{"id":8545,"date":"2021-10-22T21:44:22","date_gmt":"2021-10-22T21:44:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/TheNextWeb=1370886"},"modified":"2021-10-22T21:44:22","modified_gmt":"2021-10-22T21:44:22","slug":"google-channels-big-tobacco-with-dystopian-research-censorship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=8545","title":{"rendered":"Google channels Big Tobacco with dystopian research censorship"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In the wake of the firing of Timnit Gebru and other notable AI researchers at Google, Alphabet\u2019s circled the wagons and lawyered up. Reports flow out of Mountain View depicting teams of lawyers censoring scientific research and acting as unnamed collaborators and peer-reviewers.<\/p>\n

Most recently, Business Insider managed to interview<\/a> several researchers who painted a startling and bleak picture of what it\u2019s like to try and conduct research under such an anti-scientific regime.<\/p>\n

Per the article, one researcher said:<\/p>\n

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You\u2019ve got dozens of lawyers \u2014 no doubt, highly trained lawyers \u2014 who nonetheless actually know very little about this technology \u2026 and they\u2019re working their way through your research like English undergrads reading a poem.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The problem here is that Google isn\u2019t censoring research to avoid, say, its secrets getting out. Its lawyers are targeting scientific research that makes the company look bad.<\/p>\n

The person quoted above added that they were specifically talking about crossing out references to \u201cfairness\u201d and \u201cbias\u201d and scientists being told to change the results of their work. It\u2019s not only unethical, it\u2019s incredibly dangerous.<\/p>\n

The tea: Google\u2019s AI is broken. It might be a trillion-dollar company and the most cutting-edge AI outfit on Earth, but its algorithms are biased. And that\u2019s dangerous<\/a>.<\/p>\n

No matter how you slice it, Google\u2019s AI doesn\u2019t work as well for people who don\u2019t look like the vast majority of Google\u2019s employees (white dudes) as it does for people who do. From Search\u2019s conflation of Black people and animals<\/a> to the algorithms running the camera on the Pixel 6\u2019s inability to properly process non-white skin tones<\/a>, Google\u2019s machine-learning woes are well-documented.<\/p>\n

This is a big problem and it isn\u2019t easy to fix. Imagine building a car that didn\u2019t work as well for Black people and women as it did for white guys, selling 200 million, and then people slowly learning their automobiles were racist.<\/p>\n

There\u2019d be a lot of feelings and emotions about what that would mean.<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s current situation is a lot like that. Its products are everywhere. It can\u2019t just recall Search or put Google Ads on hold for a few days while it rethinks the entire world of deep learning to exclude bias. Why not fix world hunger and make puppies immortal while they\u2019re at it?<\/p>\n

So what do you do when you\u2019re one of the richest companies in the world and you come up against a truth so awful that its existence makes your model seem evil?<\/p>\n

You do what big tobacco did. You find people willing to say what\u2019s in your company\u2019s best interests and you use them to stop the people telling the truth from sharing their research.<\/p>\n

The National Institutes of Health released research in 2007 describing the role of lawyers during the big tobacco legal battles of the previous decades.<\/p>\n

In the paper, which is titled \u201cTobacco industry lawyers as a disease vector<\/a>,\u201d the researchers attribute the spread of diseases associated with long-term tobacco use to the tactics employed by industry lawyers.<\/p>\n

Some key takeaways from the paper include:<\/p>\n