Google Docs & Apple’s ICloud both have cloud based excel sheet equivalents that can allow multiple people to edit simultaneously and also track who made what changes.
If you did this with git, it’d have to be text based so a CSV textile that could be exported to an excel doc whenever needed, would be the closest you could get. Good luck teaching your team how to use the command line though :)
You might be better to redirect your effort into lobbying your boss to use software that’s actually designed for project management such as Trello?
^TFW the app they busted their ass developing needs to be totally rebranded and relaunched because they forgot to check if their chosen wordmark was already used!
That attitude is what turns non-nerds away from asking our opinion on the technologies that we develop.
If you don’t want to be involved in the debates about AI, automation et al, then you can’t really comment on those who do. If you do want to chip in, inform the public about the realistic dangers. What they need is realistic information from experts so that they can deduce what risks are acceptable and what risks are unacceptable.
Even the most untechnically-informed member of the public will get the positives: AI, automation, (or whatever technology you’re developing) makes software better in someway, doesn’t even matter how or why, it’s taken for granted that you’re developing something that you believe will be a net-positive.
But it’s the negatives that are what needs to be legislated for. Regulations and laws don’t give technologies a pat on the back, they protect the public from misuse of a technology. Your voice would be welcomed.
Automation will destroy certain jobs (as did cars for buggy whips). What pisses me off (and I believe ought to piss off others) is the monetizing of these types of works behind paywalls (as Nature and Science, the journals, are wont to do) when public access to the primary sources would help inform debate.
Reading tarted-up flag-planting arXiv papers can be tough going even for practicioners, to say nothing of the general public. But ultimately the general public will have to vote on propositions, or vote in representatives, to pass sensible (not hysterical) regulations.
For example, after an Uber lidar-equipped vehicle killed a Phoenix jaywalker (a separate part of law that I do not like, but acknowledges physics and shitty drivers), Uber halted testing in most markets. This is sensible based on public reaction, but three major problems compounded to take Elaine Herzberg’s life:
1) the lidar did not function as designed,
2) the backup driver did not function as instructed, and
3) Ms Herzberg did not obey the law.
This is a situation where the facts eventually became clear, and still it is difficult to say that one side or the other overreacted (personally I think Uber did the right thing PR-wise, but I also worry that less testing means slower progress towards safer cars, since human drivers are legendarily shitty and much less safe than conservative self-driving cars with functional lidar).
Now let’s consider more complicated problems, such as replacing medicinal chemists with reinforcement learning systems, or China’s AI approach to “social credits”. Both have potential benefits and huge potential drawbacks, and both are relatively easy to grasp compared to some thornier cases. One is purposely obscured due to a dictatorial regime; one is obscured not by administrative fiat but by copyright law and a very silly tradition in academic and quasi-academic research. Hiding results in paywalled “prestige” journals rather than making it available to the general public is seen as a mark of distinction (and avoiding a $30k-$50k open access charge is just sensible conservation of research funds, in this scenario. I know because I am an academic and I personally think OA charges are a waste, though for different reasons.)
Anyone who wants to [break the law] can obtain the primary documents in the former case via sci-hub. That’s just a fact. But is this any more reasonable than Georgia allowing companies to charge for access to state laws? Is it reasonable for people to pay twice, in most cases, first for the research* and then for the report, when faster dissemination of primary sources can directly inform debate over some important issues?
It seems silly that we would have a system where others are expected to pay for, digest, and opine upon research done by the primary authors. It would not be necessary if the norm was to disseminate AI breakthroughs in a format like distill.pub, where the whole point is to explain both the results and their context. But until academic and quasi-academic researchers can kick the “prestige” habit, that’s unlikely to happen, and the public will be left to listen to pundits (often idiots) rather than forming their own well-informed opinions, and that sucks.
No time to edit, but hopefully you get the idea. Disclaimer: I am an academic, applying “AI” to medical care for children with rare and deadly diseases; I used to work at GOOG a million years ago; and what I see among the worst hucksters sickens me, because I think it’s going to kill people in spite of better competing ideas that could improve the human condition. I’m just one person with one vote. I’d like everyone else to form their own opinions, because theay might change mine. Thus primary sources are critical.
* anyone who does not believe that taxpayers subsidize industrial & corporate r&d via tax credits and incentives is quite naive; it is not different from academic competition in that regard.
That’s why informed public debate is not about adding warning stickers to things, it’s about creating competent laws that robustly protect the public.
In your example, the result shouldn’t be warning stickers, it’s laws specifically against building guns with your 3D printer. Or if right to weapons happens to be enshrined in your constitution, it’s aboyt legal liability protocols being amended to take into account the fact that a perpetrator used a weapon that they built in their 3D printer as opposed to a regularly procured weapon.
Hold on, you’re ascribing a lack of dystopias because you don’t see one right now. That’s because laws have been passed to restrict that possibility. The public debate has been conducted on a lot of technologies that could have lead us to a dystopia yet you’re ignoring them totally because dystopia never materialized?
- police state actions and encouragement: entirely possible, especially now that we’ve all got location trackers that also contain our innermost thoughts in the form of our text messages, yet using all of that info against us is totally illegal.
- subliminal messaging & propaganda: never more possible than right now with our totally connected lifestyles, yet totally illegal.
And on and on. Just because the worst hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it wouldnt happen if left unchecked.
Also, Nobel thought he’d created the most explosive substance that would ever be possible, with hindsight we know that TNT wasn’t that but nukes absolutely are; and his conclusion was correct in the context that nukes are the next step up from TNT: with such powerful weapons, battlefield wars between those who hold nukes have effectively ended. (Proxy wars notwithstanding, if those countries had nukes they wouldn’t be used as pawns in a proxy war.)
A council, no matter how large, is, relative to the general public as a whole, made up of a small number of individuals.
Such a council would raise so many ethical concerns, such as: Who are these individuals? Why are they on the council? What are their biases? What does their livelihoods ultimately depend on? What conflicts of interest do they have? Among hundreds of other questions.
Only an informed debate among the general public can lead to laws that robustly protect the public at large because vested interests get drowned out by informed dissent from other, equally-qualified, voices who are not affected by such vested interests.
Regardless of the ethics of the initial developers of the individual fission researchers, they were experts in their narrow field. They could never be held responsible for not realizing that MAD was the only outcome that their work would result in. The development of the MAD determination was made by the rest of the general public once the full facts of what those initial fission researchers had developed came to public knowledge.
The article is proposing that that public debate happen during or before development so that laws can be made to robustly protect the public from a new technology in the event that it’s misused.
That’s not what’s being asked. No one person, or team of people, can determine that.
What the article is proposing is that creators of new technologies inform the public so that the general public can decide if new laws are required to prevent that new technology from being misused against the public at large.
There’s precedents here and I’ve written a ton of comments about them if you want to read a bit about why such a proposition is the only ethical option.
>It’s not clear to me that anyone can predict the consequences of technology
That’s the whole point of the article, no one person can ever figure that stuff out. That’s why the public needs tone informed. No matter how educated (malicious or not) an “elite” is, they’ll never be able to predict as much as the general public will.
Yet a wider public debate can.
Your example about greenhouse gases is a good example of this. Forget about the celebrities for a sec and look at the big picture:
The guys in the hydrocarbon industry were experts at their jobs: developing oil, coal & gas and selling those products. Likewise the car industry, experts at building and selling cars.
Their expertise is in building their particular products and selling them. They could not have been expected to understand the negative environmental effects. And moreover, it’s in their interest to ignore the negatives associated with their products because it’s much more profitable for them to produce cheap products that require little R&D.
It took insights from the general public outside those industries to realize how those products affect the population as a whole:
- Burning hydrocarbons releases far more CO2 than the planet can scrub via the carbon cycle, which has lead to the greenhouse effect. Not only that but certain types of coal produce the smog that once blighted our cities and literally killed people with weak respiratory systems. Not only all of that but the lead that was added to gas to prevent engines knocking, kills people too.
- Emmisions from cars not only add CO2 to the greenhouse effect but other car emissions such as carbon nanoparticles, Nitric Oxides, sulfuric compounds also result in measurable deaths among the populations living among those cars.
As a result, laws are passed to make cars release less emissions and also to reduce societal dependence on hydrocarbons. The public debate resulted in the population realizing that there are health hazards to both individuals in the short term and global climate in the long term, and resulted in laws being passed to reduce these health hazards as low as is possible right now.
Without informed public debate we’d never have realized that these negative effects occur and we’d never have saved as many lives as has been saved now that our cities are not drenched in lead and Nitric Oxide saturated smog.
The intent of those cigarette laws is to stop minors from getting their hands on cigarettes. It’s not intended to make criminals of kids.