Ethics Cause Developer Burn Out. Ethics? Ethics?
November 16, 2022
It is undeniable that AI algorithms are programmed with biases, because of limited datasets and their developers’ obliviousness. To learn not to be “racist,” AI algorithms need to be exposed to diverse datasets and be corrected when they make a faux pas. The MIT Technology Review says AI developers are experiencing severe burnout trying to be “ethical”: “Responsible AI Has A Burnout Problem.”
There is a huge demand for ethical AI algorithms, but the workers who develop them are dealing with psychological and physical problems. These workers are feeling undervalued and burning out almost as quickly as social media content moderators. People who work with AI ethics must cover a wide range of issues:
“The role of an AI ethicist or someone in a responsible-AI team varies widely, ranging from analyzing the societal effects of AI systems to developing responsible strategies and policies to fixing technical issues. Typically, these workers are also tasked with coming up with ways to mitigate AI harms, from algorithms that spread hate speech to systems that allocate things like housing and benefits in a discriminatory way to the spread of graphic and violent images and language. “
AI ethicists are challenged every day they are forced to work on a project that injects negativity into their lives. While they face backlash from their bosses and the public online, they are also disrespected by their fellow AI developers. These developers are mostly engineers, who are not known for their great social skills.
Another problem is the neck-breaking pace AI advancements are made. Companies are chasing the next big thing. They are also not hiring competent employees who can work together. All these issues combine into high turnover and burnout.
Margaret Mitchell, a former Googler, founded and co-led its Ethical AI team. She burned out after two years in AI ethics. She quit her Google job and left for an AI startup. While change starts at the top of any company, her quote says it all about how companies handle burnout: “The only mechanism that big tech companies have to handle the reality of this is to ignore the reality of it.”
This quote also describes the general working life in the US.
Whitney Grace, November 16, 2022
Thomson Reuters: Trust the Firm with Data Security?
November 16, 2022
Thomson Reuters tosses around the word “trust.” Should one trust the firm with data security? (Keep in mind that Thomson Reuters compiles and licenses data to law enforcement and intelligence entities in the US and elsewhere, please.)
As most people know, everyone makes mistakes, but Thomson Reuters made one heck of a doozy when the company left three terabytes of sensitive information open to the Internet. Hackers and their nefarious bots purloined the three terabytes. Cyber News discusses the fallout in: “Thomson Reuters Collected And Leaked At Least 3TB Of Sensitive Data.” The three databases are public-facing and are housed in ElasticSearch software.
Thomson Reuters fixed the problem when they found it, then they notified their customers. Thomson Reuters specializes in business-to-business media tools, such as Checkpoint, ONESOURCE, Westlaw, and Reuters Connect. The exposed databases rely on open-source software ElasticSearch because it was designed for companies handling large amounts of constantly updated data. The leaked three terabytes are worth millions of dollars in the criminal world.
Two databases were public-facing, meaning they were meant to be accessible to the public, while the third was a non-production server related to the product ONESOURCE. The leaked data could cause a lot of mayhem:
“Researchers believe that any loss of information on the dataset could not only harm Thomson Reuters and its clients but also be detrimental to the public interest.
For example, the open database was leaking some individuals’ and organizations’ sensitive screening and compliance data. Accessible data from the public-facing Thomson Reuters database could have tipped off entities that would like their wrongdoing kept in the dark.
According to Martynas Vareikis, Information Security Researcher at Cybernews, threat actors could use the email addresses exposed in the dataset to carry out phishing attacks. Attackers could impersonate Thomson Reuters and send the company’s customers fake invoices.”
While Thomson Reuters attributes the error as a system glitch, leaving the passwords in plaintext format was a rookie mistake. No matter how strong the passwords are, they are worthless once exposed.
Trust? Maybe it is a marketing play?
Whitney Grace, November 16, 2022
Discovering Bunsha. Wow, the Past Can Provide Some Wisdom to Whiz Kids
November 15, 2022
In early 1992 I gave several lectures in Japan. At the Kansai Institute of Technology in Osaka, I learned about bunsha. I recall that one of the people from MITI attending my lecture mentioned the concept. A representative of Kinokuniya (the then giant of Japanese bookselling and information) arranged for a slim volume to be delivered to my hotel when I arrived in Tokyo for another lecture.
I received two slim volumes: Bunsha. Improving Your Business through Company Division and Bunsha. Company Division. What Good Is a Stuffed Tiger? After leaving Japan, I added a third book: To Expand We Divide. The Practice and Principles of Bunsha Management.
These books made a significant impression on me. The authors Kuniyasu Sakai and Hiroshi Sekiyama, along with translator David Russell, explained how to avoid the management pitfalls of becoming too big. Teams can be too big. Companies can be too big. When big happens, some employees are stifled and leave the company.
The basic idea is to create smaller units and when an employee has a desire to start a company, give that employee an opportunity to do that new thing within the existing company. A brief summary does not do justice to the ideas in these three slim volumes.
The idea of bunsha had a significant impact on how I viewed certain types of management challenges. I suppose one could say, “That’s just common sense.” I am not so sure because these books codified the idea of bunsha and provided examples about the principles. Shortcomings and benefits are explained.
I read “Split Your Overwhelmed Teams: Two Teams of Five Is Not the Same as One Team of Ten.” (If the link goes dead, you have another example of knowledge erosion. A perfect example of our current management plight.) My immediate reaction was that the idea of bunsha is not familiar to the author. As I reflected on the essay, I realized that most people don’t know about bunsha and if they heard about the concept, the reaction was that it was irrelevant.
Several observations seem to be warranted:
- Information about important management ideas is not diffusing. The disheartening failures of management at technology companies essential to economic performance illustrate what happens when big fails.
- Japan itself has overlooked the importance of bunsha. The disappointing trajectory of well known Japanese high technology companies provides a number of examples. Hello, Toshiba.
- Management consultants — at least the ones I have encountered in the last 20 years — know how to gather data, cut expenses, and get their bonuses. I am not sure these individuals or some of their mentors know about bunsha.
May I suggest that a greater familiarity with bunsha will pay knowledge dividends. The books are short and are, therefore, suited to the TikTok and Instagram generation. For those older, bunsha may be too little, too late. Rediscovering ideas from a half century ago illustrates the peculiar narrowness of the Googlized information.
Stephen E Arnold, November 16, 2022
Google Did What? Misleading Users? Google!
November 15, 2022
In the midst of an economic downturn, most businesses try to avoid: [a] bad publicity regarding a sensitive issue and [b] paying lots of cash to US states. I suppose I could add [c] buying Twitter and [d] funding the metaverse, but let’s stick to the information in “Google Will Pay $392m to 40 States in Largest Ever US Privacy Settlement.”
For a big outfit like the Google my thought is that the negative publicity is more painful than writing checks. But advertisers are affected by the economic downturn and may be looking for ways to make sales without cutting deals with companies found guilt of user/customer surveillance.
The write up, which I assume is mostly on the money, says:
The states’ investigation was sparked by a 2018 Associated Press story, which found that Google continued to track people’s location data even after they opted out of such tracking by disabling a feature the company called “location history”.
The article points out:
It [the penalty] comes at a time of mounting unease over privacy and surveillance by tech companies that has drawn growing outrage from politicians and scrutiny by regulators.
Free services are great as long as users/customers don’t know exactly what’s happening. In the early days of the Google, there was not a generation interested in dinobaby ideas. Well, this decision suggests that some dinobabies with law degrees expect commercial enterprises to act with some sense of propriety.
The article makes clear exactly what Google did:
The attorneys general said Google misled users about its location tracking practices since at least 2014, violating state consumer protection laws. As part of the settlement, Google also agreed to make those practices more transparent to users. That includes showing them more information when they turn location account settings on and off and keeping a webpage that gives users information about the data Google collects.
Hmmm. What about targeted ads which miss their targets? Perhaps that’s an issue which will capture the attention of US attorneys general? Perhaps, but I am not optimistic. Awareness and subsequent legal processes move slowly, and slow is the friend of some firms.
Stephen E Arnold, November 15, 2022
Photo Rights and the Next Flight of Legal Eagles
November 15, 2022
I spotted a write up called “Copyright Trolls: The Unseen Tactics Lurking In The Backdrops Of Online Photos.” I was surprised to learn that this is a “real” business, not a criminal activity. The write up defines how individuals using a copyright protected image put themselves at risk. The article identifies companies in this business and highlights one law firm which deals with the alleged law breakers. Please, read the article.
However, the write up omits what I think will be an even larger business: Threatening legal action for an individual who uses a machine generated image without permission. In fact, a machine generated image may be okay for a person to create with a service like Craiyon or DALL-E today. But tomorrow some fine outfit like Getty Images or Agence France Presse may pull these images into their organizations. Then a copyright enforcement outfit uses smart software to find an unauthorized use of the image. The alleged infringer is at the wrong end of a legal eagle’s output system.
Check out the write up. Note the firms playing this game. Think about those machine generated images and future risk.
Stephen E Arnold, November 15, 2022
What Goes Up Must Come Down Even in Zuckland
November 15, 2022
Facebook used to be the indomitable ruler of social media, then its popularity plummeted in the face of older users and other platforms. Zuckerberg is facing a similar decline with his Meta company, but the plunge hits his deep pockets. Techspot explains what is going on with Zuckerberg and Meta in the article, “Meta Value Down $520 Billion Last Year, Threatening Its Position As a Top 20 Company.”
Meta has less net profits because of the economic downturn in the United States. Companies are spending less money are advertisements through Meta’s products. Meta’s investors are also worried, because the company is funneling billions into the VR/MR “metaverse” project. Meta’s VR/MR branch is called Reality Labs and it lost $10.2 billion in 2021. Reality Labs’s losses are expected to increase in 2023. In 2022, the losses are expected to be $85-87 billion.
Facebook hit the $1 trillion market cap in June 2021 more quickly than any company before. At the beginning of 2022, Facebook was the sixth biggest company in the US. Since Zuckerberg, however, renamed his company Meta its worth has fallen and it could secure the twentieth spot in the biggest company list.
Zuckerberg continues to push VR agenda:
“Despite losing billions and an analyst’s prediction that many business projects in this area will close by 2025, Zuckerberg is doubling down on the metaverse. ‘Look, I get that a lot of people might disagree with this investment, but from what I can tell, I think this is going to be a very important thing,’ he said. ‘People will look back a decade from now and talk about the importance of the work being done here.’”
Zuckerberg was a visionary with Facebook. Is he replicating his visions with the metaverse? He is losing billions of dollars, but it could pay off or it will be another blunder in technology history.
Whitney Grace, November 15, 2022
Google Hangouts Hung Up and Out
November 15, 2022
We have been hearing for years that Google Hangouts was being shuttered. Maybe. Sort of. Now Engadget reports, “Google Hangouts Is Well and Truly Dead.” Writer Mariella Moon tells us:
“Google has laid Hangouts to rest, a couple of years after it first announced that it was going to push people to use Chat, its Slack-like app, instead. After allowing users to move to Chat on their own in 2021, Google phased out the Hangouts Chat app for Android and iOS in July. Users were shown a prompt telling them that ‘Hangouts has been replaced by Google Chat’ and to switch to either the standalone Chat app or the Chat experience within Gmail. As TechCrunch notes, the last version of the messaging service, Hangouts for the web, is now also going away for good. When users access the Hangouts website, they might see a message that says: ‘Starting November 1, 2022, Hangouts on the web will redirect to Chat on Web. We recommend moving to Chat now.’ We can still access the website without being automatically redirected, but there’s a link to Google Chat that we can click to load the new messaging experience. The website might completely disappear in the coming days.”
Google Chat boasts collaboration features that Hangouts lacks, and it was a paid offering when Google first planned the shift. Chat is now a free tool that integrates with Gmail. For any users who have not yet saved their Hangouts data, there may still be time to do so with Google’s Takeout tool.
Cynthia Murrell, November 14, 2022
Simplifying the Geometry of Conscience
November 14, 2022
My first brush with crypto currency was a request to include the topic in a lecture for an outfit running international training programs for law enforcement and intelligence professionals. In 2013, I was in my first year of retirement and interested in what I called CyberOSINT. My definition of the term pivoted on the companies providing tools and software to deal with was grouped under the category of cyber crime. A decade ago, cyber crime was big, but it was propelled by what now seems to have been bad actor minnows.
The hot topics were the Dark Web, forums offering tips and tricks for hacking, and CSAM (child sexual abuse material). Digital currency, specifically Bitcoin, was the lubricant for cyber crime. Therefore, my team and I had no choice but take a look at the Nakamoto white paper, poke into the universities in England beavering away on techniques to deanonymize individual transactions, and the early research efforts of everyone’s favorite online bookstore Amazon. We attended meet ups about digital currency and spoke with seemingly well meaning people who were excited about doing money things without annoying intermediaries and regulatory authorities.
It became clear at least to me and my team that digital currency would become a replacement for paper and coin currencies because [a] money costs a lot to produce, manage, and make counterfeit resistant and [b] values could be whipped up using the juices that bad actors, money launderers, and financial “innovators” have pumping through their veins.
Today digital currencies have become a big financial play. It works… for a while. Then like the tragedy of the commons, the open green field is trashed. I thought about the current big time mess a whiz kid has created. The scale of the fraud makes those early players look less like minnows and more like clueless paramecia with math skills. “Sam Bankman-Fried and the Geometry of Conscience” is an interesting essay. However, it is difficult for a simple and somewhat dull person like myself to understand.
The write up says (and I urge you to read the complete 1,400 word essay. I want to cite one passage, if I may:
On reflection, maybe I’d just try to convince SBF to weight money logarithmically when calculating expected utility (as in the Kelly criterion), to forsake the linear weighting that SBF explicitly advocated and that he seems to have put into practice in his crypto ventures. Or if not logarithmic weighing, then at least some concave utility function—something that makes, let’s say, a mere $1 billion in hand seem better than $15 billion that has a 50% probability of vanishing and leaving you, your customers, your employees, and the entire Effective Altruism community with less than nothing.
Interesting, right.
Here’s my take. The SBF innovator attended MIT. In theory, he was exposed to MIT thinking, which as you may recall, involved taking money from everyone’s favorite poster child for questionable behavior Jeffrey Epstein. Several questions:
- What’s up with an MIT education and inculcation of such quaint concepts as moral behavior?
- Why are individuals willing and able to commit financial fraud when it is comparatively easy to deanonymize some crypto activities?
- Do we need big thoughts like “linear and concave utilities” to explain criminal behavior?
My take. Effective altruism is word salad. Say crypto to me I think of cyber crime. End of story. No Hopf fibration or wordsmithing needed, thank you very much.
Stephen E Arnold, November 14, 2022
A Digital Tweet with More Power Than a Status-6 Torpedo
November 14, 2022
I have no idea if the information captured in this screenshot of a Tweet on the Elon thing is correct. Figure it out seems to be the optimal way to deal with fake information.
My hunch is that the text is tough to read. In a nutshell, a “stunt” tweet knocked $20 billion off the market cap of the ethical and estimable firm Eli Lilly.
The item I spotted was attributed to an entity identified as Erik Feigl Ding [blue check]. I am not sure what a blue check means.
One of my Arnold Laws of Online says, “Information has impact.” My thought is that $20 billion, the alleged lawsuit, and the power of a digital message seems obvious.
Does this suggest that the dinobaby approach to curated information within an editorial structure is a useful business process? Elon, what’s your take?
Stephen E Arnold, November 14, 2022
TikTok: Algorithmic Data Slurping
November 14, 2022
There are several reasons TikTok rocketed to social-media dominance in just a few years. For example, Its user friendly creation tools plus a library of licensed tunes make it easy to create engaging content. Then there was the billion-dollar marketing campaign that enticed users away from Facebook and Instagram. But, according to the Guardian, it was the recommendation engine behind its For You Page (FYP) that really did the trick. Writer Alex Hern describes “How TikTok’s Algorithm Made It a Success: ‘It Pushes the Boundaries.’” He tells us:
“The FYP is the default screen new users see when opening the app. Even if you don’t follow a single other account, you’ll find it immediately populated with a never-ending stream of short clips culled from what’s popular across the service. That decision already gave the company a leg up compared to the competition: a Facebook or Twitter account with no friends or followers is a lonely, barren place, but TikTok is engaging from day one. It’s what happens next that is the company’s secret sauce, though. As you scroll through the FYP, the makeup of videos you’re presented with slowly begins to change, until, the app’s regular users say, it becomes almost uncannily good at predicting what videos from around the site are going to pique your interest.”
And so a user is hooked. Beyond the basics, specifically how the algorithm works is a mystery even, we’re told, to those who program it. We do know the AI takes the initiative. Instead of only waiting for users to select a video or tap a reaction, it serves up test content and tweaks suggestions based on how its suggestions are received. This approach has another benefit. It ensures each video posted on the platform is seen by at least one user, and every positive interaction multiplies its reach. That is how popular content creators quickly amass followers.
Success can be measured different ways, of course. Though TikTok has captured a record number of users, it is not doing so well in the critical monetization category. Estimates put its 2021 revenue at less than 5% of Facebook’s, and efforts to export its e-commerce component have not gone as hoped. Still, it looks like the company is ready to try, try again. Will its persistence pay off?
Cynthia Murrell, November 14, 2022
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