Next up, Google drops "Don't" from their famous mantra, "Don't Be Evil".
Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance
391–400 of 567 posts
Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance
#392If you're going to be morally bankrupt, why not just keep the pledge and lie.
Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance
#393That feels like PR / virtue signaling. AI has the potential to significantly reduce the human cost of war in two ways: by removing soldiers from direct combat and by enabling precision strikes which minimize collateral damage. Over time, robot-soldiers will surpass human effectiveness, making it increasingly irrational to send people into harm's way. In that world, conflicts would shift toward being decided by techno…
Eh, we saw how AI was used during "war" for the first time. It was used to amass as many even remotely "justifiable" targets as possible, with corresponding increase in killed civilians, because humans could not keep up creating justifiable targets by other means. And at the same time it was used to justify the killings of people in more ways than one.
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
And Google is profiting of this, helping enforce a brutal illegal occupation.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-provided-a...
Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least Google employees will sign petitions and do things that follow a moral code. OpenAI is sneaky slimey and headed by a psycho narcissist. Makes Pichia looks like a saint. Ethically, it’s the same. But if someone was pointing a gun at me I’d rather have someone with some empathy behind the trigger rather than the personification of a company that bleeds high level execs and… insert many problems here
> At least Google employees will sign petitions and do things that follow a moral code. It hardly matters what employees think anymore when the executives are weather-vanes who point in the direction of wealth and power over all else (just like the executives at their competitors). In case you missed it, a few days back Google asked all employees who don't believe in their "mission" to voluntarily resign.
That's not at all what happened. One of Google's division offered a "voluntary exit" in lieu of or in addition to an upcoming layoff, and the email announcing it suggested that it could be a good option for some folks, for example people struggling or for folks who didn't like Google's direction.
That is not the same thing as asking everyone who doesn't believe in the mission to please resign.
Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance
#395A country that now threatens the annexation of Greenland and advocates for a complete resettlement of all Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt certainly needs weapons for crowd control. These weapons could also come in handy domestically if people find out that both parties screw them all the time. I wonder why people claim that China is a threat out side of economics. Has China tried to invade the US? Has Russia tried t…
"Russia hasn't tried to invade the EU" is quite weasel-word-y. They certainly have invaded countries in Europe, specifically Ukraine; the only reason they didn't invade countries in the European Union itself is that would trigger a war that they would face massive casualties from and inevitably lose, in part due to NATO alliances.
Military power is what has kept the EU safe, and countries without strong enough military power — such as Ukraine, which naively gave up its nuclear arsenal in the 90s in exchange for Russian promises to not invade — are repeatedly battered by the power-hungry.
Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance
#396They never had any real pledge
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-provided-a...
Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance
#397 While the music played you worked by candlelight
Those San Francisco nights
You were the best in town
Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl
You turned it on the world
That's when you turned the world around
Did you feel like Jesus?
Did you realize
That you were a champion in their eyes?
On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen clean
Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home
Every A-Frame had your number on the wall
You must have had it all
You'd go to L.A. on a dare
And you'd go it alone
Could you live forever?
Could you see the day?
Could you feel your whole world fall apart and fade away?Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance
#398Earlier 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…
Historically, unchecked corporate power tends to mirror the flaws of the systems that enable it. For example, the Gilded Age robber barons exploited weak regulations, while tech giants thrive on data privacy gray areas. Maybe the problem isn’t size itself, but the lack of guardrails that scale with corporate influence (e.g., antitrust enforcement, environmental accountability, or worker protections), but what do I kn…
> amorality
That word comes with a lot of boot-up code and dodgy dependencies.
I don't like it.
Did Robert Louis Stevenson make a philosophical error in 1882 supposing that a moral society (with laws etc) can contain within itself a domain outside of morals [0]?
What if coined the word "alegal"?
Oh officer... what I'm doing is neither legal nor illegal, it's simply alegal "
Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance
#399I initially thought that this was an announcement for a new pledge and thought, "they're going to forget about this the moment it's convenient." Then I read the article and realized, "Oh, it's already convenient." Google is a megacorp, and while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil), they are fundamentally unconcerned with goodness or morality, and any appearance that they are is purely…
A megacorp is made up of people. So it's people who are fundamentally evil.
The main thing here I think is anonymity through numbers and complexity. You and thousands of others just want to see the numbers go up. And that desire is what ultimately influences decisions like this.
If google stock dropped because of this then google wouldn't do it. But it is the actions of humans in aggregate that keeps it up.
Megacorporations are scapegoats when in actuality they are just a set of democratic rules. The corporation is just a window into the true nature of humanity.
Re: Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It was always a game of maximizing captured value. In such a game, creating value and capturing some portion of what you're producing is far less effective than value extraction, moving value around such that it's you capturing it, not someone else. A market, then, will by default encourage the latter strategy over the former. However, if the society in charge of a market observes value extraction occurring, it can respond by outlawing the particular extraction strategy being employed, and punish the parties participating. Then, for some time, market participants will turn to producing value instead, making more humble profits, until another avenue for extraction becomes available and quickly becomes the dominant strategy again. This cycle continues until the market eats the forces that would seek to regulate it and reign in extractive practices. That is what we're seeing here, at least in the US there is basically no political will behind identifying and punishing any new forms of harmful behavior, and we barely enforce existing laws regarding eg monopolies. Common wisdom among neoliberals and conservatives both is that big companies are good for the economy, and it's best to tread lightly in terms of regulating their behaviors, lest we interrupt their important value production process. One wonders if there are perhaps financial incentives to be so pro-corporate.