Posted by Brajeshwar 23 hours ago
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.
Arguments as old as time that a new form of automation will put people out of jobs are just not compelling to me, I'm sorry. I also don't believe it's likely that LLMs will ever be ASI, nor ever evil and sentient.
I didn't make either of these arguments.
I was literally talking about what "bad" means, contextually, in the context of a job, responding to the idea that most people just don't see "good/bad" issues in their jobs. When almost all of us do, in fact, see harms we should reduce. Just often smaller harms.
One of the problems in the tech industry is that people always say "well sure, but…" and then try to expand the scenario to an amoral Thanos-level so they can wriggle off what might actually in many cases be much more personal, contextually obvious hooks.
"It happens, I shouldn't worry about my part in it" is not a moral framework.
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.
I know people in my life who have discomfort about their jobs at Meta because of how other people view the company. One of them is planning to leave in the next year or so.
The impact may be hard to measure or rather diffuse, but in my experience, it is real.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
---
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!
This is a massive difference in intent, which is why it’s bad when it’s multinationals.
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?
This is not what I was trying to say.
First let me state the assumption I made: You think that working at Anthropic/OpenAI is morally bad because that's the parent thread, and you made a comment about how somethings are good enough and other things are too bad to tolerate.
So yes, you hold yourself to the bar of I should not work at Anthropic/OpenAI - but the point is that this bar is convenient to hold yourself to.
Did you "took actions to diminish my contribution, and eventually left. I do not begrudge other Americans who did less than I did."
Or did you simply never work there, maybe never even had an offer to work there.
That said, I do hold myself to professional standards that are 'inconvenient' as well. User surveillance, manipulative dark patterns for maximizing engagement and monetization, and just about everything else big tech does is antithetical to the way I live my life. I strive to develop software that I myself am happy to use and that my users are delighted to use. My career certainly got off to a slower and less lucrative start than it otherwise would have if I had no scruples about how I made a living. I could've made much more money if I harvested my users' data and sold it. And yet, I chose not to. That is a choice you can just make. If you were in a position where you were facing homelessness, I could understand taking any job you can get, but the people chasing $300k+ TC jobs at $evilcorp aren't usually in that position.
You really presume what I think about it huh?
> It isn't clever
Never said it was
> easiest way to trivialize someone else's moral convictions
Did not trivialize it at all. Regardless of what's "right" or "wrong" we are definitely in the territory of "advanced ethics" and not "trivial/beginner ethics"
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.
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.
Both technologies I believe are the grim reapers of Big Oil. Once Big Oil falls (and petrostates), then we can see environmental recovery begin.
If anything, LLMs siphoning GPUs make doing this research harder as they're not available.
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.
That's different from what we have today with powerful software tools that people can use for all sorts of things, which is an extension of what we already had in less concentrated form. It makes things easier for humans to do good and bad things, but it's not an autonomous digital god.
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%.
And how are you certain that whatever else you're going into is more AI proof? Are you certain that law, healthcare, business consulting, accounting, finance, traditional engineering, and various other things that smart people are pivoting to instead of CS are not going to see demand reduction? If anything, I would wager that everything except developing software is going to be at risk, and the demand for software engineers is at the cusp of exploding.
Now is the most exciting time to be a software engineer since the mid 00s.
>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.
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.