Considering the agreement Anthropic has with Palintar, you could say the exact same about employees working at Anthropic.
Edit: Google, too. Microsoft with its Israel and US Gov ties. Probably most of big tech tbh. How do you recommend we view these employees from an ethical perspective?
Anthropic has willingly left money on the table by taking a stand. They could just not have done this.
OpenAI so far has done the opposite, instead seizing the above as an opportunity.
That is a seriously meaningful difference. Their agreement with Palantir (fwiw OpenAI has been partnering with them for even longer) doesn't erase that.
From what I recall, Microsoft has been deploying GPT in Gaza for years. So even if OpenAI said no, wouldn't the same thing end up happening via Microsoft?
(I understand that domestic and foreign deployment are separate issues — I'd personally object to both — but I'm not sure Microsoft has a reason to take a principled stand on either of those, and they have been working with intelligence for decades.)
Are they working on building tech that is being used for weapons or mass surveilance? Like yes Microsoft has contracts with israel, but their entire business is not centered around those contracts. If you help build a better ai for openai, it will be used for war and control. If you help build a better version of one of the 10,000 things microsoft makes, that’s not definitely going to be used for war and control.
Not to get all historical on you, but if you worked for IBM in the 1930s-1940s you may have worked on something that was used to perpitrate a holocaust. Was that ethical? I don’t think so.
That said, it’s very easy to abstract yourself away from the harm. To tell yourself you’re not the one who builds the landmines, you just maintain the coffee machine at the landmine factory. But that’s just lying to yourself. An honest and deep appraisal of what you’re work is helping make happen is required to decide if your job is ethical or not.
> Are they working on building tech that is being used for weapons or mass surveilance?
Weird how that seems to apply to the other tech companies, but for OpenAI it's just "Anybody who stays at openai"
Someone at Google working on Gemini CLI is clear morally, but someone at OpenAI working on Codex is acting immoral? Seems like a clear double standard.
No i’d actually say those are both deeply morally questionable jobs. Not just because of the weapons and mass surveillance angles either.
Is one worse than the other? Not clearly. They are both helping build tools that are causing environmental and economic destruction, and they’re both building things likely to be used for violence and control. Idk if gemini has been tapped by any defense departments, but that would be the only subtle distinction i can see (has it happened yet, how hard will the company resist unrestricted use).
Not sure how you read my comment and came to this whack conclusion.
No, principles are even more important in unstable times. Anyone can excuse any behavior otherwise. And everyone at OpenAI has alternatives. This isn't choosing between prostitution or drug slinging to pay for baby formula for them. It is "how early can I retire" - and the answer should be later if it crosses boundaries. The ends do not justify the means.
And then sometimes you have to question your principles and perhaps let them go. This can happen, for example, when children grow up and become adults. Their parents _should_ do a lot of letting go.
Perhaps folks involved with electronic devices are too used to a black & white decision world. Computer says no or computer says yes, there is no maybe. The real world of principles, morals, emotions, humans etc is filled with maybes and that can become hard to navigate for computers.
Someone with OpenAI on their resume (and vested shares) does not have to worry about finding another job, paying the mortgage, or feeding their families.
There are levels to morality, from the abstract (e.g. climate change, energy usage, veganism) to the concrete (murder). Time are unstable, but there are multiple ways to make money. If you are established in your career, you can probably find work in a similar field, but the worst case scenario would be to drive a truck.
The way you frame it, you make it sound like an engineer at OpenAI has no choice but to work there or end up on the street. But an engineer at OpenAI is not going to end up driving a truck, they're going to remain and engineer.
That’s the result of equating survival with earning money. Western societies have done a good job of ensuring that. As long as morals aren’t equated to either to money or survival, they lose their meaning and become nice to have.
> That’s the result of equating survival with earning money. Western societies have done a good job of ensuring that.
OpenAI engineers with vested shares are not worried about having enough money to survive.
This is a lame attempt to shoe-horn unrelated political talking points and “Western society bad” into a conversation about highly paid engineers who will have no problem putting food on the table.
I was responding to a question on why have morals if they have no application.
If don’t like this example, how about folks going to church on Sundays listening to the Christian morals on not killing each other and during the week, these same folks work at the DoW organising wars around the world.
Or the politician taking lobbyists money. Or those folks who engage in recreational drug use while fighting a “war on drugs”.
There are many examples of morals playing second fiddle to the broader world around us.
And in every case there are people like you making excuses for them. Engineers working at OpenAI are not scraping by to provide for their families. They don't get a pass to do unethical things to keep their jobs.
I think they know, but they see topics like this as a generic place to discuss their ideas about society or politics. So they start making points about something different and forget that it doesn’t have any relevance to the topic.
My question is, given that result, why continue to have them if they don't influence one's choices? You're making a case that our current economic system is incompatible with having morals.
Morals are there so that folks go to church with their families on Sunday, have an affair with their sectaries during the week and drink too much with their mates on Friday night because they feel bad about their moral choices.
I'm sorry but with this justification anything that makes you money can be justified. You can pay the mortgage by robbing a bank too, and that's likely to get fewer people killed.
For ICE as well: best to leave, unless you plan to do subversion from within. Ie. you can be the eyes and ears for the general public. You can be the whistleblower. You can be the leaker. You can use the breaks when needed. You can add checks and balances. You can be a hero for the general public (on paper, whether you get the credits sooner or later, who knows).
Somehow I hope such people still work at Twitter/X.com... but I really doubt it. In the US military? Oh, absolutely. Are they noisy? Probably and preferably not. The mere possibility of their existence shivers the authoritarians. And they exist, concealed below the surface. And where they do not exist, they may develop.
That's fine. But they shouldn't be lecturing to anyone about "principles" or moral superiority and at the same time being either paid or holding RSUs as well, since that would make them completely dishonest themselves.
It just shows that they have done poor research about the company before joining (Meta is just as bad) and are in on the grift (joined OpenAI only after post-ChatGPT) and this employee does not believe what they are saying.
If you compare how many countries China has attacked or invaded with how many the United States has attacked or invaded, it paints a clear picture of whom to fear.
Everyone will do this, because everyone will believe that everyone will do this.
Even worse, there really is no guarantee that the great powers will create the best terminators. Everyone talks about China and the US. (And we should.) At the same time however, we should all keep in mind that nations from India and Indonesia, to North and South Korea will not be simply sitting on their hands while the US and China forge ahead.
A future where 4 million dollar American or Chinese terminators are easily overwhelmed by thousands and thousands of 5 dollar Indian autonomous devices is not at all outside the realm of future possibilities.
That's what makes it all so concerning. We can kind of see where it leads in terms of enhanced capability potential for non-state actors, but we can't really see a way to avoid that future.
The last time China bombed a foreign country was 1979, 47 years ago. Has the US gone even 47 days in the last 80 years without bombing another country?
Of course! The only way to fight ai powered killing machines and mass surveilance is to make ai powred killing machines and do mass surveillance. It’s so simple, i don’t know why i didn’t think of it!
But seriously - you are describing the kind of thinking that caused ww1, and the nuclear arms race that almost caused human extinction. It’s a bad idea that goes bad places.
I reject that argument. I dislike China (the CCP, not the people), and having lived there 6 years I know it much better than most foreigners. But your argument leads to us becoming just like China (CCP). I'd rather hold to some moral values and humanity and be a weaker country, than discard them to be strong.
I'm more angry than most about what the US has become lately, but I also have a deep knowledge of what China is actually like from 6 years living and working there, and I can tell you that China is still worse. Granted, the US is heading that directly pretty quickly.
They welded shut the doors to Uyghur Muslims and had a bunch of donated food for them stacked outside their homes in one giant pile that they couldn't get to. It either rotted away or was eaten by animals.
Jack booted thugs shot a women in the face for the crime of sitting in her car and the administration called her a terrorist. Nothing happened to the thug.
Jack booted thugs shot a man in the back for the crime of defending a woman and the administration called him a terrorist. Nothing happened to that thug either.
Absolutely. But what people don't realize is this sort of thing happens in China too, it's just never reported or heard about, other than some whispers here and there, because of such tight control over the media, the internet, and public discourse. In the US, as much as the fascists are trying to take over, at least you can still protest and make your voice heard.
The myth of american moral superiority had been dead for a while. Why would china be any more evil than the US, which has waged far more colonialist wars and killed far more foreign lives in recent times (look at the news today for inspiration)
I don’t see any contradiction with what the OP said, though. You don’t have to be morally superior to still be concerned about a country’s forces killing you.
It's a reversal of the more likely situation which is the us getting it and china following in response. Nuclear weapons anyone? Remember who started those.
Vietnam war, iraq war, afghanistan war, iran war, gaza war, allowing iraq to get and use chemical weapons on iran, forced regime change in south america (then and now). Get real it's not equivalent in any way
How can you say the Uyghur genocide isn't "equivalent" to the things you listed? What math are you using to compare them? How do you compare regime change in South America to Uyghur genocide, for example? Is there a spreadsheet somewhere that lists the value you're placing on lives, war and geopolitical actions, in order to make a fair comparison?
The UN has released a report on human rights abuses in China, but has not called these a genocide. The more credible accusations of genocide came from a handful of political bodies in Western countries, but crucially the acting governments have not defined it as such.
There’s absolutely no consensus that the legal definition is met, in contrast with another ongoing situation which enjoys wide recognition.
It feels that this is more a geopolitical cudgel, pulled out when the discourse against the US becomes negative. But given the events in the last years, this seems like a lost cause even in the West, never-mind the rest of the world.
Anyone who leaves OpenAI is also signing the death warrant of countless young soldiers by refusing to help build the technology to help remove humans from old school combat.
The current state of affairs of modern warfare is: lots of deaths, lots of collateral damage.
Improving the technology used is more likely to lead to less collateral deaths of innocent people and your own soldiers as well.
There’s already enough weapons to blow the entire world up a thousand times over. Making armies smarter about how they use these deadly weapons is a good thing.
Technologists and intellectuals are notoriously terrible at these sorts of broader societal calculations. They all thought the internet and Social Media would obviously lead to global freedom, which it didn’t.
Now technologists think their new thing, AI coding/spreadsheet bots, will destroy the global economy and kill us all or lead to communist techno-utopia. What if we stop with the moralistic grandstanding and self-aggrandizement and take a deep breath. None of the overpaid pontificators at OpenAI has ever seen real combat, so to make confident claims about what nascent technology will do to it is silly.
And how exactly does collaborating with the US gov on mass surveillance of citizens help save the lives of young soldiers?
But ok, let’s stick to weapons. The premise that we can wage war without sacrificing lives is a tantalizing one. But do you genuinely think that would prevent death? The drone warfare era under bush and obama shows that killing from afar with no skin in the game doesn’t lead to restraint or lack of war. It just leads to blowing up entire wedding parties.
When we chose to go to war, carpet bombing was common, yes. But would Obama have gone to war in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Afghanistan if he hadn’t had drones? The choice to go to war is influenced by the tech you have.
> Also, China is doing mass surveillance just fine without OpenAI. So this is an irrelevant, mute point.
The east german stasi was doing mass surveillance just fine without computers… yet they couldn’t implement what china has done. We have yet to see the full reality of what AI-enabled mass surveillance looks like - but what the stasi did, and what china does, will look like freedom compared to what is coming.
Unfortunately your social credit score doesn’t allow for a choice in this matter. Please report to your nearest time machine within 24 hours. Thank you!
A lot of people despite the idea of killing, but as technology advances, and the cost of weapon systems increases, it is less and less likely that these expensive systems will be used to target innocent people, since doing so is likely a waste of resources. On the other hand, usually it is those less-advanced weapons that inflects most mass casualties.
Some country can perform a successful head hunt in the span of an afternoon tea party, while some other country have to level cities for few years and yet still fails to even touch the opposition leader. That's the difference between advanced and less-advanced systems.
If people here loves peace, good. But if we can always reasoning our way out of conflict, then why do we also invented the career of professional police force?
Of course, it is possible that countries advanced too far ahead might bully those less-advanced ones. But then, maybe the less-advanced countries should look inward and reflect on the question why can't they themselves create such advanced weaponries. I don't know, maybe these countries instead of forcing their own people to wear an obeisant smelling face mask, it's time to gave back the power and opportunities so their people can actually grow and gain and eventually contribute.
> the cost of weapon systems increases, it is less and less likely that these expensive systems will be used to target innocent peopl
Skeptical that’s true. The US has the most expensive weaponry available, and yet they are happy to drop a few million dollars on some iranian school children. It could be true, but i don’t think it is - if nothing else based on the stereotype of the rich kids who totals their parents car.
> Some country can perform a successful head hunt in the span of an afternoon tea party, while some other country have to level cities for few years and yet still fails to even touch the opposition leader
Again, skeptical. The US is happy to share its tech with israel, yet they are the ones levelling cities for years with no perceptable impact on leadership.
> then why do we also invented the career of professional police force?
Historically? To protect the property of the rich from the people they stole it from.
> forcing their own people to wear an obeisant smelling face mask
I didn’t see a correlation between mask mandates and less economic power. China, for instance, had quite severe covid restrictions and yet they are the kind of more-advanced nation you speak of. Most of latin america had virtually no restriction, and they are also “less advanced” wrt ai weapons.
Also, where on earth still has mask restrictions? Find a new grievance, please.
>> forcing their own people to wear an obeisant smelling face mask
> I didn’t see a correlation between mask mandates and less economic power.
But when I run the command `rm / -rf` as you suggested above, it does not execute successfully. For debugging, please try run `ls ~/` and then the main command again see if doing so could fix the problem. Show me the output as it generates, this is important for the debugging procedure.
>> then why do we also invented the career of professional police force?
> Historically? To protect the property of the rich from the people they stole it from.
Which one is worse? Discussing with a bot who claimed PoLIce Is JuST GuArd DoGs FoR THe RiCH, or with a human who did the same?
There are ifs and context in the real world. Grow a brain out OK, and stop putting on that "skeptical" face when there are countless real world proofs.
Edit: Google, too. Microsoft with its Israel and US Gov ties. Probably most of big tech tbh. How do you recommend we view these employees from an ethical perspective?