Racist self-driving car scare debunked, inside AI black boxes, Google helps folks go with the TensorFlow... Hello, here's a quick recap on all the latest AI-related news beyond what we've already reported this week. Are self-driving cars racist? You may have seen news reports that autonomous cars are unlikely to detect pedestrians crossing the road if they have dark skin, and thus run them over. And yes, the internal alarm bells in …
I guess everyone in tech just saw the sense of Asimov's three laws .. but didn't imagine the barriers to implementing them would be political rather than technical.
Worse, the military are likely to build autonomous killers long before we have the technology for those machines to determine that they're actually killing, and the humans in the loop (if they exist) probably can't be trusted either.
This will get worse before it gets better.
The military have been programming humans to be autonomous killers since before the first world war - so now we're programming drones to do the job. Used to be, if you were in the army you could be shot for refusing to jump out of the trench and shoot the enemy - I wonder how long it will be before they start shooting programmers for refusing to program their drones to kill people?
No problem of course, the military view is that you are being shot for your own good.
And of course it is good for everyone (including them) to be shot as well. Somewhat distressing suggestion from the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland last week that if the military were ordered too shot someone then they were immune.
Not that I would like anyone to think that I wish blanket charges to be made in that case -it has to be evidence based, but there has to be accountability, even where the civil power have made the disastrous decision to deploy soldiers - trained to kill - in Belfast.
If soldiers are pulled up, then there should be politicians and responsible civil servants who need to be in the dock as well.
I wonder how long it will be before they start shooting programmers for refusing to program their drones to kill people?
They won't need to. For every dev that refuses to do the work, they'll find another who is happy to do so.
No problem of course, the military view is that you are being shot for your own good.
More likely they view it as you being shot for your own deeds. Which is sort of the point in fairness.
Ultimately, do you really care that you got shot by a robot rather than an American? If you've done something to bring their military down on your head, then there's precious little that is going to save you.
Mostly irrelevant, but for ppl with Netflix, the second season of the Aussie drama "Secret City" is well worth a watch. Deals with the coverup of an unexplained explosion in an Aussie suburb. But considering the context, you can probably guess that it's not a standard issues with a gas main...
If I recall, the criminals in the core gang of bad guys in Robocop were all scruffy white guys, except for one black man. (At the time, that was probably rather daring; *all* the bad guys should have been white, lol.)
(There *was* a joke about the one black criminal using his, er, equipment to distract a white woman cop. But I'm sure that wasn't racist at all ...)
Lidar will presumably have about the same difficulty seeing black skin as it does seeing black clothing at night or, indeed white skin hidden behind a turned up dark collar or a dark hoodie*. Perhaps IR should be added.
I've had the experience, driving on a dark, wet night of seeing an apparently disembodied pair of white trainers crossing the road in front of me.
To be fair, it's also harder for a human driver to see a dark skinned pedestrian at night. I'm trying not to be racist here, but I don't see any way around that.
Unless it's telling people what my parents told me, as a pasty-faced child - to wear light-coloured clothing when I went out at night. Yep, that's right - I'm blaming the victims. If you walk into the road without taking reasonable precautions both to check for traffic and to make sure that drivers can see you, then I'm sorry but that's Darwinism at work.
We're just emerging from winter here in the UK, most pedestrians at night are still wearing winter coats if not hats and scarves too. As a driver I don't have time to wait til I see people's faces, I need to treat every shadowy shape as a potential human until I'm sure what I'm seeing. People could have green skin in this scenario and it would make zero difference to whether I perceive them as human.
I'm also amazed at how many people wear black costs in winter.
I once saw a pair of ears and a pair of hands proceeding along the A303, and then I hit him. He was wearing a dark suit, brown boots, and had black hair. He had been thrown out of the pub in one village, and had decided to walk along the dual carriageway to the next village. I collected him about halfway, on a dark and stormy night, and he bounced into the hedge at the side of the road (no pedestrian footpath along the roadside). We put him in the back of my car and drove him to the next village, where we called the police. The copper interviewed him, immediately after which he staggered across the road and into the nearest pub. Apparently, he was an casual worker at a local stableyard, and had just received his cash-in-hand wages, so decided to splurge it in one or two pubs. Copper said to me "Serves him bloodywell right". Never heard any more about it, but was wary of driving at night for a while thereafter.
I think any company advertising that it's building killer robots will get 10 applicants for every employee put off by the prospect.
That's what got people interested in the tech in the first place and while I'm old enough to question the morality, I'm not sure I'd have hesitated coming out of engineering school.
there are plenty of folks without such a moral compass who would gladly step in and complete the work she refused. The sad truth is that unless humanity overcomes basic urges to hurt/kill/maim/dominate others, and fairly quickly, this will end badly - most likely extinction by our own hand...
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