| ▲ | Why I Left Google DeepMind(lesswrong.com) |
| 191 points by eatitraw a day ago | 56 comments |
| |
|
| ▲ | vintagedave a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
| |
| ▲ | fuzzfactor a day ago | parent [-] | | >Powerful people can too easily do little, and ignore their consciences. IOW: >Congress remains a potted plant in the corner. |
|
|
| ▲ | hmokiguess a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
|
| ▲ | mark_l_watson a day ago | parent | prev | 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). |
|
| ▲ | superxpro12 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
|
| ▲ | tdb7893 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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). |
|
| ▲ | aleph_minus_one a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Primary source: https://turntrout.com/why-i-left-google-deepmind |
|
| ▲ | adverbly a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you want to do good in the world: You are not alone! Its not easy to do at this moment in time, but be patient, consistent, and spread your attitude to others. |
|
| ▲ | rhmn_mdov 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Thanks for trying |
|
| ▲ | throwaway26727 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > learned that Google sells its Cloud services to the relevant agencies within DHS Can a US company refuse the US government as a customer? |
| |
|
| ▲ | thisislife2 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Direct source - https://turntrout.com/why-i-left-google-deepmind 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? - How US Big Tech supports Israel’s AI-powered genocide and apartheid - https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/5/12/how-us-big-tech... - Google's Role in Supporting Israel's Genocide in Gaza - https://matttutt.me/googles-role-in-supporting-israels-genoc... |
| |
| ▲ | forafistfulof 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And why would you "understand the moderators"? I don't know what kind of principles all these people have, but of course they all know about Gaza. | | |
| ▲ | thisislife2 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | forafistfulof 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 am one of them. |
|
| |
| ▲ | throw39744 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There is no genocide in Lebanon, the West Bank or Gaza. No matter how many times you repeat that lie. |
|
|
| ▲ | ChrisArchitect a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| ICYMI Previously on the author's source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48925271 |
|
| ▲ | fragmede a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| more comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48925271 |
|
| ▲ | leoh 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
| |
| ▲ | gtowey 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
|
|
| ▲ | readthenotes1 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I am outraged to find gambling in this casino! What sort of ethics bubble was the author living in to believe that Google was anything but solely focused on achieving shareholder value? |
| |
| ▲ | tmtvl a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Agreed: expecting Alphabet not to do the evil greedy thing is like expecting a lion to become a vegetarian, it just isn't going to happen. | |
| ▲ | zbentley a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | Ygg2 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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" | |
| ▲ | pjmlp a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The same that believes in HR marketing like Do No Evil. | | |
| ▲ | Ygg2 a day ago | parent [-] | | Pretty sure they ditched that motto long time ago. | | |
| |
| ▲ | skew-aberration a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | Turn_Trout 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | cloudie78 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Wait, only now you realised that the “do no evil” meant jack shit? How blind and ignorant really are you? Let me attempt to save you from another horrifying realisation: it has hardly anything do with who’s in the office right now. The horrors and evil will persist. |
|
| ▲ | gyanchawdhary a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| painfully entitled and arrogant |
| |
| ▲ | golly_ned a day ago | parent [-] | | For having a moral position on a moral topic? If he were strictly self-interested we'd have no objection to it in this culture. | | |
| ▲ | gyanchawdhary 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 |
|
|
|
| ▲ | 1-6 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The virtue signaling is too much on this article. It could have been a well-written piece, but they had to make it about moral grandstanding. |
| |
| ▲ | layer8 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | “Virtue signaling” is when you don’t take meaningful action. The article author went out of their way to take meaningful action. | | |
| ▲ | woopwoop a day ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | gosub100 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | dpark a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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. | | |
|
| |
| ▲ | vintagedave a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Being ethical is the point. | |
| ▲ | golly_ned a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Any case where someone takes a moral position is now called "virtue signaling" and "grandstanding." | | |
| ▲ | gtowey 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | I suppose if you work in the Soylent Green factory it's easier to demonize those who speak out against it than to consider upending your own station. |
| |
| ▲ | vovavili 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Going out of your way to quit a job most people in tech dream of after months of serious calls to action is not mere signalling. | |
| ▲ | superxpro12 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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... | | |
| ▲ | gosub100 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you're only signalling meanwhile paying taxes, you are actively supporting it. Same with the genocide in Gaza. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | negamax a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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 |
| |
| ▲ | tw04 a day ago | parent [-] | | 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”. | | |
| ▲ | leoqa a day ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | superxpro12 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | gtowey 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > feels like AI empowering scams and facilitating post-truth is more harm. "There are things worse than automating the murder of innocents" is certainly and interesting take. |
| |
| ▲ | negamax a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nuclear wasn't governed until the destruction was seen. There's no reason to believe AI wouldn't follow a similar path | | |
| ▲ | tw04 a day ago | parent [-] | | 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”. | | |
| ▲ | negamax a day ago | parent [-] | | 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 | | |
| ▲ | tw04 a day ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
|
|
|
|
|
