On Resigning from Google

> the gas station down the street makes profit

The gas station down the street isn't paying its employees six figure salaries. That employee might be making $7.25 an hour, which is the federal limit. Assuming 40 hours per week and 52 weeks per year (no time off!), that's 15k before taxes. Is that gas station clerk a better/more worthwhile person than a gas station clerk in timbuktu?

> Do you think that makes you worth more than someone else?

Getting paid more than someone else doesn't make you a better person than someone else. It just means you're earning more income, and that company is willing to pay you that income for any multitude of reasons. That's it.

Programmers can provide immense value to companies, and companies make handsome profits despite paying their engineers immense salaries. This also has to do with cost of living in some areas: chicago is more expensive than many places in the world, so if you want to base a company in chicago and pay someone who lives in chicago to work for you, you need more money. It's not rocket science.

I think many companies don't need to be based in SF or Seattle, etc, but that's another discussion.

> The USA does not build nuclear weapons anymore, instead it invests heavily in diplomacy to prevent other countries from building nuclear weapons. For some reason, few people seem to consider that we could take the same approach to AI weaponry.

Because it didn't work with nuclear weapons. Just look at North Korea to name the most recent example.

> Yes, wealthy, powerful people at the top ranks of politics and business in this country, who stand to gain more wealth and power via the development of these weapons, support Google developing them. However, your position that since they're the authority figures, anybody who questions them is not an "adult", strikes me as extremely asinine and highly dangerous.

And your reflexive attitude towards "authority figures" strikes me as extremely adolescent.

Extremely intelligent people developing sophisticated technology for military applications is not an inherently bad thing.

> Arms races benefit military contractors but few other people. The 20th century taught us lessons about arms races and we should learn from them.

Indeed, but I don't think you've learned those lessons yourself. During the Second World War, if it weren't for the countless Allied scientists and engineers who designed weapons, broke codes, designed manufacturing processes, invented such things as the Mulberry harbors--the war would have, at minimum, lasted much longer than it did, and may have reached a much worse conclusion than it did.

I agree that evil dictators would probably find some profitable uses for AI technology. That's exactly why evil dictatorships are going to develop that technology anyway, regardless of whether we do or not. Oppenheimer, von Neumann, Feynman, and others refusing to help with the Manhattan Project wouldn't have made a whit of difference to whether or not Heisenberg was going to develop an atomic bomb for the Germans. And if Turing, Browning, Garand, Mitchell, and others refused to build weapons for the Allies, Heisenberg might have had the time and resources necessary to complete that bomb.

Why did it take 15 years for him to have this stance? Could salary, bonuses, 401K, home ownership, vesting, millions made have anything to do with it? I don't counter the arguments being made but the message is disingenuous to me. I ask why 15 years, because I knew Google was evil to a lot of markets, people and businesses well over 10 years ago and I don't even work for them. They have ruined people's livelihoods by simple business as usual decisions and it's nothing new. I wonder how these worker revolutions would hold up in other countries like China? Privileged people on their soapbox don't send the messages they think they do, regardless of the position. The common folk are just trying to survive and feed their kids and aren't exactly fond of the idea of doubling of their gas tax. They don't have millions of Google dollars in the bank.

Well you are free to go live your life under the rule of the Taliban or the Iranian mullahs if you really think they're the good guys in all of this.

Edit: There's a flagged-dead reply that says, "I don't, but I also don't think the Haska Meyna wedding party were the bad guys in all of this." Well, I don't think so either, which is why I think it's good to develop technology that improves the ability to accurately recognize drone targets!