| ▲ | danlitt 10 hours ago |
| > ethical approaches to model development, how humans interact with AI and debate over machine consciousness So, pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo. There is of course no-one responsible for the ethical framework of the company's actions, because it is a company, and therefore amoral at best and immoral at worst. |
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| ▲ | kaon_2 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I am not sure in what neighbourhood you live, but in my village there are hundreds of businesses with strong morals. From the local baker, to the electrician and the construction company. Many keep employees past their prime, they all invest heavily in local community events and sports. The owners don't do this because of money, but because in their view a fulfilled life is one where you serve your community. And yes they want to become rich and make money, but that is not all. 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. |
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| ▲ | danlitt 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | RandomLensman 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The people and procedures inside are the backstop. | | |
| ▲ | danlitt 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | How many leadership meetings have you been in where some profitable approach was refused on an ethical basis? (rather than the basis that behaving ethically is actually more profitable, which is totally different) By contrast, how many conversations have you personally had with people working at a company believing a profitable action was firmly unethical, but felt forced to behave that way due to "business realities" or some other whitewashing? | |
| ▲ | pferde 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | can be the backstop. The word "can" is doing some extremely heavy lifting here, against corporate practices which dilute and spread guilt and responsibility for immoral decisions so thin, nobody in the decision chain even realizes something immoral has been decided. | | |
| ▲ | RandomLensman 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Have you ever been in committees approving new products or perhaps certain transactions? These chains aren't necessarily that long. But "can", sure, things could fail etc. and some places are better than others at it. | |
| ▲ | ksbd-pls-finish 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is this the same argument as "please point to a moral backstop that would prevent any person from taking immoral acts"? We usually hope that people will be moral, but can't enforce this. | | |
| ▲ | pferde 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | My point was that in big corporations, things are stacked against people wanting to act morally. |
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| ▲ | asadotzler 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nursing has been around for a long time and they have not yet had the ethics in their field crushed by some of the biggest forces in our corporate-friendly system. High school teachers too. I could probably come up with a dozen more given half an hour to think about it. Don't give up so easily. People fought hard to get us here. |
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| ▲ | thuuuomas 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | SirFatty 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You're comparing small business to a corporation? Right. | |
| ▲ | SkipperCat 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | torginus 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Bet none of them have a chief ethicist tho. | |
| ▲ | surgical_fire 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | keybored 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | impossiblefork 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So, concerning ethical approaches to model development, there are many things worth looking into: copyright is one, environmental cost is another, and whether there are any additional concerns worth taking into account. The list of these concerns can then be used for decision making, and we can ask things like "given what we want to build, can does picking a location that gives us lower environmental cost add so much time or cost that we can't go for that path?", things like that are't crrazy. When it comes to how humans interact with AI we can ask things like "would it be better if people could detect AI output?" "how can we alleviate skill loss from excessive AI reliance?" Things like this can decide how the models behave. Imagine if taking concerns like this seriously leads to models that are easy to learn from. At the moment people seem to be moving away from that so as to make distillation difficult, worsening this concern. I'm not going to try to talk about machine consciousness, but these other things are definitely important questions where someone digging into them could make models interact better with society. |
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| ▲ | greggsy 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I hate these companies as much as the next guy but this perspective is childish at best, and ignorant at worst. |
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| ▲ | Zigurd 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is how Ayn Rand's pseudo philosophical mambo jumbo continues to poison tech. |
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| ▲ | smohare 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
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