Why I Left Google DeepMind(lesswrong.com) |
Why I Left Google DeepMind(lesswrong.com) |
IOW:
>Congress remains a potted plant in the corner.
What can we "regular people" do?
My approach, which is very inconvenient, is to try as much as possible to not feed my consumer spending money to tech giants. In some cases I fail at this (e.g., my wife and I will always buy a family membership for YouTube Plus with music; we still order some things online from Amazon) but I make an effort.
I have been an AI practitioner for over 40 years and I want to use the very best AI coding agents, etc., but I am forcing myself to just use access to cheaper open weight models from smaller US inferencing companies (my last $$ subscription runs out in a few days).
Can a US company refuse the US government as a customer?
Its not easy to do at this moment in time, but be patient, consistent, and spread your attitude to others.
Previously on the author's source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48925271
What sort of ethics bubble was the author living in to believe that Google was anything but solely focused on achieving shareholder value?
It's a complicated cost/benefit tradeoff: are the opportunities for world-improvement available with the resources of an ethically compromised organization worth the world-damage done by your participation (either your presence alone lending legitimacy/size to the org, or by work you may be called upon to do that directly or indirectly does harm)?
If you think there is a simple answer to that, you're wrong.
Like, sure, a lot of people delude themselves into thinking they're not doing harm because they like money or hate change. That's bad, and separate from what I'm describing above: that you can work for a deeply flawed org and accept the cost of your participation in those flaws in return for benefits that you can others can achieve with the resources offered by that same flawed org.
How blind and ignorant really are you?
Let me attempt to save you from another horrifying realisation: it has hardly anything do with who’s in the office right now.
The horrors and evil will persist.
If he were strictly self-interested we'd have no objection to it in this culture.
This may be controversial (and I will understand if the mods want to remove this comment) but this made me really wonder if westerners like him are actually aware of the ongoing genocide in Gaza (and now in West Bank and Lebanon) that is also supported by Google tech (amongst others)? I ask because if the death of 2 people in America bothered him so much, shouldn't the death of around 75,000+ Palestinians have stirred his conscience much earlier?
- How US Big Tech supports Israel’s AI-powered genocide and apartheid - https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/5/12/how-us-big-tech...
- Google's Role in Supporting Israel's Genocide in Gaza - https://matttutt.me/googles-role-in-supporting-israels-genoc...
I don't know what kind of principles all these people have, but of course they all know about Gaza.
> but of course they all know about Gaza.
Are you sure? What exactly do they believe is happening in Gaza? Remember that former President Biden himself claimed there is no genocide happening in Gaza. Trump has said anything about a genocide since he got elected. Western media has mostly preferred to whitewash the genocide. TikTok in America has now been taken over by an American BigTech to censor all contents on the genocide and pro-Palestinian causes. I wouldn't be at all surprised if many Americans still remain ignorant about the genocide or don't believe that what is happening in Gaza (and elsewhere) is a genocide.
Stand by and share your ethics concern. But this isn't misalignment. A lot of AI use cases will be constraint/reigned in through governance evolution at every scale
You developed the nuclear bomb. Would you give free access to every human on the planet to do with it as they see fit? Or would you demand responsible guardrails from the start?
AI companies want it both ways. This will both redefine humanity as we know it, but also nobody should try to enforce any guardrails. Why? Because it might hurt profits.
Either it’s snake oil and not as revolutionary as claimed, or people should be facing prison time for trying to claim “I just invented it and gave everyone access, I can’t be held responsible for what happens next”.
It feels like AI empowering scams and facilitating post-truth is more harm.
And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...
"There are things worse than automating the murder of innocents" is certainly and interesting take.
What? Signaling is not costly. It’s literally a display, a signal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costly_signaling_theory_in_evo...
An “in this house we believe” sign is signaling but if you live in a liberal neighborhood it’s extremely low cost by all measures.
Destruction display did caused the governments to come together and build frameworks and structures to avoid the repeat of it
Out of the gate access was restricted to government use, and a limited subset of governments at that. There was never a point in time it was handed out to any private citizen to do with as they pleased.
As for “we haven’t seen the destruction yet” - huh? Between the proliferation of hacks utilizing AI and drone warfare in ukraine we’ve ABSOLUTELY seen the destruction already.