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Discussion (82 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
When someone isn't competent to make decisions for themselves it's ok to pressure them into engaging in behavior that will lead them to get to a condition where they can start to make decisions for themselves. In Silicon Valley they have let their guilt be leveraged by a corrupt government system that lets grifters steal billions of dollars per year in 'homelessness funding'. Those same grifters fund political groups and bribe politicians. Anyone that questions it is accused of wanting to murder homeless people.
Like, a pure researcher for a corporation might have some genuine overlap and shared interests where breakthroughs in the research benefit both parties, but an ethicist?? For a legal construct that's defined by and bound to sociopathically pursue profit? Come on now.
At typical corporation, something like a Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer (CECO) would be largely focused on legal compliance - making sure company personnel aren't engaged in bribery, fraud, insider trading etc. The value of this role (and the medical example) is to prevent lawsuits and/or prosecution.
For a company like Meta, an ethicist is likely concerned with the inherent ethical concerns of running a social media company, which impacts the mental health of its users, many of whom are minors. For AI companies, the ethics of releasing models that are capable of doing dangerous things. In name, the job probably involves giving recommendations about how to ethically implement features in the platform to minimize harm. In practice, the job probably accomplishes very little.
I think a lot of it depends on the size of the company. Startup? Sure, maybe it's a real thing.
Gigantic company like a member of FAANG or MANGOS? absolutely a PR move.
ie: blaming her for anything instead of the decision makers is... really weird?
now they are exactly like every other company that has zero ethicists on staff and expect the employees to weigh the ethical ramifications of their work.
I’d argue a lot of them expect the opposite. To suppress the ethical concerns.
Even in recent memories you had Mark Zuckerberg telling his employees to use pirated sources. And executives at fossil fuel companies have to act unethically.
There isn't much ethical merit in building a wall around a city with guard towers, attack dogs, and anti-personnel mines to keep the citizens in so that they can contribute to your economic vision, for example.
All of that said, no idea what this person was doing. Probably involved a red stapler.
The capitalistic world state system was only completed in the last 50 or so years and was of course seconded by the Stalin machine. Its purpose is in the first instance to keep working populations in place, which is why all the states agree to it as they form. The system holds solid where capital moves (as did 'communism' and Comecon) but the peoples don't.
It is only when you think of individual states and not the system that you can fail to notice that we get the same result if they all try to keep their citizens in, and if they all try to keep the others' citizens out.
It's performative. She got paid more to shill for a different massive amoral mega-corporation. Don't be stupid.
/s
So, pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo. There is of course no-one responsible for the ethical framework of the company's actions, because it is a company, and therefore amoral at best and immoral at worst.
But it appears that is not how your world works. By default any company owner is a homo-sapiens, but a machine that only wants money. Tragically, your cynicism is creating the very world you hate.
It’s much easier to disregard the human cost of decisions when you are separated from said humans by thousands of miles & billions of dollars.
History shows this is not the case.
I'm happy for you to live in a place where the local economy is so vibrant. This is what capitalism should have been. Instead we got WallMart.
The problem is that corporations completely subvert any individual morality that might indicate that generating money is the only moral thing to do. Typically in small businesses. I comaider small businesses owners in general are a lot closer to labor than to capital owners in general terms, especially when their labor is still a large part of what keeps the business going.
Corporations are not that, those are hyper optimized for generating profits, all else be damned. Preferably if all else is damned.
> But it appears that is not how your world works. By default any company owner is a homo-sapiens, but a machine that only wants money. Tragically, your cynicism is creating the very world you hate.
They said companies are amoral at best.
When it comes to how humans interact with AI we can ask things like "would it be better if people could detect AI output?" "how can we alleviate skill loss from excessive AI reliance?" Things like this can decide how the models behave. Imagine if taking concerns like this seriously leads to models that are easy to learn from. At the moment people seem to be moving away from that so as to make distillation difficult, worsening this concern.
I'm not going to try to talk about machine consciousness, but these other things are definitely important questions where someone digging into them could make models interact better with society.