The Ethiopian-born computer scientist lost her job after pointing out the inequalities built into AI.
The world contains inequalities. An AI is trying to describe the world. Therefore the AI must contain inequalities.
The Ethiopian-born computer scientist lost her job after pointing out the inequalities built into AI.
The world contains inequalities. An AI is trying to describe the world. Therefore the AI must contain inequalities.
Inequality or bias? AI is certainly biased, because it’s based on the web, which is mostly in English, which most people in the world don’t speak.
She was, like a lot of Diversity hires, too dumb to know when to shut the fuck up.
I’ll bet one thing AI can do is churn out “I blame white people” bollocks.
P.S. Is AI IA in French?
I actually tried to read the article. So I’d say you’ve got it Steve!!
as always, she saw a “potential risk”. Not an actual, quantifiablee risk. Not a risk whose impact could be described, and the damage done outlined.
Just a ‘potential ‘risk from using information centered around ‘white, male, hegemonic stuff’. That being the only available stuff.
Shouldn’t have been employed in the first place.
Given that Meta/Google still runs on pre-Musk Twitter shenanigans and bloat, even more in 2020…
You have to wonder how obnoxious she must have been to be fired while ticking all the Diversity boxes..
This woman was too woke for Google. Imagine that. That takes some doing.
I’d note that the trials and travails she and her family experienced had nothing to do with white men, the U.S., or Europe. They did, however, have everything to do with black men and African tribalism.
It’s a bloody long article and a litany of mainly self-inflicted ‘woke’ woe.
To get fired in a tech company for being excessively ‘woke’ is some kind of honour badge – just incredible.
For those with better things to do than read through it all here’s a flavour:
At Stanford, although she was often condescendingly asked by some of her white peers if she had got in thanks to an affirmative action programme, her undergraduate years were spent in an environment where senior people at least “talked about diversity a lot, and they had different people from different places”.
So even to ask anything about her background was being ‘condescending’?
Gebru began to specialise in cutting-edge AI, pioneering a system that showed how data about particular neighbourhoods’ patterns of car ownership highlighted differences bound up with ethnicity, crime figures, voting behaviour and income levels. In retrospect, this kind of work might look like the bedrock of techniques that could blur into automated surveillance and law enforcement, but Gebru admits that “none of those bells went off in my head … that connection of issues of technology with diversity and oppression came later”.
Doesn’t sound like a precursor of Skynet to me
The next year, Gebru made a point of counting other black attenders at the same event. She found that, among 8,500 delegates, there were only six people of colour. In response, she put up a Facebook post that now seems prescient: “I’m not worried about machines taking over the world; I’m worried about groupthink, insularity and arrogance in the AI community.”
And of course her ideological outlook seems to be extremely open-minded and humble
Running alongside this is a quest to push beyond the tendency of the tech industry and the media to focus attention on worries about AI taking over the planet and wiping out humanity while questions about what the technology does, and who it benefits and damages, remain unheard.
“That conversation ascribes agency to a tool rather than the humans building the tool,” she says. “That means you can aggregate responsibility: ‘It’s not me that’s the problem. It’s the tool. It’s super-powerful. We don’t know what it’s going to do.’ Well, no – it’s you that’s the problem. You’re building something with certain characteristics for your profit. That’s extremely distracting, and it takes the attention away from real harms and things that we need to do. Right now.”
If there’s any further evidence needed that the State, whether at national or supranational level has grown over powerful, this lady’s entire career trajectory should serve as a warning.
Once AI has Killed! All! Humans! who’s going to keep the electricity running to keep the AI running?
Ironically, she does hit the occasional nail on the head
“The thing that was very confusing to me as an immigrant was that liberal type of racism,” she says. “People who sound like they really care about you, but they’d be like: ‘Don’t you think it’s going to be hard for you?’ It took me a while to really figure out what was going on.”
Reduced requirements for different races, affirmative action, and quotas are all cancers on society
Put more bluntly, AI threatens to deepen the dominance of a way of thinking that is white, male, comparatively affluent and focused on the US and Europe.
Ah, she means the thinking that’s dragged the “civilised world” out of mud-huts…
Is she the one from last year that got involved in a woke spat and then sent an email saying do this or I resign and they said thanks for your resignation or a new case
She was working in the Pacific US. Those people are mad.
Gunker, it’s hard to miss..
If ever there was self-flagellating, bigoted, racist, segratory self-denial, it’s displayed in modern “Liberals”. They seem to get off on it.
It seems she does too….
…AI threatens to deepen the dominance of a way of thinking that is white, male, comparatively affluent and focused on the US and Europe.
Well thank fuck for that!
Since the lady alas wrote the article, we’ve still got a long way to go.
Oooops. I see John Harris wrote the article!!! Clearly the dominance of a way of thinking that’s black, female, comparatively affluent and focused on Africa and Asia hasn’t altered in the slightest.