I think a man who makes that kind of choice is seriously admirable. I could never have made that choice myself.
Why I Left Google DeepMind
91–100 of 186 posts
Re: Why I Left Google DeepMind
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly? A few ideas 1. US aid abroad to help stem the conditions that drive many of the migrants to flee their homes. Build up institutions, enforcement, and anti-corruption frameworks so these nations can better build themselves. I'd even be open to hawkish approaches -- frankly it's been surprisingly to see the positive responses to Venezuelan interference by the US. 2. Immigration enforcement needs use-of-force…
I mean, you have an immigration policy or you don’t have one. If you have one, you need to enforce it. The unfortunate truth is that any attempt at law enforcement sometimes leads to deaths, and it doesn’t matter what you’re enforcing. The US should not have responsibility to solve all of the rest of the world’s problems to justify enforcing it’s borders.
Third option: realize the effect of the policy is undesirable and change it.
Re: Why I Left Google DeepMind
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, I feel like the people who say no to AI weapons haven't actually presented a real argument (that I have heard) besides terminator bad
Regardless of whether AI is involved, many people simply don't want to work on weapons systems, or on non-weapons technologies that are intended to become part of a weapons system.
Thats fine, but a serious luxury belief IMO
Re: Why I Left Google DeepMind
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
If half of us were half as principled as this guy, the world would be a much better place.
No, they would just walked all over by the 2% who have no principles whatsoever. Kind of like what's happening already. Principles are only good up until they enable you to be systematically victimized.
Don't play fair in a game others cheat.
Re: Why I Left Google DeepMind
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI helps people scale. If being "on target" means that you find people when they're eating dinner so you can kill their entire family, then using AI to scale that up is a terrible thing. That's exactly what Israel did with Lavender. They literally had a kill list called "Where's daddy?". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39918245
As opposed to what though? Again, I assert violence is inevitable.
AI is the end of the funnel and I actually think the mass surveillance at the beginning of the funnel is a bigger issue. The concentration of power is the problem. If you or I could defend ourselves against state level actors with AI weapons, then they would be a good thing (imho). AI and mass surveillance at the state level create a power imbalance that is a major threat to human rights and should be resisted as much as possible.
Re: Why I Left Google DeepMind
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the upside, I guess maybe DeepMind is hiring. ... I'm sure I'll get flamed into oblivion for this but it's weird to me how the zeitgeist is anti-colonialism but also against enforcing borders and national sovereignty. I guess maybe they are okay with it unless you're a western nation. Whatever, there's no room for nuanced opinions anymore in modern online discourse. I'll admit to being a weird outlier on this. I m…
> I'm sure I'll get flamed into oblivion for this but it's weird to me how the zeitgeist is anti-colonialism but also against enforcing borders and national sovereignty Let me try a reply that is perhaps a little more constructive than where this discussion went. I think most folks would frame home rule and freedom of movement in the context of basic individual rights, not national rights. I suggest you might fare be…
Fair comment and thank you.
"Freedom of movement" is a fairly loaded term, but is defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is: - "Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state." - "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."
Freedom of movement isn't the right to go live anywhere you want across any national jurisdiction (although some people/organizations would disagree, but that just doesn't survive any legal test). Every nation on the planet has very explicit rules around this. Even the unrecognized ones.
I guess I don't necessarily agree with elected officials systematically not enforcing laws that they don't agree with. It's hard to be rigid about this when there's things like Executive Orders, but I'm very pro "Change the law". And admittedly that's very difficult and it should be so -- new law should be hard to get to.
This process happens all the way from the local to national level, but we have terrible governance. Every structure seems to be abdicating its responsibility and overreaching in one way or another. It's precisely in these conditions that I think leaning into rule of law is more important than ever.
Otherwise we're just playing Whose Country Is It Anyway? Where the rules are made up and your rights don't matter. I also feel that this should be a compelling enough argument regardless of your political persuasion, but we've gone just about completely tribalist.
Re: Why I Left Google DeepMind
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly? A few ideas 1. US aid abroad to help stem the conditions that drive many of the migrants to flee their homes. Build up institutions, enforcement, and anti-corruption frameworks so these nations can better build themselves. I'd even be open to hawkish approaches -- frankly it's been surprisingly to see the positive responses to Venezuelan interference by the US. 2. Immigration enforcement needs use-of-force…
I mean, you have an immigration policy or you don’t have one. If you have one, you need to enforce it. The unfortunate truth is that any attempt at law enforcement sometimes leads to deaths, and it doesn’t matter what you’re enforcing. The US should not have responsibility to solve all of the rest of the world’s problems to justify enforcing it’s borders.
If we are just talking about "enforcing policy" then which specific policy was being enforced when Renée Good and Alex were killed? Renée was a U.S. citizen driving her six-year-old to school in Minneapolis -- far from the border. Firing into a moving vehicle as it drives away isn't "border enforcement". Rather, it's a severe violation of standard police protocol.
You can believe in secure borders without accepting the extrajudicial killing of civilians in American suburbs as just an "unfortunate truth."
The idea that "any law enforcement sometimes leads to deaths" is a cop-out that excuses bad policing. Professional law enforcement operates on strict rules of engagement to prevent unnecessary deaths. When a federal agent shoots through the side window of a car steering away from them, they aren't "enforcing the law". They are breaking it. We don't accept lethal recklessness from local traffic cops, and we shouldn't shrug it off as "collateral damage" just because the agents belong to ICE.
No one is arguing that the U.S. has to solve the world's problems, but Minneapolis is 1,500 miles from the southern border. The deaths of Renée and Alex didn't happen while defending a boundary. They happened because the federal government deployed militarized, chaotic street sweeps into residential neighborhoods. Justifying their deaths by talking about "enforcing borders" completely ignores where this happened, how it happened, and who was killed.
Re: Why I Left Google DeepMind
#98Respect for sticking to your beliefs. Just out of curiosity though why do people not want smart AI weapons? I would much rather have an onboard AI that can discriminate between unarmed civilians and military assets, seems irresponsible to not... Is a dumb sea mine that blows up everything somehow better than a smart sea mine that knows to not blow up sometimes?
"You're absolutely right, that wasn't a military target—it was actually a girls school. It won't happen again!"
I realize that's not a great argument and was definitely tongue-in-cheek, but given there's still a lot of debate about the accuracy of AI for far more mundane tasks, my personal perspective is that until we have LLMs and such that are truly, demonstrably far more accurate than humans, with true reasoning and judgement capabilities, they don't belong where lives are at stake.
I wouldn't want an LLM-underpinned machine running anesthesia during a surgery; why would I want an LLM-underpinned military apparatus that is deciding the lives of far more? I wouldn't, not in their current state.
In a hypothetical future where we truly trust incredibly smart AIs or LLMs or whatever "smart" technology it is for driving weaponry, okay - if it's truly necessary; I abhor war and the death and destruction wrought by it.
In my mind, though - even if we get to that future where there's some vastly superior technology to the LLMs we have today, which can judge and reason, then I'll have a bunch of other questions, like understanding the motivations of said technology, because I suspect it'll be something much closer to AGI, and that opens a whole separate can of philosophical worms.
Re: Why I Left Google DeepMind
#99It is honorable but ultimately hasn’t democracy spoken wrt the issues mentioned in the post? For better or worse millions of Americans voted for the guy doing the deportations. I also find it difficult to reconcile not using AI for weapons. If war is inevitable AI presumably would at least ensure you are on target.
It does appear to be anti-democratic given everyone knew Trump’s platform when he was voted in. However the great unifying fact of politics is that everyone only really believes in democracy when they win.
Re: Why I Left Google DeepMind
#100It is honorable but ultimately hasn’t democracy spoken wrt the issues mentioned in the post? For better or worse millions of Americans voted for the guy doing the deportations. I also find it difficult to reconcile not using AI for weapons. If war is inevitable AI presumably would at least ensure you are on target.
Agreed, I feel like the people who say no to AI weapons haven't actually presented a real argument (that I have heard) besides terminator bad
I think there's some nuance here that a lot of these convos dont make plain - are we talking about just using 'ai' in the military broadly, or are we specifically talking about fully autonomous weapons systems?
In the former case, I would agree with you completely, I havent heard any arguments beyond 'I dont like working on military stuff'. But if we're talking fully autonomous weapons, that's a different story. And further muddying the waters is the fact that the former is obviously a step along the path to the latter.