Very long to read, but highly principled. I feel his desperation. Powerful people can too easily do little, and ignore their consciences. I appreciate he named those he spoke to; it came across as fair, and makes them accountable for what they did or did not do.
However way people that are deep into the cog wake up I support it. Once the truth was seen you didn't bend and stood by your principles, it must have been very challenging to navigate that from the inside with your entire identity tied to and associated to the thing you ended up growing out from. Appreciate you, welcome to your new life. May you find peace and continue to do good work next.
Great show of principles and character, +1000 to the author.
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).
The author misses one GLARING explaination as to everyone's motivations... money. Literally... just money. There's so much money right now. Enough to eliminate all principles.
What is particularly heartbreaking is that the nerds were supposed to be the gatekeepers of good. And we're just watching this fall apart in realtime. Principles matter little when starting at a $1,000,000,000 check deposited directly into your personal bank account.
I'll always support someone taking a personal stand about what they can or cannot do. Ethical issues always invite the most criticism but my experience is that it's rare for anyone to really give anything up for their ethics (this person likely has money saved up and will land on their feet but even this situation is more than most people would do).
I am not sure how to square the posts that AI is a bubble with the ones that say AI is so terrible; lately I am somewhat inclined to especially believe the former.
Just look at the dot com bust; the Internet and e-commerce were definitely real, but the over leveraged investments into poor business models driven by fomo had to crash before sanity returned.
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?
By "understand", I was not alluding to their political leanings. What I was implying is that some rational comments can still lead to inflamed / emotional discussions (which is against our community guidelines) or lead to unnecessary flagging which increases a mods workload and thus I would understand if the mods delete my comment for these reasons.
> 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.
I assure you that any jew who knows a bit about what is going on in Israel, heard about what is going on in Gaza. Even if not interested, he would hear, here and there "better I would not tell what was there..", the ambiguous smiles, the "who can do anything to us?", the stuff about "Amalek" etc.
I wonder if in a few years, there'll be heads of Google paraphrasing the old skit "You know, in hindsight, allowing autonomous AI drones to carry fusion bombs was a bad move, but for that one quarter we really earned a lot of shareholder value"
I don't know the author, but I do know that it's very much possible to work for organizations whose values and ethics are extremely compromised, and to mindfully participate in their work because you can also do a lot of good for a lot of people while you're there.
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.
Not only that but his outrage is narrowly focused on contemporary US politics. Billions of people access food, shelter, medicine, education, etc, only by the rapidly diminishing leverage their labor provides (or doesn't provide) them. These people presumably never so much as picked up a book, or evenly briefly entertained a thought about a person outside their own immediate social circle.
Those topics aren't on-topic for the essay. I've taken a pledge to donate at least 10% of my money to charity / impactful giving. A good sum of my donations have targeted high-impact opportunities to improve life for people in third-world countries.
That's commendable, but I do think it emphasizes my point. If you have such ethical concerns, why develop powerful technology on behalf of shareholders whose identities and intentions are unknown to you? Activation engineering has obvious malicious uses and I can distinctly remember the sense of dread I felt when 'relaxed and expansive' went viral. I believe the 'good AI' future faces political obstacles, but perhaps you take an accelerationist view that technical solutions will pave the way. Given your politics, I wonder if an interview on a show like a Ralph Nader Radio Hour could help you connect with likeminded people from different backgrounds. Best of luck
if you personally haven't been born or raised in a third-world country (or, as I'm sure he'd prefer to call it, a "developing country" because, of course ... that sounds more morally refined) ... then taking a moral high ground and lecturing others about it is a luxury born of privilege ..
if he were truly as virtuous as he claims .. he'd live like the Unabomber .. in a cabin, disconnected from modern society, giving up all that DeepMind money and abandoning the comforts of civilisation .. that would be a genuine act of conviction .. but instead .. he quits (which insitself is a luxery) keeps the wealth, and writes a blog post about it .. what an entitled muppet
I'm like the Japanese soldier who kept fighting into the 1970s on this, but actually signalling is about taking costly action. When people call something virtue signalling what they usually mean is that it's cheap talk, but this is wrong. The whole point of signalling is that it's costly. A more correct application of virtue signalling would be something like those people who contort their lives to genuinely try to produce zero garbage. This is a truly costly action, but it is signalling in the sense that it is more about showing that one cares by being effortful than actually doing something effectual.
> When people call something virtue signalling what they usually mean is that it's cheap talk, but this is wrong. The whole point of signalling is that it's costly.
What? Signaling is not costly. It’s literally a display, a signal.
> The whole point of signalling is that it's costly
No, it costs nothing to change your twitter icon to the Ukraine flag or make a video about some moral cause, or change your language due to the next political language policing. None of those things are costly.
Youre right. virtue signalling against double-taps with AGM's on fishing boats, or using ICE to kill americans is a bad stance to take. We should have considered the pro-warcrime pro-killing-american stances first...
You (the org) brought fire to the masses. How that fire is used (to build or burn the cities) is not for you do decide
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
Comparing it to fire isn’t really an apt comparison.
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”.
The bomb was literally developed under a top secret program, and they didn’t hand out functioning bombs to the general public at any point in time before “the destruction was seen”.
It was created at wartime. Not as a civilian project. Developed as a weapon. And other countries were developing nuclear weapons as science of it was never a secret
Destruction display did caused the governments to come together and build frameworks and structures to avoid the repeat of it
Which again, is completely different than giving access to every human being on the planet, then trying to figure out how to regulate it later.
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.
I mean, does enabling ICE to be more effective actually represent a harm? ICE has authority to do the things it’s doing. The courts are the appropriate venue to check that authority. Two agents murdering citizens is a criminal matter completely unrelated to Google’s relationship with DHS.
It feels like AI empowering scams and facilitating post-truth is more harm.
Yes. Much in the same way arming a mass shooter with an M1 Abrams is more destructive than an airsoft gun.
Also, ICE is still bound by both the 4th and 5th amendments, of which they have routinely violated. Peretti in particular was executed by an ice agent, and his murderer still runs free.
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