Head of not too much Ethics at Palantir, minimal really, obviously

Subsequently named Head of Post-Ethics at Palantir.

Don't forget to put the special LLM trained to eliminate PII leaks in the Gavin Belson signature box.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=gavin+bel...

There are a lot of government watchdogs, and Trump has been ignoring or dissolving them

> What do you think is more likely: this or the other way around: getting the "ethics team" to align with investor goals? Hint: Where does the money come from?

From the (ethics) team obviously, because the investors just have goals and aren't a team!

Big irony marker of course. But remarkably, in human history, this line of thinking would not be unheard of. Of course, I don't think it easily adapts to companies of course, so I don't really disagree with you.

Remember that MTV show offering people like 5 grand or something to lick an elevator handway in front of a camera?

Well, if someone has a useful idea in this world, and want to build a company from it, the MTV "lick-the-stairway" offers will be the largest and first hurdle before anything else happens. People will simply offer to buy you out, and that's not limited to founders and creatives.

That's how our system works.

It's funny, but Scientologists were innovators on this front. They use the word "ethics" a lot, but they've specifically redefined it to mean productivity at work (people who aren't productive are stealing a living.)

Being "downstat" (iirc) is when you're not productive in comparison to your coworkers, which makes you "outethics" and a "potential trouble source (PTS)." If you're outethics, then you get called in for "auditing" which is when they interrogate you with a lie detector to find out if you're associating with "suppressive people (SP)" (who are people who are causing you to be downstat because they despise human happiness.) If those people can't be found, then the problem is obviously in your "withholds" (again, iirc) which are your secret deep-down desires to destroy the organization that you may not even be aware of. You see, your "reactive mind" is raging at being forced to be "ethical." The conclusion is that either you find the SP and "disconnect" from them, you discover the nature of your withhold and admit that you were plotting against the organization and why, or you're the SP and you get declared and ejected from the organization.

Welcome to "ethics." The original AI alignment scholars.

The specific, named people who run these organizations are moral black holes. Anybody that they're hiring for "ethics" they're hiring to define an ethics for their own benefit.

Microsoft Tay has entered the chat.

I'm kind of surprised by the cynicism. There are real problems in AI ethics that contribute to model training. Someone has to own those problems. How that team is incentivized is outside the scope of my comment.

"Prove" is a shorthand because of course it's a stochastic process. My point is that I would expect ethics to be part of the training and eval criteria.

Bro trust, they will be like Voltaire. The circle doth jerk itself over at lighthaven.

The ethicists who see their job as publishing papers and acting as philosophy professors, sure, but someone has to own the training and eval suite for how AI thinks about trolley problems.

staying for less than a year usually means you don't take any equity with you, it must've been an incredible offer in that case, since those openai shares are a golden ticket right now

This 100%.

Even in the target-rich environment of late-stage kleptocratic surveillance capitalism, it is hard to pick out a less ethical firm which has done more moral and direct harm, to more people, with as durable a record of defying all attempts and internal and external at harm reduction.

Never use their products. Never partner. Never participate.

She made Meta the most serious of all the ad platforms on transparency, then. I work in the industry and Meta led the field then in public ad libraries, political restrictions, mandatory ad disclosures, etc.

> This comes at a time when there is huge pushback against all AI companies due to, in large part, ethical concerns.

I don't think ethics is fueling the outrage. It's people not wanting big noisy data centers close to their communities, driving up utility costs. Nobody would care if these things stood in Africa. Just like people don't want wind turbines close by but have no issue with them being abroad or in $remote_location or uranium mines polluting a far away country.

An aside, but what does "spherically awful" mean?

People say this, like "oh you'll never get a job in this industry again!" but seem to ignore that these incidents count as professional experience. It's possible that she was screened on the Rohingya situation when she was interviewing for the position, or mentioned it when she was asked about challenging or conflicting narratives she received from the executives. It's likely that her response was what qualified her for the job at OpenAI, there were probably hundreds of candidates that had never even come close to that level of damage control.

Again, look at Sam Altman and tell me with a straight face that he's hiring goody-two-shoes to fill these seats. He knows where the puck is headed, OpenAI's use by the state will be ugly and they need "ethicists" to help assuage the PR disaster. Considering that Meta's still afloat, she didn't completely abdicate her responsibility there. She might be just what OpenAI needs to avoid being lambasted for military and surveillance use.

From everything I've read in Careless People, basically everything people like us complained about with Facebook was already known internally, people raised concerns about it, and Zuck brushed them off because he is, ultimately, a petty tyrant who wants nothing more than to be loved, and who has surrounded himself with people who are willing to sell that love for power.

Also, you should read Careless People, if only because Facebook is trying its darnedest to censor the author.

As for OpenAI, I already hated the company pre-Sam Altman takeover because AI safety seemed like an excuse to brush away ethics concerns (e.g. "stealing training data is fine because if we don't withhold model weights the model might do something evil"). Post-Sam, I hate the company because they are now ignoring both the AI safety and ethics concerns.

...if you're wondering what the difference is, AI safety is roughly "making sure the AI doesn't do something bad" and AI ethics is "making sure we don't do something bad making the AI". There's a bit of a rivalry between the two, mainly because the former group managed to present their concerns in more business-palatable ways and thus won all the CxO level arguments. Even the most decelerationist AI safety takes are ultimately criti-hype: OpenAI's model breaking containment and hacking HuggingFace is an awful safety outcome, but it's also good marketing for an industry beleaguered by bubble concerns. You can't turn "AI is trained on stolen data" into hype.

CISO is a fair pushback. But I would challenge you on "firing an ethicist is like firing a marketing person". This HF issue clearly brings to light possible ethical issues with how these models are being trained ...

It signals they no longer feel the need to pretend to have ethics.

My bet is that all those companies suddenly seeing their AI going rouge is groundworks for classifying them as dangerous/weapons and using that stick to attack opensource from state side of things.

Or maybe, just maybe, there's another reason that CIA Director John Ratcliffe describes AGI as "akin to digital nuclear weapons." Unless of course you think the CIA is a branch of OpenAI's marketing department

"The most unethical companies on the planet" - if you believe this maybe its time to log off for a bit.

I am pretty certain that Nestlé ranks well above openai on the most unethical companies on the planet rankings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_of_Nestl%C3%A9

lmao i completely agree

What do you mean? She didn't job hop to a better job, that's the whole point. She very well could have gotten "let go".

Philip Morris.

Palantir

Straight to Cocomelon, catch them young'

I'd think an ethicist at Meta/OpenAI involves extremely challenging mental gymnastics

Rubber stamp for hire?

Any ethicist for a corporation is clearly a PR move, right?

Like, a pure researcher for a corporation might have some genuine overlap and shared interests where breakthroughs in the research benefit both parties, but an ethicist?? For a legal construct that's defined by and bound to sociopathically pursue profit? Come on now.

It's silicon valley, literally everything is for pay or be homeless

Just because the ethicist says something is a bad idea, doesn't mean anyone else is obligated to make a change.

ie: blaming her for anything instead of the decision makers is... really weird?

Food testing? Hospitals? Childcare? Pharmacists? How about "clergy"? I could go on and on.

Do you believe that no one in management in these fields pushes the importance of ethics?

Eh, I would say it doesn’t have them as axioms the concept is based on, but ethics are modelable in economics and often appear. Remember economics is the study of choices/ preferences given a certain set of inputs, not about how money works. That’s just the easiest second effect signal to use. Game theory regularly models how ethics affect and are affected in situations.

All of that said, no idea what this person was doing. Probably involved a red stapler.

You mean like in East Berlin?

Many people have strong morals, and might resist profit-maximising behaviours, but they will be outcompeted and replaced by less scrupulous people. There is actually no sharp difference between a person and a one-person-company, but: to the degree a company is really a company and not just a person, it is amoral. If you disagree, please point to a moral backstop that would prevent any company from taking immoral acts. A few exist, but they are invariably resisted by the most powerful companies. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Your neighborhood examples are on an incomparably smaller scale than Meta et al.

It’s much easier to disregard the human cost of decisions when you are separated from said humans by thousands of miles & billions of dollars.

You're comparing small business to a corporation? Right.

But what happens when one of those businesses in your village strikes it big and becomes a multi-national baking good company. They hire a lot of MBAs, take investor money and then need to stay profitable to meet those obligations. Add to the fact that the people now running the business live nowhere near the village. Will they still make the most ethical decisions about keeping employees past their prime?, paying them a fair wage?

History shows this is not the case.

I'm happy for you to live in a place where the local economy is so vibrant. This is what capitalism should have been. Instead we got WallMart.

Bet none of them have a chief ethicist tho.

I know people like that, you are not wrong.

The problem is that corporations completely subvert any individual morality that might indicate that generating money is the only moral thing to do. Typically in small businesses. I comaider small businesses owners in general are a lot closer to labor than to capital owners in general terms, especially when their labor is still a large part of what keeps the business going.

Corporations are not that, those are hyper optimized for generating profits, all else be damned. Preferably if all else is damned.

I know. The local newspaper believes the same thing. And the local events are all sponsored by businesses. Who could question all of this evidence?

> But it appears that is not how your world works. By default any company owner is a homo-sapiens, but a machine that only wants money. Tragically, your cynicism is creating the very world you hate.

They said companies are amoral at best.

Which perspective? I said two things.