Comment on Google's AI now listens to your English language phone conversations
stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days agoThis is common for companies that like to hire PhDs.
PhDs like to work on interesting and challenging projects.
With nobody to reign them in, they do all kinds of cool stuff that makes no money (e.g. Intel Optane and transactional memory).
Designing a realtime scam analysis tool with resource constraints is interesting enough to be greenlit but makes no money.
Once released, they’ll move on to the next big challenge, and when nobody is there to maintain their work, it will be silently dropped by Google.
I’m willing to bet more than 70% of the Google graveyard comes from projects like these.
btaf45@lemmy.world 4 days ago
And they never ever ask themselves “Is this ethically the right thing to do”. And so they create things that do way more harm for society than good. For selfish reasons, just because it is a “fun” project.
stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
I may be biased (PhD student here) but I don’t fault them for being as such. Ethics is something that 1) requires formal training 2) requires oversight 3) contains to are different to every person. Quite frankly, it’s not part of their training, never been emphasized as part of their training, and subjective based on cultural experiences.
What is considered unreasonable risk of harm is going to be different to everybody. To me, if the entire design runs locally and does not collect data for Google’s use then it’s perfectly ethical. That being said, this does not prevent someone else from adding the data collection features. I think the original design of such a system should put in a reasonable amount of effort in stopping that. But if that is done then there’s nothing else to blame them about. The moral responsibility lies with the one who pulled the trigger.
Should the original designer have anticipated this issue thus never took the first step? Maybe. But that depends on a lot of circumstance that we don’t know so it’s hard to predict anything meaningful.