zlacker

>>dang+(OP)
I find this experiment a bit strange/disturbing, avoiding political subjects is a way of putting the head in the sand. HN is a community of hackers and entrepreneurs and politics affects these subjects one way or another wether we want to avoid it or not, and are an important component of entrepreneurial and technical subjects. It might be fine if HN was a scientific community, but it is not the case, and even then politics do interact with science, as one can conduct scientific experiments on government decisions, or politics can attack scientific community positions (e.g. climate change).

The way this sounds is that you are more concerned about politics as in people who take party positions and may feel excluded as a group when the majority of the community takes a different position. This is a slightly different issue i.e. party politics, and I think it is fine/a good thing, but it is also important to distinguish the two. This should essentially be under the same umbrella as personal attacks, as they are essentially the same thing.

>>tarikj+34
I find it disturbing too. Right now one of the top stories on HN is about Amazon Go and the top comment is about whether the destruction of jobs it could cause is socially acceptable.

I don't know whether that is politics or not but I can't imagine discussing Amazon Go as a technology without having that discussion. In fact when you look at HN very little is about particular technologies. Most of our discussion is around the implications.

>>golemo+0a
I've been attending a lot of AI/Data Science conferences lately, and it's incredible to me how this is not a major part of any conversation about AI and automation.

A talk I recently attended by a data scientist from Amazon had him gloating about how many jobs he could eliminate.

Ironically, the only speaker who brought it up as a major social problem we'll have to tackle is someone from Uber. His solution was less than satisfactory, but at least he recognized the issue.

I don't want to pretend we live in a world of algorithms without consequence.

>>michae+jd
I think we're still in the early phase of A.I. where things seem more theoretical and thus ethics is not included in the discussion. However, as we near the time when policies will have large scale implications for our society, those consequences will be measured out. This is why I do not think A.I. will be a revolution but rather a gradual process. Already, the automation of cars is subjected to government regulation.

>>CN7R+go
We have been working on AI in one form or another for 50 years or more, I think it ought to be time for a serious debate about this.

Lisp date from 1958 and some would argue that rule-based programming is AI. Eliza is also more than 5O years old.

The ethics of AI have been extensively discussed for a very long time.

In essence, the debate taking place around AI is a heir of the 19th debate on automated looms. Karel Čapek play, Robots, has been written in 1920 and it was already an ethical discussion of "autonomous machines"...

My first introduction to AI and its consequences and dilemna come from Isaac Asimov Foundation Cycle and that dates back to the 1950s.

AFAIK, the 3 Laws of Robotics invented by Asimov are actually used by philosophers & AI practitioners.

(I added and then removed references to the Golem, but...it could be argued as relevant to this discussion)

I am quite vehement in this discussion exactly because I am currently debating whethever or not I should release a new AI software I have designed. From a technical standpoint, I am quite proud of it, it is a nice piece of engineering. From a political standpoint, I feel that tool could be used for goals that I am not sure to agree with...