🔇🔇🔇Announcing new work from DAIR which is very close to my heart, 3 years in the making. When #TigrayGenocide, the deadliest genocide of the 21st century thus far, started in November 2020, it was 1 month before I got fired from Google. 🧵

english.elpais.com/international/… Unlike Tigrayans whose sisters were being raped & parents murdered, I didn’t know what was happening on the ground & who to believe. But I did see the genocidal speech targeting them on social media, particularly from Eritreans, in Tigrinya.

goodreads.com/book/show/2146…

When I got a request to speak from something something Oxford this was what I had responded:

Given the number of eugenicists housed at Oxford with zero consequences, especially those who created the field of "existential studies"

theguardian.com/technology/202… talking about "existential risk" from "AI" like Nick Bostrom, various people in his institute, the effective altruists and the overall TESCREAL bundle who have been drenched in money to advocate for the impending AGI apocalypse and utopia, two sides of the same coin,

Some perspectives on AI regulation in Africa. By Abdullahi Tsanni.

"Africa’s push to regulate AI starts now" My two cents?

1. African governments should support & protect African startups that are getting stolen from under the guise of "open source."

…chnologyreview-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.techno… See our paper here with @asmelashteka & @pazunre. These startups are doing much better work and actually hiring people from the continent, with shoe string budgets and no support.
pml4dc.github.io/iclr2023/pdf/P…

I forgot that I had written this in September. It was published in November. Since the its behind a paywall, I'll paste the text that you can't access in this thread.
economist.com/the-world-ahea… The field of artificial intelligence (ai) cycles through what are called AI summers, epochs where every other news headline seems to be about AI and there is ample funding for the field, and AI winters, which come from the disappointment of undelivered overpromises

I received some messages from students saying that they can't be productive. Unfortunately many of us have had to be "productive" under pretty awful conditions for most of our lives. Some of the ways we've figured out how to do that and compartmentalize are pretty unhealthy IMO. But many times we don't have a choice. One thing I will say is to a certain extent, I think your success at your discipline also gives you more of a voice that allows you to do something about the injustices that are making it difficult to get your work done.

Anyways, this was my letter venting to myself when OpenAI was announced as a company that will save the world in 2015 🙄

I would have framed somethings differently now than 8 years ago, but my disdain of them remains.

Alt text in thread below.

I struggle to understand Silicon Valley’s libertarians’ allergic reaction to discussing problems caused by the extreme homogeneity of the research circle. The same is true for many in the AI research community of which I am a part. As this thoughtfully written letter to SCOTUS..

Working out date/time for our @DAIRInstitute #NoTechForApartheid virtual event but I'm too excited to keep quiet until then cause our participants are

Caroline Hunter (co-founded Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement --forced the company to pull out of apartheid South Africa). Read more about them here.
"When Polaroid Workers Fought Apartheid"
dissentmagazine.org/online_article…

Reminder that the largest Israel lobby in the US is not AIPAC but Christians United For Israel. From @ariel_koko's letter when she was pushed out of Google,
"White Christian Zionism...is the top funding & lobbying source for Israel in the U.S. & globally"
medium.com/@arielkoren/go… "Christians United For Israel is the largest Israel lobby in the U.S. with 10 million members (compared to the largest Jewish lobby group AIPAC which has just 100,000 members)."

I think it is helpful to read other cases of genocide denial if you want to help yourself figure out what to engage with and what not to engage with. The talking points are exactly the same. All genocides work the same. "No we're not talking about the population its just this group we're calling animals"

"You support terrorists, why aren't you talking about them?"

"They use people as human shields, the people should revolt against them, they brought it upon themselves"

Web Summit CEO was forced to resign over these comments. Over this tweet:

“shocked at the rhetoric and actions of so many Western leaders & governments, with the exception in particular of Ireland’s government, who for once are doing the right thing. ”

abcnews.go.com/Technology/wir… “War crimes are war crimes even when committed by allies, and should be called out for what they are,” he added."

The fascism of the tech industry knows no bounds. Anything other then aiding and abetting a world sanctioned genocide is not acceptable apparently. Despicable.

For those interested, here's my talk at the #DeepLearningIndaba2023: 35 minute talk, then Q&A. Shout out to the white woman who decided to travel all the way to Accra to interrupt my conversation with students afterwords to ask me how I feel about...

"comparing AGI to Nazis" & wasting the time of researchers like her, asking if I do it to get a rise out of people or do I believe what I say? Because I don't have enough problems that I waste my own time writing papers, traveling far & giving talks about things I don't believe.

I'm glad @xriskology wrote about this cause a bunch of highly influential TESCREAL leaders grew up in similar cultures. I hope there's more writings on this angle.

"I grew up in a religious community, where talk of the world’s end was common....

newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/08/… The rapture was going to happen any day, I was told,...."

By the early 2000s I’d lost my Christian faith, but only a few years later I discovered the longtermist philosophy, which seemed to provide a science-based answer..."

We received this heartbreaking email by someone who was falsely accused of using "AI" to generate an essay & got a ZERO on their assignment. How many people's lives are being ruined like this? This should be unacceptable. Are there any journalists investigating stuff like this? Hello,

My name is XX. I am a XXX year old XXX student at XXX. I am currently being falsely accused of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) on an assignment of mine. The AI detector is used through the company "Turnitin".

Here's what I wrote in 2015 when our OpenAI overlords were announced, and after I had a terrible experience at NIPS (a conference now named NeuRIPS after a number of people, mostly women demanded a name change and received death threats for doing so. 1/n Interesting to see my reflections from ~8 years ago, not much I'd change except for certain phrases I probably wouldn't use now (e.g. implicit bias).

"I struggle to understand Silicon Valley’s libertarians’ allergic reaction to discussing problems caused by 2/n

Great so we're now going to be taking advice about extinction and "AI" and stuff from people who have

1) never graduated women PhDs students
2) advertised their startups as working 96+ hours or whatever it was

The grift 🙄 The ad was:
"Strong work ethic. All of us believe in our work’s ability to change human lives, & consequently work not just smart, but also hard. It’s not unusual to see some team members in the office late into the evening; many of us routinely work and study 70-90hours a week."

This was the exact same with Yoshua even though his brother Samy was our manager, quit over what happened and also spoke up. He never says anything on social media or the press but he did this time.

https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1666530051800571906

I used to try my best to involve all these men.

For instance Yoshua talked to the press about a letter that @mmitchell_ai & I wrote (where we put our employment on the line), coming in defense of @Deb & @joy when Amazon attacked their work.

"Dobbe has seen this rhetoric crop up before. It creates fear among the public and policy makers & is extremely lucrative for the researchers who lead the field & say they want to correct their own mistakes, under the motto 'current AI is dangerous, so give us more money ...

https://twitter.com/roeldobbe/status/1666525663245881350

to make more secure versions, we know how it works'. Hinton does the same: there are problems with AI, but we solve them. Don't listen to those who have been saying for years that the technology is inherently dangerous.'"

Read this from @jennaburrell

"In 2010, Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell wrote a book about tech innovation that described the way technologists fixate on the “proximate future” — a future that exists “just around the corner.”"
techpolicy.press/artificial-int… "Looking to the “proximate future,” even one as dark and worrying as AI’s imagined existential threat, has some strategic value to those with interests and investments in the AI business: It creates urgency, but is ultimately unfalsifiable."

So another "godfather" of AI, Turing Award Winner Yoshua Bengio has decided to FULLY align himself with the #TESCREAL bundle, writing about "rogue AI" and prominently citing people like Nick Bostrom.

Take a good look at this text here written by non other than Nick Bostrom, prominently featured by so many of these fathers & godfathers & sons & brothers & nephews of "AI" (given that its all men you know). That's right "Blacks are more stupid than whites" & then he proceeds to call us the N word.

Page 15 of The Continent highlights our warnings for Africans not to fall into the hype & hand data to OpenAI + co., & instead support local efforts where $$ goes to speakers of languages whose data is being taken, @alienelf & @tamati_biskit talk about @LelapaAI's vision.

https://twitter.com/thecontinent_/status/1659840839386890246

"“These programs are built by the West on data from the West..represent their values & principles,” said Abbott, who notes that African perspectives and
history are largely excluded from the datasets used by OpenAI & Google’s LLMs. That’s because they cannot easily be “scraped”.

Lets review some of the #TESCREAL institutes & people quoted in this article. The Future of Humanity Institute: founded & led by Nick Bostrom, you know, this dude "Blacks are more stupid than whites" guy, who also later uses the N word.

https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1660079304385118208

Oh and an even worse "apology" when he realized his email was about to be published. As if he hasn't been talking about "dysgenic pressures" as an existential risk. But minor things not to worry ourselves with while thinking about the whole of HUMANITIY.
vice.com/en/article/z34…