... Google said it suspended Lemoine for breaching confidentiality policies by publishing the conversations with LaMDA online, and said in a statement that he was employed as a software engineer, not an ethicist.
He is probably in the wrong on many counts, still I find worrying the implications of that line.
That is not saying "your job isn't to worry about it", it's saying "this person is not a professional AI ethicist and reporters/readers should be aware of the role that this person has at Google".
I am a programmer. I am not a security expert. I can have opinions on security concerns, but they carry less weight both within and outside my company because I am not a professional security engineer. I can still recognize obvious problems, but I would correctly not be trusted to roll my own encryption.
To be blunt i would trust an engineer making a system that said there was a security concern in a system over a security engineer.
The only time you might want to listen to a security engineer is when they percieve a problem that the builder doesnt and even then my professional experience with security engineers is way too many are boys who cry wolf and parrot whatever the sweeping tools say.
Phrased another way i would trust an engineer who put up a bridge if they said the bridge had issues over an inspector whose paycheck is very much dependent on not finding issues.
To be blunt i would trust an engineer making a system that said there was a security concern in a system over a security engineer.
That depends quite a bit on what was being discussed. If it's the engineer's work specifically, and what they did and why, that's one thing. If it's an engineer making claims about specific encryption algorithms that they chose to use or not use in the software they wrote which is contradicted by a security professional, you should probably trust he security professional.
This seems to me a case of the latter. A software engineer making claims about things that are not their subject of authority, or at least not what they were hired for, and thus have less reason to be listened to about by their employer.
I kind of feel like this sort of statement is saying that exactly. It’s a warning to anyone else who has any sort of ethical qualms with anything the company does; “shut up and color!”
I'm glad people get PhDs in things like ethics. But ethics isn't like nuclear physics -- everyone alive has an enormous amount of experience in it.
I am not convinced this is true AI. But if and when true AI happens, and a lot of engineers claim that the machines are suffering horribly, we should take that seriously, regardless of whether the engineers have been accredited to recognize suffering in others.
My interpretation is that they were presenting themselves to the media who understood more about the topic they were discussing than they actually did. If you're a reporter and someone from company X comes to you saying they have important issues involving issue Y in product Z, you'll probably assume that they have significant expertise in issue Y - even if their involvement is only in some unrelated subcomponent of the actual product.
I'm a software engineer, but if I went to talk to a reporter about UI issues in a product, ignoring the obvious correct dismissal, I have nothing to do with anything UI related (I haven't worked on UI level anything in it must be the vicinity of a decade, and the UI stuff I did do was a super specific subset). If I'm presented as "an engineer working on Z" talking about UI, it would be reasonable to assume that I was a person who knew what they were talking about.
Hence a company X might reasonably feel that they need to clarify what I actually did (or did not) do.
Furthermore, while some companies are stricter than others, (and Google is reputedly quite strict), companies are generally not big on employees talking to reporters in a way that could be taken as speaking in an official capacity.
If you're a reporter and someone from company X comes to you saying they have important issues involving issue Y in product Z, you'll probably assume that they have significant expertise in issue Y - even if their involvement is only in some unrelated subcomponent of the actual product.
At most companies, that scenario is probably going to get you in trouble if Company X hasn't actually OKd you to talk to that reporter. There's probably some grey area where you just wrote something on social media--but that's a reason to be cautious on social media.
If it's a FAANG talking in specific about anything work/employer related - unless you are working on OSS stuff; talking about new APIs, etc (as you'll see many engineers on twitter, etc after I/O, WWDC, etc) - is very much frowned* on. Certainly any such presence would need to take care to avoid the appearance of being a company rep, etc.
There are very few companies that are likely to be ok with random employees talking to media, maybe not the same result as a FAANG, but I can't see avoiding any repercussions (e.g if a bank employee goes off and talks to the news presenting themselves as a rep from the bank, I don't see that going well)
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He is probably in the wrong on many counts, still I find worrying the implications of that line.
That is not saying "your job isn't to worry about it", it's saying "this person is not a professional AI ethicist and reporters/readers should be aware of the role that this person has at Google".
I am a programmer. I am not a security expert. I can have opinions on security concerns, but they carry less weight both within and outside my company because I am not a professional security engineer. I can still recognize obvious problems, but I would correctly not be trusted to roll my own encryption.
To be blunt i would trust an engineer making a system that said there was a security concern in a system over a security engineer.
The only time you might want to listen to a security engineer is when they percieve a problem that the builder doesnt and even then my professional experience with security engineers is way too many are boys who cry wolf and parrot whatever the sweeping tools say.
Phrased another way i would trust an engineer who put up a bridge if they said the bridge had issues over an inspector whose paycheck is very much dependent on not finding issues.
That depends quite a bit on what was being discussed. If it's the engineer's work specifically, and what they did and why, that's one thing. If it's an engineer making claims about specific encryption algorithms that they chose to use or not use in the software they wrote which is contradicted by a security professional, you should probably trust he security professional.
This seems to me a case of the latter. A software engineer making claims about things that are not their subject of authority, or at least not what they were hired for, and thus have less reason to be listened to about by their employer.
In real life, it would depend on the individual engineer.
That's not how inspection works
Real life inspection? Correct! Thats why its done that way.
Google AI Ethicist "inspection" though....
I kind of feel like this sort of statement is saying that exactly. It’s a warning to anyone else who has any sort of ethical qualms with anything the company does; “shut up and color!”
I'm glad people get PhDs in things like ethics. But ethics isn't like nuclear physics -- everyone alive has an enormous amount of experience in it.
I am not convinced this is true AI. But if and when true AI happens, and a lot of engineers claim that the machines are suffering horribly, we should take that seriously, regardless of whether the engineers have been accredited to recognize suffering in others.
My interpretation is that they were presenting themselves to the media who understood more about the topic they were discussing than they actually did. If you're a reporter and someone from company X comes to you saying they have important issues involving issue Y in product Z, you'll probably assume that they have significant expertise in issue Y - even if their involvement is only in some unrelated subcomponent of the actual product.
I'm a software engineer, but if I went to talk to a reporter about UI issues in a product, ignoring the obvious correct dismissal, I have nothing to do with anything UI related (I haven't worked on UI level anything in it must be the vicinity of a decade, and the UI stuff I did do was a super specific subset). If I'm presented as "an engineer working on Z" talking about UI, it would be reasonable to assume that I was a person who knew what they were talking about.
Hence a company X might reasonably feel that they need to clarify what I actually did (or did not) do.
Furthermore, while some companies are stricter than others, (and Google is reputedly quite strict), companies are generally not big on employees talking to reporters in a way that could be taken as speaking in an official capacity.
At most companies, that scenario is probably going to get you in trouble if Company X hasn't actually OKd you to talk to that reporter. There's probably some grey area where you just wrote something on social media--but that's a reason to be cautious on social media.
If it's a FAANG talking in specific about anything work/employer related - unless you are working on OSS stuff; talking about new APIs, etc (as you'll see many engineers on twitter, etc after I/O, WWDC, etc) - is very much frowned* on. Certainly any such presence would need to take care to avoid the appearance of being a company rep, etc.
There are very few companies that are likely to be ok with random employees talking to media, maybe not the same result as a FAANG, but I can't see avoiding any repercussions (e.g if a bank employee goes off and talks to the news presenting themselves as a rep from the bank, I don't see that going well)
* frowned == new job