique Israeli institution — to avoid such inquires.

The info is here.

Why Moral Emotions Go Viral Online

Ana P. Gantman, William J. Brady, & Jay Van Bavel
Scientific American
Originally posted August 20, 2019

Social media is changing the character of our political conversations. As many have pointed out, our attention is a scarce resource that politicians and journalists are constantly fighting to attract, and the online world has become a primary trigger of our moral outrage. These two ideas, it turns out, are fundamentally related. According to our forthcoming paper, words that appeal to one’s sense of right and wrong are particularly effective at capturing attention, which may help explain this new political reality.

It occurred to us that the way people scroll through their social media feeds is very similar to a classic method psychologists use to measure people’s ability to pay attention. When we mindlessly browse social media, we are rapidly presenting a stream of verbal stimuli to ourselves. Psychologists have been studying this issue in the lab for decades, displaying to subjects a rapid succession of words, one after another, in the blink of an eye. In the lab, people are asked to find a target word among a collection of other words. Once they find it, there’s a short window of time in which that word captures their attention. If there’s a second target word in that window, most people don’t even see it—almost as if they had blinked with their eyes open.

There is an exception: if the second target word is emotionally significant to the viewer, that person will see it. Some words are so important to us that they are able to capture our attention even when we are already paying attention to something else.

The info is here.

Can Physicians Work in US Immigration Detention Facilities While Upholding Their Hippocratic Oath?

Spiegel P, Kass N, Rubenstein L.
JAMA. Published online August 30, 2019.
doi:10.1001/jama.2019.12567

The modern successor to the Hippocratic oath, called the Declaration of Geneva, was updated and approved by the World Medical Association in 2017. The pledge states that “The health and well-being of my patient will be my first consideration” and “I will not use my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat.” Can a physician work in US immigration detention facilities while upholding this pledge?

There is a humanitarian emergency at the US-Mexico border where migrants, including families, adults, or unaccompanied children, are detained and processed by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Customs and Border Patrol and are held in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions with insufficient medical care.2 Children (persons <18 years), without their parents or guardians, are often being detained in these detention facilities beyond the 72 hours allowed under federal law. Adults and children with a parent or legal guardian are then transferred from Customs and Border Patrol facilities to DHS’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, which are also overcrowded and where existing standards for conditions of confinement are often not met. Unaccompanied minors are transferred from Customs and Border Patrol detention facilities to Health and Human Services (HHS) facilities run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The majority of these unaccompanied children are then released to the care of community sponsors, while others stay, sometimes for months.

Children should not be detained for immigration reasons at all, according to numerous professional associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics.3 Detention of children has been associated with increased physical and psychological illness, including posttraumatic stress disorder, as well as developmental delay and subsequent problems in school.

Given the psychological and physical harm to children who are detained, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child stated that the detention of a child “cannot be justified solely on the basis of the child being unaccompanied or separated, or on their migratory or residence status, or lack thereof,” and should in any event only be used “…as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time.”6 The United States is the only country not to have ratified the convention on the Rights of the Child, but the international standard is so widely recognized that it should still apply. Children held in immigration detention should be released into settings where they are safe, protected, and can thrive.

The info is here.