How to Not Build the Torment Nexus(buttondown.com) |
How to Not Build the Torment Nexus(buttondown.com) |
Why do people think that is? Have there been any attempts to change this from the inside over the past decade? Where are professional associations like the ACM in all of this? It's a shameful state of affairs and reflects poorly on the whole discipline.
People who design bridges and vehicles have real responsibilities and standards they are held to, yet somehow the software that actually runs these things is exempt.
This is how Boeing negligently murdered hundreds of people with MCAS. By taking responsibility for safety away from actual engineers and misplacing it with people who write software.
Imagine my surprise when even most of those jobs were founded on things/goals/ambitions/central risks that were also profound ethical lapses. I've gotten to the point where I'm honestly wondering whether humanity is even ready for ubiquitous computing, to which seemingly the answer lately trends toward "hell no". Great thing to only realize after 10 years in the industry.
Point being, ethics is something self enforced, and we've taken great pains to ensure there is no professional licensure body or anything else around software; in particular because of the fundamental asymmetry created by locking that fire away from mortals behind a bunch of barriers to entry. Those with tech will have an advantage over those without. This is a certainty. The price of that (intentionally opening access to expertise for anyone curious) is what we have now. The tech that gets implemented is a reflection of the collective soul of humanity. If Greed is God, and the Deadline and Sale take priority over Safety, Fitness for Use, Quality, and Characterization of the System-Under-Scrutiny; then previously mentioned lapses in the ethicality of implementations of computer systems are what we're gonna get, and the conscientious objector will just be walked out the door and the next practitioner less afflicted by scruples will be walked in instead.
I'm open, as I've always been to putting a thumb on the scales through greater organization of active practitioners to actually make a means to ensure some subset of systems don't get implemented, but I'm not sure that's the right answer. The right answer is to improve ourselves and our non-computerized ways of life so there is no damn incentive to make the Torment Nexus.
Easy to say right? But that execution... Oofta.
I think the problem is that clearly not everyone took the same path, and did not get the same moral education. I’m not religious at all, but religions do play a part in morally educating people. Not only are fewer people religious, but more of the religions that are popular are outright immoral in their teachings.
For profit companies do not act morally when not required to by law. Remember when Google hired some AI ethicists, and then fired them? Heck, they couldn’t even maintain their elementary school ethical code of “don’t be evil.” Companies who engineer bridges, medical devices, aircraft, etc. are regulated by law. They don’t follow ethical engineering practices of their own volition. They do it only because we force their hand.
We’re starting to see now what it looks like to regulate tech with some of the policies in the EU. While those regulations are flawed in several ways, they are also working properly. GDPR does have positive impact on privacy. Digital Markets Act is forcing Apple to allow side-loading.
We can defeat the torment nexus by simply outlawing it.
Google used to have ethicists ethicists and a culture of don't be evil. They were fired by the AI ethicists, who for the most part were among that latter group - Rationalists who were supremely good at rationalizing their choices rather than making good ones.
I don't think that any of the current efforts at regulation are going to work. The latter culture has taken over the institutions, and that's why you see so many baying for the institutions to be taken down.
I think the piece you are missing is that guilds exist to protect workers, not consumers. US software engineers not feeling as though they need the protection of guilds means by extension there are no non-government bodies to enforce codes of conduct. It is also worth mentioning that, although limited to specific high-risk use cases, software engineering is regulated.
https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
However, ACM continues to accept money from companies that routinely and systematically violate this code (for example privacy in section 1.6) and seems to have little interest in sanctioning them.
> We want you to actively contribute to the discussion of ethics and computing (through the comment section or our survey (https://tinyurl.com/CACM-ethics) because participation is part of the computing profession.
https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/the-future-of-professional-ethi...
The most impressive accomplishment of the computing industry is avoidance of any kind of liability.
Its a lot of work to grass-roots something like that, and I don't have the charisma for it.
"Once the rockets are up, Who cares where they come down? That's not my department," Says Wernher von Braun.
This thing you eventually come to believe, of course, is exactly what one must believe for the Torment Nexus to be made.
Sure, there are structural and economic incentives that tilt the playing field, but this is the belief that is easier to accept than to turn down the high pay, deal with the hassles of insurance or lack of, or have to encounter the immigration authority.
> In the tumultuous discussion of moral issues which has been going on since the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the disclosure of the total complicity in crimes of all ranks of official society, that is, of the total collapse of normal moral standards, the following argument has been raised in endless variations: We who appear guilty today are in fact those who stayed on the job in order to prevent worse things from happening; only those who remained inside had a chance to mitigate things and to help at least some people; we gave the devil his due without selling our soul to him, whereas those who did nothing shirked all responsibilities and thought only of themselves, of the salvation of their precious souls… (p 34)
But, ultimately, she finds the excuse lacking:
> Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. (p 36)
https://grattoncourses.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016...
Oh absolutely! It's my hope that detailing the psychological mechanism at play is in some way an antidote to its acceptance. It feels if anything a bit naive when faced with the possibility that there exists a group who gleefully implements the most heinous practices so this line of thinking doesn't even enter the picture.
If and when people start asking themselves these questions, their only options are to rationalize away the harm their work has done entirely, engage in moral relativism, or consider "the big picture" at a zoom-level where nothing ever really matters.
And no gods no masters is the sort of thing you might see someone say right before they become the leader, ban religion, and cause mass starvation.
> he's helping kids getting blown to literal pieces
Helping kids [who are] getting blown to bits would be a noble endeavor. What you presumably mean is that he is helping to blow kids to literal pieces
That statement is pivotal and one which people really need to be called out on when they use it as a crutch.
"Don't hate the player, hate the game"... Motherfucker there's only a game because of the players!
You can take almost any tech job, and there is a probably an argument to be made, that it is mostly reasonable given some other moral priors.
Am I too naive in thinking that the AIs we're working on are a prerequisite step on the way towards Star Trek's post-scarcity future?
Everyone else will be animal farm brainwashed into caring more about celebrities and sports and war and arguing online with strangers about pointless topics and politics while they eat their slop and work their meaningless jobs to keep the engine of civilization moving forward in a way that benefits the wealthiest, and AI will ultimately become the old school Andy Griffith cop that seems all nice and kind and helpful but will T-1000 sell us out to its true masters without remorse or hesitation no matter what.
This sentence nose-dove the article's credibility.
Intellectual property and the enforcement thereof is in and of itself a Torment Nexus. The belief that thoughts and ideas and words and images and sounds can be "stolen", and that such "theft" is somehow a bad thing (instead of the sort of free exchange of ideas that has benefited humanity for its entire recorded history) is itself mutually exclusive with having an intact soul.
Yes, artists deserve to be able to earn a living making art (absent a universal basic income that renders the notion of "earning a living" moot). Yes, it's understandable that they choose to do so by wielding IP law, because that's the most straightforward option they have in a capitalist system that actively rewards Torment-Nexus-enforced rentseeking. No, that doesn't make them any less complicit in the perpetuation of that Torment Nexus. These are the same laws that enable Disney to sue the pants off of parents who dare to decorate their dead children's coffins after said children's favorite fictional characters. These are the same laws that rob other creatives of their creative autonomy lest their works "infringe" on the "rights" of richer creatives who can afford better lawyers. These are the same laws that normalized shipping rootkits with creative works for the sake of "digital 'rights' management". These are the same laws that actively hinder the preservation of creative works for historical posterity, causing those works to be at risk of being lost forever. Intellectual property has done vastly more harm than good, and AI throwing a wrench in the ability to meaningfully enforce it is one of the exceedingly few good outcomes of AI proliferation.
Your soul will not remain intact while you parrot MPAA/RIAA "yOu WoUlDn'T dOwNlOaD a CaR" talking points in defense of collecting royalties until 70 years after you die.
In general, now that the pump has been fully primed for capital to flow into developing "AI", I do not see how copyright law is going to make much of a dent in that trend. Nor do I see how "AI" companies are going to make a dent in copyright law for anyone but themselves. I foresee large "AI" companies being essentially unbound on training over small-owner copyrighted works, upstart "AI" companies needing to pay into a hefty protection racket, and individuals still bound by imaginary property laws whether directly (old fashioned piracy) or when using common genAI (sorry Dave, I can't do that).
I just ran into a situation where ChatGPT refused to quote me the relevant bit of the electrical code for my state (supposedly binding law), because those laws were created by wholesale importing the "National Electrical Code" which is copyrighted. At best, the situation is an open legal question. And yet de facto there is still a restriction that prevents me from using the tool to engage with the law in good faith.
I thought I made that pretty clear when I wrote in my original comment that "[i]ntellectual property and the enforcement thereof is in and of itself a Torment Nexus."
> In general, now that the pump has been fully primed for capital to flow into developing "AI", I do not see how copyright law is going to make much of a dent in that trend. Nor do I see how "AI" companies are going to make a dent in copyright law for anyone but themselves.
"AI" exists outside of the various corporations hosting LLMs on The Cloud™. The corporate-hosted LLMs get undue emphasis largely as yet another result of the Torment Nexus that is intellectual property.
That does not make it clear. Saying that A is an instance of B does not define what B is.
> "AI" exists outside of the various corporations hosting LLMs on The Cloud™
You're speaking obliquely here, so I'm left guessing what you mean. I think you're just referring to how individuals can train/download/modify/run models locally. I don't see how that affects copyright, as it seems to fit in the same exact place as piracy of the source material (unfortunately). Downloading a model that has gotten the attention of corpos for "infringing" will be treated exactly how torrenting original works is now.