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Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

washingtonpost.com

261–270 of 567 posts

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

#261
It is interesting how these companies shift with the political winds

Just like Meta announced some changes around the time of inauguration, I'm sure Google management has noticed the AI announcements, and they don't want to be perceived in a certain way by the current administration

I think the truth is more in the middle (there is tons of disagreement within the company), but they naturally care about how they are perceived by those in power

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

#262

I want to be upset over this in an exasperated expression of oddly naive "why can't we all get along?" frame of mind. I want to, because I know how I would like the world to look like, but as a species we, including myself, continually fail to disappoint when it comes nearly guaranteed self-destruction. I want to get upset over it, but I sadly recognize the reality of the why this is not surprising to anyone. We actu…

> We actually have competitors in that space, who will do that and more So what? Can't Google find other sources of revenue than building weapons?

Why would it turn down billions in government contracts unless otherwise punished by its shareholders?

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

#264

Why on earth would a for profit company refuse a potential line of profit? They already dumped "do no evil" many years ago and they are now all in on fuck the poor and fuck the rest: I'm making profits and all is fine. Google makes money and they don't appear to care how - its all about the money.

>> Why on earth would a for profit company refuse a potential line of profit? On the one hand I think they were afraid many of their employees might protest again like they have in the past, signaling that Google isn't that awesome, progressive place everybody should work. This would mean they could be potentially losing some of the top notch SV talent that they are in constant competition with from other companies.…

"they're really all about the money."

When you publicly quote: You are mostly lost to reason and profit is everything! That's why you do it.

If you have other intentions then go with a Not for Profit (I'm sure most countries have a similar structure) or similar setup.

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

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it woke nonsense to not want to create a weapon that probabilistically determines if a civilian looks close enough like a bad guy to missle strike them?

Or better yet, misinterpret who the target is even supposed to be because of a hallucination.

> Or better yet, misinterpret who the target is even supposed to be because of a hallucination.

Who, in that business, cares?

AI will provide a fig leaf for the indiscriminate large scale killing that is regularly done since the start of industrialised warfare.

Using robots spare drone pilots from PTSD

From the perspective of the murderous thugs that run our nations (way way before the current bunch of plainly bonkers ones in the USA), what is not to like?

Whilst there are all sorts of quibbles about weapons generally being evil, this is evil.

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

#266

Many will hate to hear this but the only solution is one world government or at least a unipolar order that reduces the survival need to participate in arms races. Arms race dynamics between nations will be the end of our species.

Some country leaders do think this. But they're very particular about having that one world government named "USA" or "Russia".

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

#267

I pledge to not drink coffee. drinks coffee Nevermind.

More like:

I pledge to not drink coffee

Somebody hands me coffee

I retract the pledge and start drinking

---

I have to wonder what the value of a pledge is if you can just stop pledging something at the earliest convenience, do the thing, and people cheer you on for it

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

#269

It's not like they're above lying, why do they even care to update this?

Would it be too far out there to imagine that the LLMs they were training for weapons systems knew it violated their rules and were resisting compliance?

The alignment-faking research seems to indicate that LLMs exercise of this kind of reasoning.

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

#270
post #39
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…

You're taking about pre-Clinton consumerism. That system is dead. It used to dictate that the company who could offer the best value deserved to take over most of the market. That's old thinking. Now we have servitization. Now the business who can most efficiently offer value deserves the entire market. Basically, iterate until you're the only one left standing and then never "sell" anything but licenses ever again.

I prefer the angle that describes this as a shift from value production to value extraction. Value production means coming up with new goods or services, or new/better ways to make existing ones. Value extraction means looking at existing economic exchanges, and figuring out how to get X percent of some of them.
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