assoc prof in computer science at Oxford. heterodox CS; HCI; privacy & security; law/philosophy/political economy of tech. terrified about the climate crisis. he/him. #THFC#COYS
๐จโ๐ผ: Hello this is the market surveillance authority for the #EU#AIAct, how can we help?
๐คฆโโ๏ธ: Hi, I'd like to report an AI system. I just turned it on this morning and it's only gone and violated several of my fundamental rights.
๐จโ๐ผ: Sorry to hear that, how bad is the damage?
๐คฆโโ๏ธ : Pretty bad. There's smoke coming out of Article 7 and I can see it's infringed all down the side of Article 10. I'm not even going to look at Article 11 without my safety goggles.
Spoons have enormous potential for humanity, but also pose risks, such as being left out on the table and dripping honey on things that shouldn't have honey dripped on them.
That is why we need to re-engineer our spoons to be aligned with human values like keeping our surfaces clean, saving excess honey, and promoting flourishing.
I'm thrilled to announce I've received $1 billion in series A funding to solve this problem at scale.
Just in case anyone is thinking that maybe #ChatGPT could engage in moral reasoning, I thought I'd try giving it the trolley problem as originally described by Philippa Foot in 1967, but with a slight modification.
As expected, it gave what would have been a good answer to the original version of the problem, but a terrible answer given my slight modification.
GPTs cannot do moral (or other) reasoning, they are just generating statistically likely text.
"Going back to #FAccT, I should mention that, in browsing recent papers, it seems that many participants are willing to ask not just the how-to-build-it-better question, but the should-we-build-it question. This line distinguishes discourse that power will have no problem with and discourse that will be painted as radical, regressive, and inappropriate" https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/crisis/crisis.pdf
"Higher education institutions have a mandate to serve the public good, yet in many cases fail to adequately respond to the global climate crisis ...The inability of academic institutions to commit to purposeful climate action through targeted research, education, outreach, and policy is due in large part to โcaptureโ by special interests"
I agree that the 'war on general purpose computing' (cf @pluralistic ) is futile, since we only know how to make computers that can run every program.
But the parallel argument for generative AI seems weak. We can decide what data goes into 'foundation' models, and therefore constrain their outputs; and we can certainly regulate fine-tuned models according to their intended purposes.
the large open sourced models (e.g. LLaMa) have so far mostly been produced by regulatable large firms (e.g. Meta).
even a truly open peer-produced model would have to have a limited set of core maintainers (cf bitcoin - only a handful have commit access), who could make curation decisions about training data.
@1br0wn to some extent I think so. And yes, regulating open source projects without an established legal entity would be hard, but it seems like it tends not to be that decentralized in practice
Not 100% sure if this account advertising carbon credits on Twitter is a full on scam, but the generative AI vibes on the images and text really don't inspire confidence.
I hope that pretty soon we'll all associate gen AI content with spam and scam.
"How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? ... social scientistsโ forecasts were on average no more accurate than those of simple statistical models .. or the aggregate forecasts of a sample from the general public...
However, scientists were more accurate if they had scientific expertise in a prediction domain, were interdisciplinary, used simpler models and based predictions on prior data" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01517-1
Obviously no one is saying that a single iFrame is conscious.
But maybe, if you plug enough iframes together, in the right way, who's to say the resulting system is not functionally equivalent to a thinking, feeling, intelligent human being deserving of our sympathy and respect?
@LornaWoods so can I hope that after all these years of claiming that advertising is a valuable service provided to consumers, informing them of purchasing opportunities, the adtech industry might end up classed as such under the DSA?
#Uber "drivers are entitled to information about the existence of automated decision making used in the management decision to dismiss them ... The Court of Appeal also found that the human review of the robo-firing decisions was nothing more than a symbolic act."
One of my students alerted me to this example of SMPC in the real-world, at JPMorgan: "Prime Match is the first secure multiparty computation solution running live in the financial world"
It enables inventory matching - where buyers and sellers match to trade stocks without moving the market - but without revealing either party's buy/sell orders unless a match is found.
Very tentative steps to #decolonize#computerscience have inevitably been met with attacks in our right wing press.
What could computing have to do with colonialism, both in its legacy and as it still exists today? Off the top of my head, here are some very material, empirical questions which I think CS undergraduates should and would be interested in finding answers to:
Where in the world do the raw materials to build computers come from? Who mines them? Who puts them together? How much do they get paid? Where do the profits go?
Who owns the #intellectualproperty in modern computers? Who decided on those IP laws, and how are they enforced globally, to whose benefit and whose detriment?
Why do we produce so many computers? Who benefits when we throw old ones away, and who deals with all the #ewaste? Which countries and populations bear the environmental costs?
Judge said: "It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website. It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot."
