Google offers to help others with the tricky ethics of AI
A lot of knee-jerk Google-hating in this thread, which I think is unfounded in this specific context. Google’s AI safety and AI bias toolchain is by far the most robust that I’ve seen. Seems to me that they are investing much more heavily than other players.<p>Note that this is a different issue than data privacy, which Google rightly takes flak on. AI bias is referring to questions like “if I train a network to  (sentence criminals, price insurance, ...), how do I detect if the resulting predictions are racially biased?”<p>The conversation on this subject by lay folks is rife with statistical ignorance, and Google has done good work communicating and clarifying the conversational starting points. This is a hard issue because it takes ethical trade-offs and forces you to specify mathematically exactly how you want to handle inequality, which is a subject that most people haven’t thought through rigorously, and would rather hand-wave away with virtuous sound bites.<p>For example, see <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.google.com&#x2F;bigpicture&#x2F;attacking-discrimination-in-ml&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.google.com&#x2F;bigpicture&#x2F;attacking-discriminati...</a>