Hasnain says:

“AI is a field dominated by emotionally immature white and Asian men. If you can ignore all of the brilliance of human interactions and focus your soul on calculus you can become a rising star in the field of AI. All you need to do is beat the benchmarks and come up with clever formulae and you can be great. What Timnit said resonated closely with me because when I had gone to that conference with Meg I saw an engineer present his findings regarding police profiling systems. A researcher from UCLA had presented a system for determining whether or not a given dispatch was “gang related” so that the police could bring “the appropriate amount of force”. Several other people had asked him about the biases of the datasets his system consumed and he had canned answers for those questions. I asked him: (paraphrasing) “Let’s assume that all of those concerns are irrelevant and that your system perfectly predicts whether or not a dispatch is gang related. Are you at all concerned that the informational advantage you’re giving to the police might cause the gangs to unilaterally raise their force profile thereby making a bad situation worse?” His response: “Man I’m just an engineer.” I decided that the best response was to sing Tim Lehrer’s “Werner von Braun” into the microphone.”

Posted on 2021-05-18T03:30:38+0000