Posted by Brajeshwar 1 day ago
If you work at a defense contractor on warplanes, radar systems or nuclear weapons and you are too free in how you teach or write about your professional knowledge, you go to prison, and it has been that way in the US continuously since WWII. Criminal prosecutions are relatively rare because security-clearance background investigations filter out most of the job applicants who would go on to violate the laws.
"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.
People are very happy to abdicate what personal responsibility they have if they can blame the system. (And then fail to help change the system.)
Does he have any formal education
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."
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.
Its the same playbook, over and over again.
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)
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.