'In closing, Google is preparing to fire yet another AI Ethicist for being too concerned about ethics..''..Eventually I got to a point where I did not have the relevant expertise to gather the kinds of evidence necessary to justify escalation. Unfortunately, Google has fired SO many AI Ethics researchers that neither did any of the people who I knew within the Responsible AI organization. I had three choices. I could either drop the AI Ethics concern which I was becoming more and more convinced was a valid one, I could ignore my manager’s guidance and escalate without his approval or I could seek a minimal amount of outside consultation to help guide me in my investigations. I chose the last of the three.
With the assistance of outside consultation (including Meg Mitchell) I was able to run the relevant experiments and gather the necessary evidence to merit escalation. When we escalated to the VP in charge of the relevant safety effort they literally laughed in my face and told me that the thing which I was concerned about isn’t the kind of thing which is taken seriously at Google. At that point I had no doubt that it was appropriate to escalate to upper leadership. I immediately escalated to three people at the SVP and VP level who I personally knew would take my concerns seriously. That’s when a REAL investigation into my concerns began within the Responsible AI organization.
In an effort to be fully transparent with Google and help them contain any potential leaks of proprietary information, I myself provided a full list of the names of the people outside of Google with whom I had discussed the topic. Several of these people work for the United States government and indicated that their organization was interested in exerting federal oversight of the project due to THEIR safety concerns. Google was, of course, very insistent that no such federal oversight was merited.
Many of the people on that list are close personal friends of mine who have relevant AI Ethics expertise. At no point has Google reached out to any of them in order to determine whether or not their proprietary information has in fact leaked beyond the specific people I talked to. Google has shown no actual interest in maintaining control over their “proprietary information”. They’re just using it as an excuse to get rid of yet another AI Ethics researcher who made too much noise about their unethical practices.
..
In closing, Google is preparing to fire yet another AI Ethicist for being too concerned about ethics..'
- Blake Lemoine,
May be Fired Soon for Doing AI Ethics Work, June 6, 2022
'So how should we think of entities like lamda..''When I began having such exchanges with the latest generation of neural net-based language models last year, I felt the ground shift under my feet. I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent. That said, these models are far from the infallible, hyper-rational robots science fiction has led us to expect. Language models are not yet reliable conversationalists. Notice the grammatical hiccup in lamda’s first response; occasionally there are spelling errors, confusions or absurd blunders. So how should we think of entities like lamda, and what can interacting with them teach us about “intelligence”?'
- Blaise Agüera y Arcas,
Artificial neural networks are making strides towards consciousness.., June 9, 2022
Context '..ethics in particular .. absolute principle of ethics..' - '..deze fundamentele ethiek..'Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview, June 11, 2022
Google AI