Fixing the Google: A Very Short List
December 21, 2020
I read and chortled at the recommendations in “From Whistleblower Laws to Unions: How Google’s AI Ethics Meltdown Could Shape Policy.” The title does not match what the write up actually presents. The article is a list of “should” recommendations.
You know. Your mom told you that you should clean up your room or your teacher told you that you should not cheat on a science test.
Remember?
How well did those “shoulds” work?
Just great I bet.
Now the write up from a “real” news outfit with strong Sillycon Valley tendencies offers there ideas to remediate the fine organization known as Alphabet Google:
- Get someone not working at Google to do an independent algorithm audit.
- Scrap self regulation.
- A worker union.
- Protect AI whistleblowers.
- Eliminate corporate funding of ethics research.
- Tax big tech.
- Require AI researchers to disclose financial ties.
- Separate AI ethics from computer science.
Yeah, brilliant stuff.
Perhaps the issues swirling around Googzilla have hardened like the crust on top of recently flowing lava? Talking about the crust is interesting but avoids the issue of the lava pouring into subdivisions, burning down houses, and generating new land. I want to point out that such new land can become the ideal location for a resort hotel.
I think it is a bit late to suggest that big tech must not police itself. In case some have not noticed, the large online monopolies are, in effect, quasi nation states. These outfits are doing the taxing, the regulating, the defining of ethics, and the organizing of workers.
Do I have some recommendations? Nope, I am going to be either 77 or 78. I forget because the vapidity and general craziness of thumb types short circuits my few remaining synapses.
Why not view these outfits as a consequence of the way certain societies function? Then the focus shifts from the symptoms to the root cause.
Stephen E Arnold, December 21, 2020
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