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Life isn't black and white with "good/bad". Further, there's no objective measure of what is good or bad. Everything is a shade of gray.
You certainly could argue that some actions are absolutely good or absolutely bad, but those aren't the majority of actions people take on a day to day basis. People aren't often faced with "should I kill this person" or "should I publish the cure for cancer". Instead it's "should I eat a hamburger or a salad" or "Should I finish this jira case or that jira case".
For example, you could argue that anyone working in an automotive plant is doing something bad because they are helping to produce vehicles which burn fuel which perpetuates climate change. But those plants also often produce parts for farm equipment or vehicles used to transport necessities like food.
People working at AI companies can make similar personal calculations. Like yeah there are bad things happening because of AI, but also they can believe that there are good things that can come as a result such as research and product developments.
But there are several workable contextual definitions of bad; it’s your job to know what they are.
For example:
- it would cause a harm to someone who was not made aware of the risk up front.
- it would cause someone to lose a job they didn’t know was under threat.
- the way the harm occurs precludes its only corrective/curative action or has no adequate compensation.
Bad things are almost always contextual but also almost always obvious in that context.
You can’t avoid bad things that you can’t foresee. If you do not attempt to avoid, avert or mitigate bad things that you can foresee, then you are one of the bad things.
Things may not always be black and white but it is wise not to seek the protection of the grey.
Under this guidance, wouldn't almost every technological advancement then qualify as bad? i.e. typewriter repair, etc.
I mean everyone has to die someday but that doesn’t excuse murder.
Most of my life's work has been in areas of increasing productivity. Is that good or bad? On the good side of the spectrum, it reduces the time hundred of people need to spend on mundane tasks, or reducing the amount of mentally taxing complexity. On the bad side, based on this definition, there is less of a need to hire someone with specialized talent when the software can handle what their job function would be.
I've always felt kind of bad helping companies automate people out of jobs, that's the core of what most of us writing software are doing. Maybe I am a bad person.
Is that necessarily so?
Leaning on "I did what I thought was right for humanity" while not addressing the harms to people along the way is not moral.
Other people can draw their own conclusions.
Ultimately, pretty much everyone feels like they are a good person, so "you doing a bad thing makes you bad" doesn't really square away especially when that person's personal moral calculus can see their actions as being a net good.
It's pretty hard to shame someone out of a job even if most people view at as net negative on society (boat loads of money and all).
That's why I disagree with all the framing of the article.
Balancing good against bad is not clear, I agree, but that makes it all the more important to think about it when making a big decision such as what job to take.
Its hard and people do not even agree about how to balance it - e.g. whether the ends justify the means.
No amount of trying to tell them "But you are doing something bad by helping the oil industry" will make them reconsider if they are good or bad. But I also wouldn't say they are necessarily bad people. You can also simply just be wrong or misinformed when you make your moral calculation.
Good people do bad things sometimes. Bad people do good things sometimes. That's why the framing of badness as a taint isn't really helpful IMO. It creates a "us vs them" sort of attitude that ultimately doesn't address whatever issue is at hand.
I've been wondering what sectors I wouldn't maintain and develop infrastructure for, because I consider it a strength of mine that I don't entirely care about that. I'm not excited about your product, for good or bad.
Defense for example is on an edge there. Supporting the creation of death and suffering in other humans does not sit right with me. Being defenseless doesn't sit right either, as it can create suffering and death for people I know as well.
Online gambling is more on the nope side. Maybe with a decent regulated german company, but if you start working with some eastern-europan online video gambling sites with pretty girls as dealers, you are suddenly very close to human trafficking and many more things connected to it.
So I guess directly causing human suffering and pain is a boundary for me. And yes, if you push that argument to an extreme, if you search long enough, you realize that pure existence causes suffering to other people, animals and the planet and must be ceased.
But then there is that other side - in the current system (and arguably many before) you have to do a job to get money to live, and a lot of people like the person making cars have no choice about that. I guess we are contributing to that suffering as well by existing.
So, minimizing the direct suffering and pain I cause seems to be a sensible directive.
Do the people working for AI labs believe that it has a better direct beneficial effect, or makes for a worse outcome on society?
What I've read thus far heavily lead me to believe that the balance is well tilted towards the negative.
If you're one of the "f u got mine" belief system, you do not care about effects but only your wallet.
This is also in some way how my perception has been tinted by effective altruists; which (through media representation) seem activiley present as employees at AI labs. Are those people actively donating away 10-20% of their base salary every year, or "whatever it takes to make me a billionaire" and "after that I'll do some philantrophy"?
Effective altruism hasn't really crossed the atlantic into the balkans, feel free to correct me and elucidate me on the positive effects in the US of this ideology.
In the particular case of AI companies, I think a handbrake should be pulled when they start claiming things like "10% chance we're ending humanity."
Really? You can't think of an act in history that society might agree was evil?
And I'm not sure why everything has to have a "measure". Someone who approaches the world we live in (and their own life) in such absolute, reductionist terms is living, in my opinion, a very ufortunate life.
We can still have moral good and bad, even subjective good and bad, without reducing everything to one or the other or placing everything in a non-existent moral center. Far too often a sliver of good is given equal weight to a enormous lot of bad. We should be ready to cut the cord far sooner than we do in practice.
So, there's an ojective measure of shade of gray? /i
Precision is not objectivity.
Very much no. More that almost all actions have good and bad impacts and how good or bad those impacts are can be judged completely differently between large groups of people.
To someone that's Hindu, eating a cow is a supremely bad act. For your standard meat eater, it's just lunch. The cow eater is only a "bad person" to the Hindu. To them, the act is likely a white or light gray act.
Good lord. You could apply the same logic to any taxpaying resident of any country whose government is doing something bad. There's some truth to it, it's worth bearing in mind, but it's also the very definition of an Isolated Demand for Rigor.
As if the author excluded other examples? What is your criticism, that the principle can also be applied to other things?
That is a fantastic term for something that seems to come up a lot, and I had not heard before.
The man is the definition of a useful idiot https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/30/military-strikes-are-a...
You can't, because those taxes are coerced from you at literal gunpoint if you refuse (or your property seized at gunpoint to the same effect). It's completely different than choosing to do that of your own free will.
When I was in the US, I did actively attempt to diminish my tax contribution as much as legally possible out of disgust at what it was used for, but nobody is morally tainted for being forced to contribute a small slice to something evil. Maybe there's a threshold where you should be actively laying down your life to resist, eg. if being forced to commit actual murder, but I don't think you can reasonably expect that of paying taxes at all.
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Edit: rate-limited, attaching a reply to a below comment.
> The problem with avoiding taxes because of expenditures you think are bad is that you also reduce the pool available for things you think are good.
Indeed, but I also chose to contribute money to other good causes instead. In that way, the same sum could be used for 100% good instead of, say, 80% good 20% bad.
Now that I live in a country of my choosing, I am proud to pay taxes because of how they are used. 0% of my tax money goes to killing innocent people overseas, for instance.
I like how this is being spun as virtuous. When multinational trillion-dollar companies do it, we say it's bad!
You should beware that you've rationalized everything you do as good enough, and everything that other people do is morally questionable.
Have you set the bar for what is 'reasonable' to be extremely convenient for your own circumstances?
Social security? Medicare?
The problem with avoiding taxes because of expenditures you think are bad is that you also reduce the pool available for things you think are good. Every country will do a mix of things you judge good, and things you judge bad.
> nobody is morally tainted for being forced to contribute a small slice to something evil
I agree.
>So, why are you still working for them?
>If the answer is the salary, say it louder, and do not force yourself to make excuses.
>If the answer is “someone worse would replace me”, say it too, and louder too.
>If the answer is “I can change things from the inside”, then show me what you changed. Haugen tried the inside. Coxon tried the inside. At the end, unfortunately, the inside did not move.
>
Okay, but what if I think that both sides are LARPing their personal science fiction stories and reality will end up much more mundane (but still incredibly beneficial) than the utopias and dystopias everyone is cooking up?
This is presupposing a moral dilemma that just doesn't exist in my opinion.
The mimicbots are impressive but they're frustrating. We've hit the limit for pre-training data and now we're relying on RL for the next progressive steps and that gets asymptotic fast. The truth is that unsupervised learning hasn't inched forward and we don't know how it will, so we're left with benchmaxxing and LARPing about how they're escaping air-gapped configs using themal sensors, all in a desperate attempt to make the projected numbers look less insane so these people can cash out at IPO time. Everyone knows what's happening and it's embarrassing.
But I don't think that's their argument. I think their argument is that people should make moral choices to avoid employment with AI firms, and if you're using Coxon for that argument, you can't coherently argue that models are hype objects simultaneously. There is no greater claim you can make about AI hypercapability than that it will eradicate humanity.
(I don't buy any of those claims, for what it's worth.)
It's harder and harder to make the point that frontier objects are just hype objects though. And, even if they stay where they are today, that's more than enough to make them incredibly...destabilizing, to say the least. It's not only it, but frontier models act like knowledge mixers and percolators. Some people (not necessarily everybody), are adept at the discipline of learning, building things and executing projects, and that's all you need today with LLMs filling many of the gaps such person can have. Now, most of those people are actually engineers. So I'm going to go with the article and say that we must stop selling our souls for money.
Imagine: you start working at the company with a good will towards them. As you learn more and see more decisions, you slowly realize how bad it is. Now you've already contributed. Then you leave.
It might be possible to build everything with this goodwill and that's how we'd still end up with a torment nexus even if you immediately drop it.
What I'm saying is, at one point you have to break the company fully.
I'm not sure what more we need to wait for, if the claim "10% it ends humanity" is not enough.
Good people can be in tough position where even when they do not agree they may not have much of an option but to keep going.
What I wanted to say is that usually people start with good intentions and only later they realize they are contributing to a torment nexus.
What you are saying definitely plays a role and it makes doing moral choices difficult.
But the reality is that experts' probabilities for human extinctions vary wildly, with the lab leaders at 20%-30% and these researchers at >10% (he didn't state how much higher...), LeCun at <0.01% and the other two godfathers of AI, Bengio and Hinton at >10%.
And this decision to take our shot is not taken in a democratic way by humanity as a whole, but by a few companies racing as fast as possible.
So as long as no one can put an upper bound on the extinction risk, development must be globally shut down.
Because I'm seeing mainly hacker attacks, job insecurity, environmental impacts and vague threats with smiling faces.
It would be nice to see this survey repeated across professions. In my experience, most people have gripes about their profession because it’s what they know. Only half of respondents saying they would steer newcomers away feels a lot better than what my friends in medicine say all the time. Among my college professor and professor-track friends, this number probably reaches 100%.
"AI" is being worked on and funded by sociopaths who care about money over all else and have demonstrated that they are willing to hurt others in exchange for more of it. There are no rules or protections for anybody anywhere. In fact AI companies are pouring bribe money into our corrupt political system in an effort to remove or avoid anything that would stop them from doing whatever they want.
Yes, some members of the group don't have that freedom. But that doesn't excuse the ones who do.
> If the answer is the salary, say it louder, and do not force yourself to make excuses.
That said, I don't buy this article. I'm AI neutral. It's going to break a lot of things and fix many others. Good for you if you think you know what the net outcome will be but I think it's delusional to believe you do. Also I don't think you can resign and stop it without ceding the world to bad people. Pandora's box has already been opened. We've discovered a new thing math can do and now it's yet another arms race between various factions seeking to exploit it. Help the faction you want to win. It's not the world I want it to be, but it is what it is.
Here is one of his posts from 2022:
"Since a long time now I was interested in learning computer graphics and “do stuff” with computer graphics APIs. I began to work on a very simple Game engine in Swift / Metal last year but I began to switch to a Windows machine a few months ago, and Swift / Metal is not compatible with Windows (and will never be I think)."
https://carette.xyz/posts/opengl_and_cpp_on_m1_mac/
This is the same person who is apparently now writing:
"It is a transaction where you sell the part of you that was supposed to care. Do that often enough, and it does not come back. That is not burnout, but it is still a disease. Although, like every disease, it spreads: first to your team, then to your product, then to the people using it."
I strongly disagree, I think this is instead true for those who have an image of themself as "good". IME, someone whose identity involves their "goodness" (and I certainly include myself here) will be willing to do a whole lot to maintain that perception (whether it's a self-perception or an external one). In particular, I think that someone already motivated to feel good about themselves is going to be easier to mislead by slick arguments. See the unfalsifiable longterm-ism of modern-day EA ("you can do an incalculably large amount of good with comparatively minimal effort"), much of today's political violence/radicalism, or the religious persecution all throughout history, whether against the religious (many of last century's authoritarians) or by the religious: cf. Jesus' warning about this in John 16:2 ("They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God."), or even just the Bible's very many warnings against pride (e.g. Proverbs 26:12 [0]) and self-righteousness (e.g. Romans 10:2-3 [1]).
(Of course, sometimes people have no way of knowing a priori that they're being misled. I'm exclusively talking about cases where, deep down, one could/should have known that the situation wasn't actually on the up-and-up... which I'd argue is much more common than we often like to think.)
On the other hand, I'd argue that someone who is truly doing what is good is, by definition, unable to be swayed from that (for then they wouldn't be doing good things anymore, no matter what words they want to use to describe themselves or others). Relatedly, I don't agree that someone can be a "good person" in the absence of actually doing good. (Naturally, this is an extraordinarily high bar, and I'd argue an impossible one to perfectly meet.)
I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis's famous quote:
> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
[0] "You have seen a man wise in his own opinion— there is more hope for a fool than for him."
[1] "For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For not knowing about the righteousness of God and seeking to establish their own, they did not subject themselves to the righteousness of God." (emphasis mine)
Its the same playbook, over and over again.
2. Humans put it in charge of everything, as fast as possible, because it's just so damn useful
3. Is it perfectly aligned to human values for all of future ????
4. Everybody dies as a byproduct of the ASI pursuing some project that humans don't even have a chance to understand, like an ant colony during construction of a hydroelectric dam.
I studied biology in college. I actually did this because I was interested in AI, and already knew a ton of CS and programming. I was already coding in C and using Linux and writing fairly complex stuff. I figured studying the only actual example of a truly intelligent system (especially at the time, early 2000s) was the best way to understand intelligence.
Didn't end up going into AI as my day job, but I've kept up with it all and worked through the math and played with different types (genetic, neural nets, transformers/LLMs, CA / alife, etc.).
I think the root of my skepticism is in what I learned studying biology about how life, adaptation, learning, and evolution actually work in the real world.
I'll try to TL;DR it: I think the doom crowd (and also some of the AI singularity crowd) has a "mystical" view of intelligence. Intelligence is magic pixie dust, and intelligence beyond human is fully unknown and likely has magic superpowers.
The deeper underlying thing seems to be some kind of mathematical mysticism.
Real intelligence is ubiquitous in nature. Trees, grass, bugs, and even bacteria are intelligent. It's also domain specific and limited in capability to what its domain, available training data, and available compute allows.
It's not context-free limit-free magic. It's not special. It's an adaptation like any other.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are from that world, where Rationalist doesn’t mean you’re a rational human being, but instead that it is rational to believe that AGI will be created, thus that they should be the ones creating it. It’s a doomsday cult.
If you start looking at the links between prominent rationalists and effective altruists you see how that whole doom prophecy came about. It’s also how they got so much capital in the early days, SBF literally invested into Anthropic as part of his Effective Altruism effort foundation, and both Amodei siblings are deeply into that whole world
I still can't believe anyone ever took Roko's Basilisk seriously, but people did... to the point of freaking out about it.
The groups themselves are a little cultish too, or a lot cultish depending on which one you're talking about. Some of them are full-on cults.
But what do I know. I'm probably low IQ.
Once again, I've said it elsewhere here, I think we could have nipped this thing in the bud if when the first "effective altruist" started talking about the EV of saving billions of "future lives" vs dealing with today's real problems, someone looked at him, cocked their head to the side, and said "That's fucking ****".
All of those magical future people do not get to live if we bake the Earth today. The best way to take care of future people is to take care of people today. And if they were truly serious about taking care of future people, that's what they would be doing. But it's not, they're just collecting resources. I don't know how the fuck Sam Altman owning a Koenigsegg Regera today helps save 20 quintillion lives in 40,000AD. Deeply unserious people.
& ofc AI is making climate change worse, some of the Amazon datacenters are using fossil fuels to generate a country’s worth of power, but that’s never part of their calculations
Which one of these would it be? All of them in parallel? Or something we wouldn't think of. If I were to play chess against Magnus Carlsen, I wouldn't know with which piece he will checkmate me, but I know that I am going to lose.
If so, he's the person that's made me lament one loss the progressives took from us. I think there's one phrase that we should be allowed to say regardless of the fact that it is also used to refer to certain groups of people. Because the insult comes from the comparison, not the language itself. Every time we update the language, we just use the new word as the insult. And I don't think we're allowed to use the word here.
But sometimes, you just have to look at someone, cock your head to the side, and say "That's fucking ****".
It brooks no argument, it offers no sympathy, it just tells the other person that they should be ashamed for speaking those thoughts aloud.
Story time :)
I remember when I was first starting out as a programmer. At QE (always occurred on a weekend) a slew of financial reports were created and printed for review the following Monday then I think used for summaries for Wall Street to look at.
A high level finance manager came to me and asked if the report could be changed, not knowing what he was asking I said sure. After a long discussion turned out he wanted the numbers on the report changed and re-printed. I said it was possible but the numbers would be all wrong.
So he said "do it". I went to my manager and told them what he wanted, then I refused to do it. I said I would quit first because I did not want the SEC to come after me. Luckily they all supported me and the finance manager was told to "FO".
FWIW, that company is long gone.
I had to make this conditional promise once, back in the nineties, as a junior person in a related industry. Because in the dot-com era developers like me were often simultaneously a babe-in-arms on a professional career level and also the only person who knew how to do the work that was being sold. I decided that if it came to it, I would not be the person having a hard time in court. The client understood better than my bosses and they changed the product. Took them a few minutes at most, but I have reason to believe that my decision made some ripples.
Nowadays I don’t let those issues surprise me: I believe in establishing specific ethical standards at the beginning of projects, because if you don’t do that, you don’t have a basis to robustly point to actions that put them at risk.
The rule of all games played in capitalism is there's a sucker born every minute. you can work a few years or your whole life before you realize you've been had.
and most do....
People do things.
Good or bad is relative to their own biases/experiences/ beliefs and moral compass.
Very few people are truly sociopaths who do evil stuff for personal gain.
Most do it because of the curse of the “banality of evil” (re: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem?wprov=sf...>)
Doesn’t make it right, but like everything else in life the reality is much more complex than saying “good people refuse to do bad things”
My current read is that ~20-30% of people in America actively delight in hurting others (ICE supporters etc)
Another 30% do not seem to care about anything but their own well-being. (I don’t like to think I fall here but as a big tech peon it doesn’t look good).
The remaining percent seem to care and are trying their best but looking at how things are going it’s not enough
Obviously morality and ethics aren’t binary. OP isn’t saying that. What they’re saying in a clear and concise manner is that your actions have consequences far beyond your personal sphere, and good people acknowledge that and fight for what’s better despite the harm they personally may suffer as a result. That what makes someone “good” in their point of view isn’t a binary deed or outcome, but of the sacrifices they’ll make for themselves to build a better existence for others.
Planting a tree whose shade you’ll never enjoy, in other words.
So to reiterate OP’s challenge at the end, at least be honest about why you’re still in the game. Let others know where you stand so that we don’t waste our time on futility. If your voluntary position on something mutable risks making you a target, then the rational next step would be to evaluate how important that position is to you that you would weather said harm instead of changing it.
That’s all OP was getting at: promoting the mere notion of critically thinking about the decisions you make in regards to your own moral philosophy and acting more authentically, including tanking the damage trying to bring about change.
He's still working in service of the AI companies though (same narrative) and no doubt will land a cushy job at so-callef "AI Safety" labs or make a living on the news/podcast circuit.
To quote Coxon on CBS News: > I think it clearly there was some latent demand for this sort of sentiment or people were gradually coming to this sort of conclusion because obviously so many other people have been saying the same thing for a long time. ... > Yeah. Honestly, when I talk to my friends and family about this, I find it easier to or people seem to actually get more of a sense for it if they're further away from technology. Because I honestly think it sounds more like science fiction than real technology.
He's quite open about it, saying the quiet part out loud. Tech is strange place to be if you're, well... technical. Being constantly gaslit by people who haven't built anything or have 3 years in the industry like here Coxon.