Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

> Most suggestions of this nature fail to explain how they will deal with the problem of people just seeing there’s no point in trying for more. On a personal level, I’ve heard people from Norway describe this problem for personal income tax—at some point (notably below a typical US senior software engineer’s earnings) the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating, and you either coast or emigrate. Perhaps that’s not entirely undesirable, but I don’t know if people have contemplated the consequences of the existence of such a de facto ceiling seriously.

I think if you look at quality of life and happiness ratings in Norway it's pretty clear it's far from "entirely undesirable". It's good for people to do things for reasons other than money.

"the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating"

Sounds like the effort needed for bonuses here in the US. Why try if the amount is largely arbitrary and generally lower than your base salary pay rate when you consider all the extra hours. Everything is a sham.

We're talking about corporations here, where are they going to go? If you had a competent government, you would say "fine, then leave. But your wealth and business is staying here" at some point the government has to do its job. These corporations pull in trillions of dollars, its wild to me to suggest that suddenly everyone would stop working and making money because they were taxed at a progressive rate. Its an absurd assumption to begin with.

We could literally have high speed rail, healthcare, the best education on the planet and have a high standard of living... and it would be peanuts to them. Instead we have a handful of people with more wealth than 99% of everyone else, while the bottom 75% of those people live in horrifying conditions. The fact that medical bankruptcy is a concept only in the richest country on earth is deeply embarrassing and shameful.

The bait-and-switch model is absolutely amazing as well. Start by offering a service covered with ads. Then add paid tier to get rid of ads. Next add tier with payment and ads. And finally add ads back to every possible tier. Not to forget about keeping them in content all the time.

Is that referring to 'customer focus'? That was still going strong in the Clinton era. It probably peaked around the year 2000.

> made up of people

People making meaningful decisions at mega corporations aren’t a random sample of the population, they are self selected to care a great deal about money and or power.

Honestly if you wanted to filter the general population to quietly discover who was evil I’d have a hard time finding something more effective. It doesn’t guarantee everyone is actually evil, but actually putting your kids first is a definite hindrance.

The morality of the average employee on the other hand is mostly irrelevant. They aren’t setting policies and if they dislike something they just get replaced.

I don't really agree with some of your assumptions. At many companies, many of the people also are evil. Many people who hold shares and public office are also evil.

I don't think it's necessary to conclude that because a company is evil then everyone who works at the company is evil. But it's sort of like the evilness of the company is a weighted function of the evilness of the people who control it. Someone with a small role may be relatively good while the company overall can still be evil. Someone who merely uses the company's products is even more removed from the company's own level of evil. If the company is evil it usually means there is some relatively small group of people in control of it making evil decisions.

Now, I'm using phraseology here like "is evil" as a shorthand for "takes actions that are evil". The overall level of evilness or goodness of a person is an aggregate of their actions. So a person who works for an evil company or buys an evil company's products "is evil", but only insofar as they do so. I don't think this is even particularly controversial, except insofar as people may prefer alternative terms like "immoral" or "unethical" rather than "evil". It's clear people disagree about which acts or companies are evil, but I think relatively few people view all association with all companies totally neutrally.

I do agree with you that taking personal responsibility is a good step. And, I mean, I think people do that too. All kinds of people avoid buying from certain companies, or buy SRI funds or whatever, for various ethically-based reasons.

However, I don't entirely agree with the view that says it's useless or hypocritical to claim that reform is necessary unless you are going to "do something". Yes, on some level we need to "do something", but saying that something needs to be done is itself doing something. I think the idea that change has to be preceded or built from "saintly" grassroots actions is a pernicious myth that demotivates people from seeking large-scale change. My slogan for this is "Big problems require big solutions".

This means that it's unhelpful to say that, e.g., everyone who wants regulation of activities that Company X does has to first purge themselves of all association with Company X. In many cases a system arises which makes such purges difficult or impossible. As an extreme, if someone lives in an area with few places to get food, they may be forced to patronize a grocery store even if they know that company is evil. Part of "big solutions" means replacing the bad ways of doing things with new things, rather than saying that we first have to get rid of the bad things to get some kind of clean slate before we can build new good things.

You could use this logic to posit that any government, group, system, nation state, militia, business, or otherwise, isn't "evil" because you haven't gauged the thoughts, feelings and actions of every single person who comprises that system. Thats absurd.

If using AI and other technology to uphold a surveillance state, wage war, do imperialism, and do genocide... isn't evil, than I don't know if you can call anything evil.

And the entire point of taxes is that we all collectively decide that we all would be better off if we pooled our labor and resources together so that we can have things like a basic education, healthcare, roads, police, bridges that don't collapse etc.. Politicians and corporations have directly broken and abused this social contract in a multitude of ways, one of those ways is using loopholes to not pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else by a large margin... another way is paying off politicians and lobbying so that those loopholes never get closed, and in fact, the opposite happens. So yes, taxing Google and other mega-corporations is a single, easily identifiable, action that can be directly taken to remedy this problem. Though, there is no way around solving the core issue at hand, but people have to be able to identify that issue foremost.

Remember when the other AI companies wanted ClosedAI to stop "for humanity's sake" when all it meant was for them the catch up? None of these companies are "good". They all know that as soon as one company does it, they all must follow, so why not lead?

If you want to take it so far off topic, then sure, go ahead with it.

Maybe it's more like "If I don't do this job, someone else will"...

Anduril already asked this question with a strong "fuck yes"

The magic market fairy godmother has decided that TVs with built in ads and spyware are good for you. The market fairy thinks this is so good for you that there are no longer any alternatives to a smart TV besides "no tv"

The market fairy has also decided that medication commercials on TV is good for you. That your car should report your location, speed, and driving habits to your insurer, car manufacturer, and their 983,764 partners at all times.

Maximally beneficial indeed.