I disagree with this article and here's why.

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.

There may not be a definition of “good”.

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.

You can also use moral relativism to cope with doing basically anything unethical, especially so when you’re offered dump trucks full of money.

A few big good/bad decisions are more important than thousands of trivial decisions.

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.

I agree.

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 would rather say the argument is simplified, but on a decent track. Because there are two angles to it.

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.

I like to think of good in terms of direct positive effect, and bad in terms of direct negative externalities. Second order effects become too fuzzy.

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.

I like the concept of deontological ethics where instead of just plain good and bad, we consider what is one’s duty. People make decisions based on who they are responsible for.

"Life isn't black and white with "good/bad"."

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.

To be crystal clear in case there is confusion, we should also not confuse "everything is a shade of gray," with "all grays are the same shade."

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.

Yeah that’s why ea is like catnip for these folks, justify anything by some handy hallucination about how the outcome will help more than it hurts. Suffering is fungible

"Nothing is simple, therefore it is impossible to act ethically."

> there's no objective measure of what is good or bad. Everything is a shade of gray.

So, there's an ojective measure of shade of gray? /i

Precision is not objectivity.

Only bad things have happened so far in AI. This is why they need the daily propaganda to whitewash themselves.