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Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

#61
GOOD.

Nothing is going to stop USA's adversaries from deploying AI against US citizens. Pick your poison, but I prefer to compete and win rather than unilaterally disarm and hope for goodwill and kindness from regimes that prioritize the polar opposite.

Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

#63

At what point does a public promise carry any legal weight whatsoever? If it carries none, then why not leave it in place and lie? If it carries some, for how long and who has standing to sue? Genuine questions. Unlike "don't be evil," this promise has a very narrow and clear interpretation. It would be nice if companies weren't able to just kinda say whatever when it's expedient.

Absolutely no legal weight.

However, when you change a promise publicly, you signal a change in direction. It is much more honest than leaving it in place but violating it behind the scenes. If the public really cares, they can pass a law via their democratic representatives (or Google can swear a public oath before God I suppose).

Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

#64

I'm guessing this will be a somewhat controversial view here, but I think this is net good. The world is more turbulent than at any other time in my life, there is war in Europe, and the U.S. needs every advantage it can get to improve its defense. Companies like Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, can and should be working with the government on defense projects -- I would much rather the Department of Defense have access to…

> the U.S. needs every advantage it can get to improve its defense

That’s one of the reasons for the turbulent times. Let’s face the truth, most of the defense can easily be used for offense and given the state of online security every progress gets into the wrong hands.

Maybe it’s time to pause to make it more difficult for those wrong hands.

Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

#65

GOOD. Nothing is going to stop USA's adversaries from deploying AI against US citizens. Pick your poison, but I prefer to compete and win rather than unilaterally disarm and hope for goodwill and kindness from regimes that prioritize the polar opposite.

Yeah wouldn't want other countries to deal with us the way we've dealt with them.

Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

#68

At what point does a public promise carry any legal weight whatsoever? If it carries none, then why not leave it in place and lie? If it carries some, for how long and who has standing to sue? Genuine questions. Unlike "don't be evil," this promise has a very narrow and clear interpretation. It would be nice if companies weren't able to just kinda say whatever when it's expedient.

It's an ad.

Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

#69
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil), I think megacorps being evil is universal. It tends to be corrupt cop evil vs serial killer evil, but being willing to do anything for money has historically been categorized as evil behavior. That doesn’t mean society would be better or worse off without them, but it would be interesting to see a world where companies pay vastly higher tax…

Most suggestions of this nature fail to explain how they will deal with the problem of people just seeing there’s no point in trying for more. On a personal level, I’ve heard people from Norway describe this problem for personal income tax—at some point (notably below a typical US senior software engineer’s earnings) the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivati…

We're talking about corporations here, where are they going to go? If you had a competent government, you would say "fine, then leave. But your wealth and business is staying here" at some point the government has to do its job. These corporations pull in trillions of dollars, its wild to me to suggest that suddenly everyone would stop working and making money because they were taxed at a progressive rate. Its an absurd assumption to begin with.

We could literally have high speed rail, healthcare, the best education on the planet and have a high standard of living... and it would be peanuts to them. Instead we have a handful of people with more wealth than 99% of everyone else, while the bottom 75% of those people live in horrifying conditions. The fact that medical bankruptcy is a concept only in the richest country on earth is deeply embarrassing and shameful.

Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

#70
post #12

> "There’s a global competition taking place for AI leadership within an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape. We believe democracies should lead in AI development..." This is extremely disconcerting. Google as a tool of surveillance is the kind of thing that could so easily be abused or misused to such catastrophic ends that I absolutely think the hard line should be there. And I only feel significantly more…

... did they just present themselves as the saviors of all democracies?! Really?

By weaponising AI?

Who else right? If not them, there will be no one saving democracies with weaponized mass-surveillance AI. It is their quest and privilege, right? Medicine, just society, and all such crap have to wait!

I bought that!

(not)

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