Timnit Gebru helped expose how artificial intelligence replicates prejudice. She’s not waiting for Big Tech to fix it
Gebru is quick to detect bias in others but there is no sign in the long article below that she detects any bias in herself. Yet as a woman with some African ancestry she can be expected to show bias in favour of her own group. And that can mean bias against other groups, whites in particular. And, as she is a woman, bias against men can also be suspected.
But those are not mere suspicions. She repeatedly reveals an animus against white men. They are the demons in her theogony, the constant offenders against what is right: Her enemies. She could not be clearer about her attitude to white men
And that leads to a serious blindness, albeit a common blindness. She appears to have no idea about the way biases such as hers work. She may be aware that her biases are conventional Leftism but, if so, she no critique of that. She offers no critique of such biases and shows no awareness of how intergroup biases in general arise. Allport's old insight that there is a "kernel of truth" in stereotypes seems unknown to her. Or, if it is known, she allows it no influence on her thinking or advocacy. She shows no insight into how intergroup beliefs in general, "stereotypes", arise.
She can perhaps be forgiven for that great gap in her thinking, that lack of insight. There is no hint that she has ever studied psychology. But, as a much-published psychologist, I am well aware of the studies of belief formation. And I can put my conclusions from that research quite starkly: Racial prejudice to a major degree reflects racial reality. To be even more explicit, negative beliefs about blacks mostly arises from bad behavior by many blacks. What she detects as bias is in fact lsrgely realism.
So her finding that discourse about minorities presents them negatively is no fault of the data she has gathered. It is a feature, not a bug. So her whole enterprise is misconceived. She is tilting at widmills. The windmills are there but they are there for a good reason
Google hired Gebru in 2018 to help ensure that its AI products did not perpetuate racism or other societal inequalities. In her role, Gebru hired prominent researchers of color, published several papers that highlighted biases and ethical risks, and spoke at conferences. She also began raising her voice internally about her experiences of racism and sexism at work. But it was one of her research papers that led to her departure. “I had so many issues at Google,” Gebru tells TIME over a Zoom call. “But the censorship of my paper was the worst instance.”
In that fateful paper, Gebru and her co-authors questioned the ethics of large language AI models, which seek to understand and reproduce human language. Google is a world leader in AI research, an industry forecast to contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, according to accounting firm Pwc. But Gebru’s paper suggested that, in their rush to build bigger, more powerful language models, companies including Google weren’t stopping to think about the kinds of biases being built into them—biases that could entrench existing inequalities, rather than help solve them. It also raised concerns about the environmental impact of the AIs, which use huge amounts of energy. In the battle for AI dominance, Big Tech companies were seemingly prioritizing profits over safety, the authors suggested, calling for the industry to slow down. “It was like, You built this thing, but mine is even bigger,” Gebru recalls of the atmosphere at the time. “When you have that attitude, you’re obviously not thinking about ethics.”
Gebru’s departure from Google set offa firestorm in the AI world. The company appeared to have forced out one of the world’s most respected ethical AI researchers after she criticized some of its most lucrative work. The backlash was fierce.
The dispute didn’t just raise concerns about whether corporate behemoths like Google’s parent Alphabet could be trusted to ensure this technology benefited humanity and not just their bottom lines. It also brought attention to important questions: If artificial intelligence is trained on data from the real world, who loses out when that data reflects systemic injustices? Were the companies at the forefront of AI really listening to the people they had hired to mitigate those harms? And, in the quest for AI dominance, who gets to decide what kind of collateral damage is acceptable?
For the past decade, AI has been quietly seeping into daily life, from facial recognition to digital assistants like Siri or Alexa. These largely unregulated uses of AI are highly lucrative for those who control them, but are already causing real-world harms to those who are subjected to them: false arrests; health care discrimination; and a rise in pervasive surveillance that, in the case of policing, can disproportionately affect Black people and disadvantaged socioeconomic groups
https://time.com/6132399/timnit-gebru-ai-google/
*********************************************Joe Rogan Slams Liberals Who Still Support Joe Biden: ‘Are You Guys Out of Your F***ing Mind?
Recently, Rogan slammed liberals who still support this total failure. On his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan went over Biden’s record with fellow podcaster, Coleman Hughes. Rogan lamented over how anyone could defend Biden’s performance.
Inflation is smashing 40-year-old records. Gas prices have skyrocketed. The U.S. southern border is a total fiasco. America looked like a cowardly fool when Biden cut tail and ran out of Afghanistan. Joe Biden has done absolutely nothing right.
Now, his ineptitude on foreign policy was a huge contributor to Russia’s launching an invasion against Ukraine. Biden has screwed up border policy, destroyed America’s energy independence, and put the country at risk. Rogan reminded everyone that we pretty much got what we paid for.
The outspoken podcaster refreshed everyone’s memory. Rogan reminded people of what Biden’s boss, Barack Obama, said about him. “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up.” When Biden announced he was thinking about running in 2020, Obama insisted, “You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t.”
Coleman Hughes gravitated to all the lies Joe Biden has told over the years. Hughes talked about how he lied about college and about marching with Nelson Mandela. But both podcasters stressed that Biden is an even bigger buffoon than he is a liar.
They’re not sure if he has the cognitive capability to tell the difference now. Joe Biden screws up the teleprompter messages he’s scripted. He reads the instructions. Biden forgets who is president.
We think he forgets where he is. It’s not funny. Joe Biden’s declining condition is truly sad. No one should make fun of him. But Joe Biden has been thrust into the position as the leader of the free world, a job he is clearly incapable of handling.
His decisions have consequences on the daily lives of every American. He is not up to the job. While it’s unfair to target his aging decline, it’s flat out stupid to support his performance. In fact, anyone who does is “out of their f***ing mind”. Well put, Mr. Rogan.
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Were old children’s history books racist?
If Brighton and Hove Council has its way, children as young as seven are to be taught about the ‘white privilege’ supposedly derived from 500 years of colonialism. But is it true that the history we have been learning from childhood has been infused with the great isms of our day – colonialism, imperialism and racism? I thought I would test this on a small scale by going back to the first history books I read.
H.E. Marshall, who wrote Our Island Story, was also the author of the knockabout book Kings and Things. She knew all about trigger warnings: ‘The story of England,’ she proclaimed, ‘is thought to be a story too frightening or too difficult for the very young person’s understanding.’ She promised not to dwell ‘on horror or on the glory of bloodshed’. She did not keep her promise – nor, surely, did her readers want her to. There is plenty of boiling oil poured from the castle walls, and Wicked Uncle Richard has a starring role before Henry VIII cuts off piles of heads. As for Empire, she bypassed the native population to emphasise how the ‘bothersome’ French kept getting in the way in North America. In both Marshall’s books notable people are generally Good or Bad, a way of thinking that sparked the famous parody by Sellar and Yeatman, 1066 and All That. Their book has been seen as a pioneering post-modernist attempt to debunk jingoistic versions of British history. That is surely to take their silliness more seriously than it deserves.
Beneath the flag-waving there were thoughtful ideas, as I discovered on returning to my first proper history book, given to me as a birthday present: A Nursery History of England by Elizabeth O’Neill. It is filled with glossy colour illustrations which are still locked in my memory, influencing the way I imagine scores of events in history. The book first appeared in 1912 but kept selling and was constantly updated. O’Neill was for a time a fellow at Manchester University and was married to Herbert Charles O’Neill, who wrote a celebrated Spectator column during the second world war under the nom de guerre Strategicus.
O’Neill set out her aims in another of her books: ‘I have chosen the greatest men and women to tell you about, and in reading their stories I hope you will understand better something of what the times were like in which they lived, and what the other people too were like who were not so great and the kind of lives they led.’ O’Neill did not neglect what would nowadays be called the history of gender and class. We have the Countess of Buchan displayed in colour crowning Robert the Bruce. Queen Matilda and Queen Margaret of Anjou are shown escaping from capture. Further down the social scale Jenny Geddes is portrayed hurling her stool at the preacher when he started reciting from the English Book of Common Prayer in Edinburgh’s St Giles’ Cathedral.
O’Neill was indignant about the horrors of slavery. The hot conditions in America did not suit English settlers, ‘so black men, from a country called Africa, were stolen away from their homes and taken over to America. The white men bought them, and made them do the hardest work… They had to do just what their masters told them, and cruel masters often used to beat them’. The slaves ‘were bought and sold as though they were animals’. One of her heroes was Charles James Fox, for standing up for the slaves in parliament. She also condemned child labour during the Industrial Revolution, this time with an illustration of barefoot, ragged children on their way to the ‘big ugly workrooms’.
She was, admittedly, interested in people’s physical appearance, and delighted in describing early Britons or Saxons as golden-haired and blue-eyed. She relished the story of how in the 6th century Pope Gregory the Great had seen blond Anglo-Saxon children in the slave market in Rome and commented that they were non Angli sed Angeli, ‘not Angles but Angels’. We are now being assured by graduate students at the University of Leeds that the term Anglo-Saxon should be abolished because it developed ‘as a concept intrinsic to the emerging ideologies of colonialism, nationalism, and white racial superiority’. As an eminent medieval historian commented: ‘But theywere the victims of Norman colonisation in 1066.’
Looking at the British Empire, O’Neill was most interested in India, ‘a very hot country’ whose people ‘have dark skins and black hair. Some people from this country used to live in India to help to rule it’. That led to resistance from those who thought the British had been ‘unkind’, but ‘Indians are very brave fighters, and thousands of Indian soldiers helped to win both world wars’. Gandhi ‘was a very great and good man’.
Rather than delivering a jingoistic account of English history, O’Neill was generally careful to maintain a balance. She was keen on godliness and steered carefully between Protestants and Catholics, giving full marks to Thomas More and high marks to Thomas Cranmer, shown at the stake. There were genuinely good people like Thomas More and Florence Nightingale who would serve as an example to the young, and there were thoroughly bad ones like King John. But it is important to recognise that her book was not a paean in honour of national heroes. Even Nelson, who unusually earned two colour illustrations, is praised for his skill and bravery as a naval commander, but not made into an icon. She recognised Napoleon’s military genius and was inspired by England’s foe Joan of Arc.
Overall, the Nursery History is a humane attempt to tell what she hoped would be a balanced version of England’s story to young children. Would that this were the case with modern narratives of history that evoke injustices of long ago in order to cast blame on the citizens of 21st-century Britain.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/03/matter-of-time
***************************************Mixed-raced Florida police chief, 48, is fired after just six months on the job for ‘refusing to promote white people and choosing candidates by asking "which one is blacker?”’
Former Fort Lauderdale police chief Larry Scirotto, 48, was fired on Thursday after an inquiry found that he allegedly once said a conference room wall of photos was 'too white' and added, 'I'm gonna change that.'
Scirotto, a former assistant chief in Pittsburgh, was the first openly gay chief hired in Fort Lauderdale and also is from a mixed-race background.
An investigation into the bias complaints concluded that Scirotto was unfairly focused on minority candidates for jobs and noted that he once asked 'which one is blacker?' when considering a promotion.
He is also accused of working as a high school basketball referee while being on the clock as chief. 'The Chief was paid by the City for these unauthorized schedule adjustments, totaling an estimated 55.50 hours,' a memo by a since-fired city auditor read.
The complaints centered on allegations that Scirotto made hiring and promotion decisions with an improper minority-first approach.
At one time, when considering a promotion, the investigation found that Scirotto said 'which one is blacker?' The report quoted Scirotto as saying he intended to 'consider diversity at every opportunity.'
Scirotto has vehemently denied ever saying that, and has insisted he gave promotions to those who 'deserved them.'
From August to November, Scirotto promoted 15 people, six of whom were minorities, he told CNN.
In Fort Lauderdale, African Americans make up 31percent of the population, but 2020 reports showed the police force was only 15percent black.
'Those minority groups are now being treated as if they were less than deserving, and that's not the case, and it never was,' he told 7News Miami.
'The promotions that I made...were because they were exceptional candidates, and they excelled in every level of the organization,' he added.
'They deserved to be promoted, and by the way, they happened to be minority. It wasn't because they were minority.'
The acting police chief will be Luis Alvarez, who is currently an assistant chief. The department has about 530 officers and 179 civilian employees.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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