PROTECTING AND ENHANCING

OUR HUMANITY IN AN AGE

OF MACHINE LEARNING
CHARIS THOMPSON
CHANCELLOR’S PROFESSOR, UC BERKELEY
PROFESSOR, LSE
ABSTRACT AND STAKES
• In this talk I review some of the biggest threats - for example, algorithmic oppression
and triage, exacerbation of bubble chambers and inequality, and cybersecurity and
autonomous weapons - and some of the biggest opportunities of the current state of
machine learning, and consider the major approaches being taken to guiding machine
learning for human benefit.  I then describe three initiatives we are pursuing to
intervene, implement, and archive better practice.

• With current political movements being both more dependent on machine learning
and science and technology in general, and more disconnected in terms of reasoning
and values than at any time in the recent past, how we think about machine learning
policy is critical
WHITE HOUSE REPORT AI RESEARCH STRATEGY
HOUSE OF COMMONS ROBOTICS AND AI REPORT 10/16

• “Over the past decade, the AI subfield of machine learning, which enables computers to
learn from experience or examples, has demonstrated increasingly accurate results, causing
much excitement about the near-term prospects of AI. While recent attention has been paid
to the importance of statistical approaches such as deep learning, impactful AI advances
have also been made in a wide variety of other areas, such as perception, natural language
processing, formal logics, knowledge representations, robotics, control theory, cognitive
system architectures, search and optimization techniques, and many others.”

• In 2015, the U.S. Government’s investment in unclassified R&D in AI-related technologies

was approximately $1.1 billion.
• UK putting together Commission
THE TERMS AI AND MACHINE LEARNING
• AI (like ARTs? Where the ”artificial” changed to “assisted” once it became normalized)
• Technologies and algorithms combined so that software does “intelligent” things
(“computational intelligence”?)
• For some, “machine learning” is a synonym for AI, with all things like robotics, natural language
processing, computer vision, etc. all part of it
• For others, machine learning is a subset of AI, or partially overlaps with AI, referring explicitly
to AI that learns from its environment – which basically means performance improves over time
with more data – including neural nets and deep learning
• Deep learning methods that use multi-layered neural networks are used on some tasks once
believed to be incapable of automation
• PUBLIC THINKS ABOUT ARTIFICIAL GENERAL, NOT JUST NARROW, INTELLIGENCE
and mixes ML / AI / ROBOTS, normalizing ubiquitous new ML interfaces quickly
 NATIONAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE R&D STRATEGIC PLAN FOR FEDERALLY FUNDED
RESEARCH OCTOBER 2016

• Strategy 1: Make long-term investments in AI research. . .enable US to remain a world leader in AI

• Strategy 2: Develop effective methods for human-AI collaboration. Rather than replace humans,
most AI systems will collaborate with humans
• Strategy 3: Understand and address the ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI... expect AI
technologies to behave according to formal and informal norms to which we hold fellow humans
• Strategy 4: Ensure the safety and security of AI systems. . . assurance is needed that the systems will
operate . . . in a controlled, well-defined, and well-understood manner
• Strategy 5: Develop shared public datasets and environments for AI training and testing. The depth,
quality, and accuracy of training datasets and resources significantly affect AI performance
• Strategy 6: Measure and evaluate AI technologies through standards and benchmarks. . . and
community engagement that guide and evaluate progress in AI
• Strategy 7: Better understand the national AI R&D workforce needs. . .AI will require a strong
community of AI researchers
 PARTNERSHIP ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO BENEFIT
PEOPLE AND SOCIETY (9/16; 1/17)

• January 2017: new members . . . based on expertise in civil rights, economics, and open
research, to join Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Facebook and Apple
• Ensure that AI technologies are understandable and interpretable and benefit and
empower as many people as possible; educate and listen to the public and actively
engage stakeholders, including business
• Open research and dialog on the ethical, social, economic, and legal implications of AI.
• Privacy and security of individuals; understanding/respecting interests of all parties;
making AI research and engineering communities socially responsible, sensitive and
engaged with wider society; ensuring that AI research and technology is robust, reliable,
trustworthy, and operates within secure constraints; opposing development and use of AI
technologies that would violate international conventions or human rights, and
promoting safeguards and technologies that do no harm
AUTONOMOUS AND ASSISTIVE & AUGMENTED ML/AI

• Some of the arenas where we once defined what it meant to be intelligent are now
dependent on computational intelligence to be world class as a human (chess, Go)
• AI/ML good at things we are bad at that we do not think are intelligent (porn, dating..)
• Phylogenetic/ontogenetic correlates in layers? Social aspects of learning – snow
monkeys . . .don’t have to be that smart?
• Public has focused a lot on what AI would mean in autonomous form – from Sci Fi where
robots have emergent intelligence, emotions and moral landscapes and consequent social
and political organizing and plotting; and fears of autonomous warfare
• Assistive and augmentative ML has great potential for living well with various
disabilities, as well as overcoming barriers, e.g language translation (romance ads)
• Hybrid human-AI systems also raise huge challenges about conforming to social norms
and laws designed for human capabilities, boundaries of the self, and national borders
MACHINE LEARNING THREATS:
ALGORITHMIC OPPRESSION / FILTERING /
TRIAGE
• Dave Coplin from Microsoft: “in AI every time an algorithm is written, embedded
within it will be all the biases that exist in the humans who created it”. He
emphasised a need “to be mindful of the philosophies, morals and ethics of the
organisations [...] creating the algorithms that increasingly we rely on every day”
(HoC report, 10/16)
• Many scholars working on this: Safiya Umoja Noble algorithms of oppression;
Cathy O’Neil weapons of math destruction; Holston, Ochigame algorithmic filtering
• Supervised learning algorithms, Unsupervised learning, Semisupervised learning,
Reinforcement learning: each has its issues; even basic processes like validation and
verification are relative to the constraints of the formal specifications
BIG ISSUES: THREATS, CONT
• Autonomous weapons – frameworks for regulation (lock-out with autonomous
analyzing and countering cyberattacks?)
• Future of work – deskilling / reskilling / superskilling? Which jobs will be hardest
to automate, from citrus picking to emotion and care work. Many jobs that
currently seem least likely to be automated have been racialized and gendered in
ways connected to care and immigration, and have rarely paid living wages; how
do we revalue work?
• Exacerbate inequality – digital divides; EJ and ecological concerns in data
hardware and storage and cooling; fast innovation leads to extreme economic
inequality; filtering / oppression / triage
• Divided societies with algorithmic bubbles – challenges of populism
(recommendations, news feeds, etc)
SCIENCE FARE: SOCIAL BENCHMARKING

• Building in social goals in formal specifications; measure and correct shortfalls

• Infrastructure and goals: social benchmarks and milestones
• Empaneling experts and non-experts, stakeholders and non-stakeholders to set
goals and measure outcomes and set correctives
• Those historically underserved within different arenas, such as underrepresented
minorities and healthcare; disability justice and rights scholars and activists setting
goals and correctives and monitoring for assistive and augmentative devices
• Highlight projects and set goals at the interface of social justice and ML: e.g.
building up 360 and panoramic views from e.g. police body cameras
DATA SCIENCE PROGRAMS AND EDUCATION

• Data science programs at universities need to emphasize expertise from across

campus
• No longer ok to be innumerate, though also work to do away with unnecessary
barriers to entry and / or re-entry especially to diversify workforce and maximize
creative input and work against implicit bias
• No longer ok to be illiterate – social science / arts / humanities should be folded in to
basic ML literacy
• Our ML / AI workforce moving forward, as well as our humanity, requires this
• Re-value and re-invest in vocational training, while broadening what that means now
that ML is becoming more and more integrated into all arenas
THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY AND ROBOT LOVE

• “A personal question of mine I’d love if you could get some answers - it’s
whether the future for robots would be for the individual, whether that’s for
pleasure, therapy, company, service, etc., or if the future will be focused on
using them for our countries’ advantage, military, etc? Will they ever be a
personal item? If so, would they have rights? Would their rights matter without
consciousness? What is the pushback on the theories of “robots taking jobs?”
• “Can we have a Westworld? Not the settler colonial imaginary; just some sort
of amusement park to experience AI first hand. Not a luxury vacation but
more of an experience for those interested.”
• “Those bruhs need some ethics”: on putting together a robot ethics framework
– how we should treat robots, as well as how they should behave . . .