"completely harmless if you're more than a few inches away"
This was in the "disassemble for scraps" tent. I do not think that's a particularly reasonable thing to assume.
95% of the time, someone unscrews the housing, sees the radiation symbol, behaves appropriately. 5% of the time it goes in a garage junk box, gets dropped, kid finds the shiny yellow disc and tries to open it.
As it was, this was hilarious, and perfectly on-brand for EMF. I'm glad there's not a small nuclear source sitting in some unknowing person's hackspace, I'm glad someone was watching out, and them wearing cute animal ears makes the story even better!
I actually think it somewhat proves the opposite. It's clear they've tacked on a "make images of a diverse set of people" in the setup prompt, rather than baking diversity in properly and with more nuance.
Tbh, I think I'd rather have diverse founding fathers by default (obvious problem, fixable by changing your prompt), than DALL-E's current default, which seems to just draw all white people. (I just requested a few images of doctors, nurses and patients, and an elven council - every last person of the 103 it drew was white).
I agree their phrasing could have been better. However in my country it typically takes 1-2 years to get a diagnosis and start treatment. It's even a few months to a year if you go private.
I can see this sort of thing being at least a stop-gap, and something that might help while someone's waiting to get access to the better treatment.
But wouldn't the experiences of an actual trans person be much more relevant to this discussion than our cis asses?
We're never going to have experiences of our own that can inform our judgement on this, so shouldn't we just listen to and trust trans people to work out how to best to make their way in the world?
More relevant than the experience of a single cis person? Quite possible. More relevant than actual hard data reflecting the collective experiences of a large plurality of trans folk, with relevant variation in such factors as e.g. age and social milieus? No way.
An important example of where debate and information can be foreclosed upon is that /r/detrans, a vital support community for detransitioners, has been temporarily banned in the past by overzealous admins, and the mods had to appeal and institute much stricter moderation than most subs have to be able to get it back up.
That's a great resource (that links to even more great resources) - thanks for posting it.
I disagree that professional ethicists aren't needed in an organisation like Google though. Just as security should be lived and breathed by every developer, you still need some experts to consult when things get gnarly, light the way when you need many years of study to understand the concepts, and spot things that laypeople would miss.
The large language models Timnit was studying are a great example of this; people like her were (and are) needed to help the engineers understand the breadth and scope of the issues. Everyone in the org having their hearts in the right place doesn't replace expertise.
I think the article is taking the stance that ethics should be a concern at the point of development, and those that create these large language models and those that use them should be accountable. Right now, those groups are not accountable, so instead a separate group of people is asked to take responsibility. This is where AI Ethics as a field has ended up, and in my opinion, stalled.
Citizens United gave them the constitutional right of free speech granted to citizens. The problem is that we let the corporations have it both ways. There are no easy answers but if I am a corporation of 1 person and commit manslaughter do you think it would be handled the same as Uber?
That's an edge case. I would say no, because 1 person companies are not treated the same.
Generally to get this sort of treatment it needs to be an employee that fucks up (meaning not the owner) and the company needs to guarantee it'll take civil responsibility (meaning pay up damages).
Look, there are 2 forces at work here in what we, as humans, seem to want:
People, when working as employees, seem to really protest the idea of being held responsible for anything at all. This has lead to laws that state that employees are almost never responsible for their actions during work time (NOT legal advice, but generally speaking: if you aren't actively sabotaging your employer and it isn't a crime, your employer is responsible. Even if you are extremely negligent)
(Large) corporations tend to be a lot easier to extract money from, and a lot more likely to play fair (ie. actually pay what they're convicted to pay) compared to humans. So even if an employee commits a crime during work hours, the employer takes "civil responsibility" (that's the part of the law where the principle "money (amount to be determined) can take the place of ANY legal conviction"). And criminal responsibility ? Frankly, usually, nobody cares, and employers are generally happy to just fire whoever it was on the spot.
And yes, this is generally true everywhere in the justice system. If the court can trust that you will do whatever it deems necessary, you will get a lot more flexibility out of them. That doesn't mean you can just do anything (American courts especially have historically shown that there are circumstances where they will bankrupt a company if the facts are bad enough, to the point that it's a bit of joke)
Given the above, of course it wouldn't be reasonable to extract heavy punishments against corporations when employees drive a truck through a kindergarten because they fell asleep at the wheel.
This was a woman that was watching Hulu on her cell phone behind the wheel of a car who, we can be pretty sure, was very clearly told to be at any point ready to take over the driving. And, I mean, we've all seen the video of her during that accident ... WTF. I am wondering why you would demand the company be punished ?
This is then further made problematic because actual punishments on companies tend to cause large job losses, large tax base losses, and may cause other companies to leave, further exacerbating the problem. So there's political reasons as well to not go too far.
> In other words, either that woman watching hulu behind the wheel is responsible, or perhaps some other employee, but a person is.
Right. If a group of people came together with a scheme that caused car accidents at the rate Uber does, they'd be held liable and they'd receive conspiracy charges.
Perhaps the same should happen to people who come up with such schemes behind the corporate veil.
Precisely - I think this falls to the classic problem of who to blame in accidents involving self-driving cars. Is the manufacturer at fault? The driver? Certainly statements like this suggest it could be argued in this case.
I used to have this view; a more precise miliatary has fewer civilian casualties, and shortens wars, limiting overall destruction.
However, my mind was changed by the idea that if killing people is easy, and there is little risk to the operators of the equipment, it will be done all the more. Countries will go to war much less overall, if there are higher stakes. I like there being high stakes.
> However, my mind was changed by the idea that if killing people is easy, and there is little risk to the operators of the equipment, it will be done all the more. Countries will go to war much less overall, if there are higher stakes. I like there being high stakes.
Modern warfare is not conducted like this. Killing is already easy but that’s not how wars are won. The trend of warfare since WWII is on precision targeting. Take a look at munitions technology and systems from then to today. The US military wants to minimize casualties and collateral damage while acheiving mission objectives.
"This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading."
Sure, there are statistical differences between genders. This is a total non-sequitur from that, with no citation in sight to try allay blame. This is just the 1950s calling with its stereotypes.
Women may be more agreeable, and more less assertive. However you had better provide fairly convincing proof that we are speaking up too little, rather than merely less than men do.
I think there are studies that probe that claim. In my experience when I told some female friends to ask for a raise because they deserved it, some of them decided not to do it because a list of non-sense excuses (afraid to talk with their supervisors, that they will look for another job in the future, that their bosses don't like them, etc)
Bear in mind the published doc don't have the references the original work had. They removed them when they made it public (not the author)
He got fired for the other bits, the casually implying 40% of the workforce were, onr average, somehow inferior and less suited to their work than men, and for not taking it down but stirring the pot, when he realised that he'd wildly misjudged the reaction people would have to it.
This was in the "disassemble for scraps" tent. I do not think that's a particularly reasonable thing to assume.
95% of the time, someone unscrews the housing, sees the radiation symbol, behaves appropriately. 5% of the time it goes in a garage junk box, gets dropped, kid finds the shiny yellow disc and tries to open it.
As it was, this was hilarious, and perfectly on-brand for EMF. I'm glad there's not a small nuclear source sitting in some unknowing person's hackspace, I'm glad someone was watching out, and them wearing cute animal ears makes the story even better!