67. Joaquin Quiñonero-Candela - Responsible AI at Facebook
Towards Data Science
01/20/21
•50m
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Facebook routinely deploys recommendation systems and predictive models that affect the lives of billions of people everyday. That kind of reach comes with great responsibility — among other things, the responsibility to develop AI tools that ethical, fair and well characterized.
This isn’t an easy task. Human beings have spent thousands of years arguing about what “fairness” and “ethics” mean, and haven’t come close to a consensus. Which is precisely why the responsible AI community has to involve as many disparate perspectives as possible in determining what policies to explore and recommend — a practice that Facebook’s Responsible AI team has applied itself.
For this episode of the podcast, I’m joined by Joaquin Quiñonero-Candela, the Distinguished Tech Lead for Responsible AI at Facebook. Joaquin has been at the forefront of the AI ethics and fairness movements for years, and has overseen the formation of Facebook’s responsible AI team. As a result, he’s one of relatively few people with hands-on experience making critical AI ethics decisions at scale, and seeing their effects.
Our conversation covered a lot of ground, from philosophical questions about the definition of fairness, to practical challenges that arise when implementing certain ethical AI frameworks.
Previous Episode
66. Owain Evans - Predicting the future of AI
January 13, 2021
•47m
Most researchers agree we’ll eventually reach a point where our AI systems begin to exceed human performance at virtually every economically valuable task, including the ability to generalize from what they’ve learned to take on new tasks that they haven’t seen before. These artificial general intelligences (AGIs) would in all likelihood have transformative effects on our economies, our societies and even our species.
No one knows what these effects will be, or when AGI systems will be developed that can bring them about. But that doesn’t mean these things aren’t worth predicting or estimating. The more we know about the amount of time we have to develop robust solutions to important AI ethics, safety and policy problems, the more clearly we can think about what problems should be receiving our time and attention today.
That’s the thesis that motivates a lot of work on AI forecasting: the attempt to predict key milestones in AI development, on the path to AGI and super-human artificial intelligence. It’s still early days for this space, but it’s received attention from an increasing number of the AI safety and AI capabilities researchers. One of those researchers is Owain Evans, whose work at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute is focused on techniques for learning about human beliefs, preferences and values from observing human behavior or interacting with humans. Owain joined me for this episode of the podcast to talk about AI forecasting, the problem of inferring human values, and the ecosystem of research organizations that support this type of research.
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68. Silvia Milano - Ethical problems with recommender systems
January 27, 2021
•60m
One of the consequences of living in a world where we have every kind of data we could possible want at our fingertips, is that we have far more data available to us than we could possibly review. Wondering which university program you should enter? You could visit any one of a hundred thousand websites that each offer helpful insights, or take a look at ten thousand different program options on hundreds of different universities’ websites. The only snag is that, by the time you finish that review, you probably could have graduated.
Recommender systems allow us to take controlled sips from the information fire hose that’s pointed our way every day of the week, by highlighting a small number of particularly relevant or valuable items from a vast catalog. And while they’re incredibly valuable pieces of technology, they also have some serious ethical failure modes — many of which arise because companies tend to build recommenders to reflect user feedback, without thinking of the broader implications these systems have for society and human civilization.
Those implications are significant, and growing fast. Recommender algorithms deployed by Twitter and Google regularly shape public opinion on the key moral issues of our time — sometimes intentionally, and sometimes even by accident. So rather than allowing society to be reshaped in the image of these powerful algorithms, perhaps it’s time we asked some big questions about the kind of world we want to live in, and worked backward to figure out what our answers would imply for the way we evaluate recommendation engines.
That’s exactly why I wanted to speak with Silvia Milano, my guest for this episode of the podcast. Silvia is an expert of the ethics of recommender systems, and a researcher at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and at the Oxford Internet Institute, where she’s been involved in work aimed at better understanding the hidden impact of recommendation algorithms, and what can be done to mitigate their more negative effects. Our conversation took us led us to consider complex questions, including the definition of identity, the human right to self-determination, and the interaction of governments with technology companies.
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