
Mozilla Announces $225,000 for Art and Advocacy Exploring A.I. - laurex
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/06/04/mozilla-announces-225000-for-art-and-advocacy-exploring-artificial-intelligence/
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mankash666
This is an unpopular opinion here, but the facts stand.

Mozilla makes money disappear. Their 2016 revenues were in excess of $520M,
and their claimed output was the Quantum browser.

The two largest R&D verticals seem to be their browser and the codecs group.
That still doesn't account for expenses of $520M in 2016, and much much more
in 2017.

Where is all the money going, Mozilla?

~~~
Immortalin
Browser engineers aren't exactly cheap. 250k for a good C++ Dev is reasonable.
Assuming 100 engineers (a very conservative estimate), that's 25 million in
just pay alone. 50 million including codec. Now add in the costs of
infrastructure, community engagement, DevOps, Marketing etc. and the costs
will quickly balloon. Browsers are critical infrastructure like operating
systems. Their complexity is on the same level as OSes, perhaps even more.
It's exposed to hostile code everyday, you don't want people who don't know
what they are doing to work on it. This isn't some sort of dating app where
the only vulnerability you have to worry about is a code injection in the
birthday form field.

~~~
mankash666
So the true benefit (to the community) is about $50M +- 10%. Heck, let's
double it and call it $100M.

The remaining expenses are fluff. In a corporation, one wouldn't be allowed to
have non-essential expenses far exceed essential ones. In a non-profit, this
philosophy needs doubling down on.

I might be completely wrong, but Mozilla seems to be subsidizing the whims of
a corrupt few at the top.

~~~
st3fan
"""So the true benefit (to the community) is about $50M +- 10%. Heck, let's
double it and call it $100M."""

Your napkin "calculations" make zero sense. Go read the financial report.

"""Mozilla seems to be subsidizing the whims of a corrupt few at the top"""

Ah it is clear what your real intent is.

~~~
mankash666
"Ah it is clear what your real intent is."

And what might that intent be? Are you suggesting Mozilla's top brass are
bonafide angels doing God's work, above public scrutiny? They seem to position
themselves as champions of the people and freedom, much like politicians

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s-shellfish
While I believe there are real dangers AI can cause, I don't know how you'd go
about proving such a thing without recreating the problem in a different
constructed variant.

Psychology and sociology are 'soft' sciences because you can't test people
psychologically and sociologically in 'hard' ways without seriously crossing
some serious ethical boundaries.

It could be argued that a lot of the decisions being made that back the design
in contemporary infrastructures already are engaged in this sort of testing
and behavioral modification, in ways that seem innocent from the onset, but
yet still propagate across social systems in ways that are far too chaotic and
complex to forecast.

~~~
emiliobumachar
Proving to a high standard of proof would indeed be very hard.

But a lot of useful Science can be done by observing, documenting, cataloging
and explaining the effects of AI being already inflicted on us.

~~~
s-shellfish
I don't know if I would use the word 'inflict' when one is inferring intents.

I think if there were more transparency concerning these systems and their
affiliated organizations, that would obviate the need to add another layer of
reasoning, which would reduce the number of unknowns, rather than increase.

Of course, that requires cooperation and trust. Which brings one back to the
question of intents. Which can conflate intents meant to 'inflict' (harm?) or
intents meant to grow, develop, inspire, progress.

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SolaceQuantum
If anyone is interested I would recommend Alexandra Meliou. She does research
at UMass and her work explores making data and large data manipulation more
transparent, and also therefore does some amount in quantifying bias and
diversity. I attended a talk by her and it was very enlightening.

[http://people.cs.umass.edu/~ameli/](http://people.cs.umass.edu/~ameli/)

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jacquesm
How does a project like this relate to Mozilla's core mission?

I understand that it may be useful but this is far outside of what I would
expect Mozilla to spend its funds on.

~~~
iicc
[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/mission/)

>Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and
accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals
can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.

~~~
dmix
From Mozilla's blog post describing the project:

> We’re awarding $225,000 to technologists and media makers who help the
> public understand how threats to a healthy internet affect their everyday
> lives.

> In a world where biased algorithms, skewed data sets, and broken
> recommendation engines can radicalize YouTube users, promote racism, and
> spread fake news, it’s more important than ever to support artwork and
> advocacy work that educates and engages internet users.

I guess that's somewhat related to their mission. Although they seem to be
taking on more of an activism / PR role with this project.

My guess is that it's largely people within Mozilla responding to the popular
outrage against Russian 'bots', fake news, and the alt-right.

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eklavya
Why is Mozilla investing in this study? It’s a good cause but should Mozilla
be the one doing this? I feel bad when they are doing this but I still can’t
use Firefox on macOS because they won’t implement support for keychain and
then they go ahead and stretch themselves thin on these things.

I mean it’s all good and fine but please also focus on the one thing you are
supposed to be doing primarily.

Disclaimer: I donate to Firefox.

~~~
maxerickson
This is a rounding error in their budget. They have $500 million in revenues.

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/foundation/annualreport/2016/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/foundation/annualreport/2016/)

~~~
eklavya
What would be the excuse to flat out ignore all those desperate user requests
then?

Issue list: [https://github.com/jfitzell/mozilla-
keychain/issues/88#issue...](https://github.com/jfitzell/mozilla-
keychain/issues/88#issuecomment-332331685)

~~~
Spivak
"Why is an organization spending their money on things that I personally don't
care about? Large groups of people can only do ever one thing at a time and
problems can always be solved faster by throwing money at them."

~~~
eklavya
Are you making this statement after looking at the issues I linked?

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stewbrew
"... to help art and advocacy projects ..."

Why not (serious) social science projects? Don't have today's sociologists
have anything to say about this or do they need a few more decades for warm
up.

~~~
ASpring
I would argue that we are at a point where it's more important to raise
awareness of the dangers of algorithmic bias and other AI issues because the
public is not aware of them. Art is provocative and fits this role nicely.

To answer your question directly though, there is "serious" work like that
from people like Veale and Skirpan; also orgs like AI Now are very serious
about this area.

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mlthoughts2018
This would roughly fund 1-2 technical staff to work on one project for one
year. Probably just 1 staff if the project involves statistical methodology
work, data collection, and modeling to empirically assess society impacts
rather than writing yet another safe AI / AGI risk essay.

Not a normative judgment, just thinking about what people think this labor
costs vs. what it actually costs.

~~~
blackbrokkoli
Right, but the open-source community might be involved as well - maybe the
money is more about promoting e.g. a platform than paying individual staff

~~~
mlthoughts2018
Yes, that is a good counterpoint.

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bgorman
Mozilla can't afford to throw its money away on projects like this if it wants
to stay relevant. This is two/three engineers salary for a year.

~~~
ASpring
This is little more than 1 engineer's salary and benefits for a year.

Can you explain how this is Mozilla "throw[ing] its money away"?

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lucb1e
If for that money one can get only one manyear in the bay area due to the cost
of living, wouldn't it make much more sense to hire 4 people for a year
elsewhere?

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staticassertion
It seems obviously more complicated than that, otherwise the bay area wouldn't
be what it is.

~~~
lucb1e
For companies that are physically there, but afaik Mozilla is quite spread out
and people work remotely most of the time.

~~~
bzbarsky
Mozilla has both multiple offices and remote employees.

So do various other companies with significant physical presences in the Bay
Area (Google and Facebook come to mind).

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trumped
Someone needs to do it... thanks Mozilla

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s2g
AI can't create Art.

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iicc
Better link: [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/06/04/mozilla-
announces-2...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/06/04/mozilla-
announces-225000-for-art-and-advocacy-exploring-artificial-intelligence/)

~~~
sctb
Thanks! We've updated the submission from
[https://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-announces-225000-for-
pro...](https://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-announces-225000-for-projects-
examining-ais-effects-on-society).

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tmpz22
This is a really important study that should be conducted by an organization
with a strong engineering culture and as little bias as possible. Who would be
better then Mozilla to do this? I really don't trust academia to do this with
all of its misplaced incentives.

~~~
forapurpose
> I really don't trust academia to do this with all of its misplaced
> incentives.

We've really learned to repeat the anti-'academia' meme. There is no
"academia"; Mozilla is an organization; "academia" is millions of people
around the world in every place and environment imaginable. It's absurd to
assume all these people are the same or coordinated somehow.

Given the absurdity, one might ask: Who would be interested in discrediting
everything produced by every college and university?

