[yoyohello13]

> people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment).

Honestly, we should judge. There should be judgment for people who are solely money motivated and making the world a worse place. I know, blah blah privilege, something something mouths to feed. Platitudes to help the rich assholes sleep at night. If you are wealthy and making stuff that hurts people, you are a piece of shit and should be called out, simple.

[smith7018]

I completely agree. The tech industry has long been overrun by people sacrificing morals for money and it's destroyed society and presumably the world. We've given people a free pass to work for companies we've all known are harming the fabric of society and look where it's gotten us. I'm sorry, I would rather be poor and switch careers if my only option was xAI and making image generation models that explicitly allow people to undress others. At X's scale, technology like that harms an unfathomable amount of people. I could never have that on my conscience. All so I could make more money than a job at another tech company? I'd rather work somewhere innocuous like Figma, Cloudflare, Notion, Jetbains, Linear, etc. Hell, if you only wanted to work for an AI company then at least go to Anthropic.

[sph]

I like how some in this thread are telling their anecdotes about how shitty the company is from when they were in, or interviewing with, xAI. I mean, thanks for your input guys, but how do you go through life without having a moral backbone?

“Here’s my story from that time I had an interview with IG Farben…”

[jihadjihad]

Shame is a powerful social tool, but sadly some are simply immune.

[janalsncm]

The problem with this argument is you can’t know or control what will happen in the future with something you built. This is the same moral dilemma the scientists faced after developing nuclear bombs.

And the future is not deterministic (or if it is, it is highly chaotic) so the existence of a thing does not have a simple relationship with what will happen in the future. Scientists who developed convolutional neural nets could not know how much good or evil was caused by image recognition technologies. The same technologies that are used to detect tumors in images can be used to target people for assassination.

There are exceptions, but my opinion is the supply chain of evil is paved with mundane inventions.

[Perseids]

Yes, yes, true, but you've massively moved the goalpost. The original commenter was referring to people working at xAI right now. To continue your comparison, your argument would be like Oppenheimer claiming "How could I have ever known my work would be used as a weapon? I just wanted to make big explosions."

I don't know why this argument often pops up in these kinds of discussions. Approximately no one is judging people who have done their best effort to avoid doing harm. We are judging people who don't care in the first place.

[janalsncm]

Well if I moved it, consider this to be me putting it back where it was: people who continue to work on things which are concurrently being used in mostly harmful ways and have means to find a different job have no excuse.

As far as Oppenheimer is concerned, his argument is not that nukes are harmless, but that they are less harmful than Nazis, and much less harmful than Nazis with nukes.

[Perseids]

Thanks, I can very much agree with that.

Re Oppenheimer: I know. My point was that he very much knew what his work was being used for, as should people working at xAI at the moment.

[Ar-Curunir]

Plenty of the scientists involved in the Manhattan projects had immediate regrets. Plenty of rich people working in tech don't. That's the difference between having morals and not having morals, and the latter group needs to be judged and shunned.

[glitchc]

Work is and has always been an economic bargain: Your time for their money. Morality is a luxury that only the independently wealthy can afford. Any business that allows it's employees to function according to their own morals becomes uncompetitive against its peers. That's why small companies by individual founders who want to stay true to their mission often stay small. They inevitably get bought out by one of the larger ones.

[yoyohello13]

We are not talking about some destitute person hocking cigarettes on the street for minimum wage. We are talking about smart, educated people who are making 500k a year to build the torment nexus. There is no excuse for this. It’s pure greed and any other explanation is deflection.

[jerojero]

It's always baffling to me to see people in tech, particularly in hackernews, talking about others earning salaries many times the median of the country and acting like these are people who just simply have no other choice.

They really, really do. In fact, those salaries being so high is probably also due to the fact that you will be doing work that's a net-worse for the world so they gotta compensate accordingly.

A lot of these firms are parasitic institutions at a society level. They do benefit themselves and their workers at the expense of everyone else. Personally, I find it hard to respect someone that takes that choice, but I also get it. A lot of people only care about their own and their immediate people's benefit.

On that note, I really recommend "No other choice" by Park Chan-wook or the book ("The Ax") it is based on.

[Morromist]

"Morality is a luxury that only the independently wealthy can afford."

No? Why would you think this? Morality has been practiced by medieval peasants, by slaves, by soldiers sacrificing their lives, by people suffering from the plague, by gladiators. The rich are not known for their outstanding morality in any society I've ever heard of.

[glitchc]

I think we're agreeing. Morality requires some sacrifice. The rich have surplus to pay for it, the poor do not.

[lucianbr]

> Morality is a luxury that only the independently wealthy can afford.

No. At least as I understand the word, "morality" means something different than "do the right thing when it is easy". If only those who can afford it do it, it is not morality. Morality is choosing the right thing even when it costs you, even when it is hard.

[awesome_dude]

Speaking as someone that has spent a large amount of time unemployed because I have a moral compass - let me know when you actually walk that talk.

For me I could only do it because I had "f*ck you" money gained through investments, other people are able to do it because of welfare systems, or even through friends and family.

[lucianbr]

Textbook ad hominem. If the implication is that nobody sacrifices things for a principle or ever makes hard choices, that is so obviously wrong. Read some history.

[awesome_dude]

I literally said that I personally had done so; so the only ad hominem is coming from you.

I also asked if you had done it yourself, because, as I also said, from personal experience, it's a LOT easier said than done.

Edit: fixed subject as I hadn't realised the person accusing me of making an ad hominem was the person I had originally replied to.

[YetAnotherNick]

I don't know why the people here are naive enough to think that. Most programmers can donate more than 70% of their income to Africa if they want to make world a better place, yet they only target people earning more than 3x of them, even though majority of the world earns less than 1/3rd of them.

[make3]

spending your productive output making one of the most powerful terrible people alive more powerful just sounds depressing to me. do you really want your research to be how to make the personality of Elon's anti woke mind virus LLM better at erotic talk.

I guess it comes down to your daily efforts serving only to make the world a worst place, vs having a neutral job

[YetAnotherNick]

Allowing it to users who ask for erotic talk is in my opinion way better than forcing someone to watch shady ads based on private conversations.

[awesome_dude]

>> If you are wealthy

Then.. you wouldn't be working...

[yoyohello13]

Why is Elon still working then?

[rsynnott]

I'm not sure that posting deranged tweets at three in the morning _really_ qualifies as work.

[awesome_dude]

At the risk of drawing moderation ire..

When does Elon work?

[timacles]

He works pretty hard to destabilize democracy