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.
Morals were invented to hold a larger group of humans together. Smaller groups can be held together by everyone knowing each other, larger groups required a more complex system of trust.
Morals are the glue for nation states. Morals prevent us from driving over others, morals prevent us from being mean to others. Moral makes us trust the politicians we vote for because we are told they have the same morals as we.
My somewhat cynical picture of morals is only to make a point of how deep morals go in our societies. Folks have conscience and morals are the basis of that conscience - be it good or evil.
Police and armies enforce these morals in the form of laws and legal constructs. Important to note though that morals are not filly encoded as laws, these are two concepts are separate societal adhesives.
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.