Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 369 posts

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#31

Post by estearum »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #23
jofzar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's silicon valley, literally everything is for pay or be homeless

That's everywhere, there are homeless people everywhere. The difference is Silicon Valley feels so guilty about it's wealth it refuses to do the normal things that societies do to prevent people from living like animals because 'rights' or something, so they let drug addicts live in their common spaces without treatment. This normally isn't tolerated in a functioning society where people are pressured into behaviors…

No, homeless people are not everywhere.

Homelessness is created by high rents. High rents are created by high local productivity. The people who are productive enough to make it over the rent-bar are housed, and their marginal productivity above the rent-bar serves to raise the rent-bar (talk to any landlord about how they set rent prices: it's the local wages, stupid). This then pushes a greater proportion of people below the rent-bar, and then they are homeless.

There are few places in the world more productive per square foot than Silicon Valley, ergo one must be extremely productive in order to remain housed there, ergo it has an extremely bad homelessness problem.

That's why people making $200k+ (an extremely productive person by national standards) need public housing assistance in Silicon Valley (https://www.reuters.com/article/world/palo-alto-considers-su...). Which of course actually just... raises the rent again...

The charities may be full of grift and whatnot, but you can remove them entirely and you will not solve the fundamental problem.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#33

Post by pferde »

RandomLensman wrote: post #19
danlitt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people have strong morals, and might resist profit-maximising behaviours, but they will be outcompeted and replaced by less scrupulous people. There is actually no sharp difference between a person and a one-person-company, but: to the degree a company is really a company and not just a person, it is amoral. If you disagree, please point to a moral backstop that would prevent any company from taking immoral acts…

The people and procedures inside are the backstop.

can be the backstop. The word "can" is doing some extremely heavy lifting here, against corporate practices which dilute and spread guilt and responsibility for immoral decisions so thin, nobody in the decision chain even realizes something immoral has been decided.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#34

Post by podgietaru »

parpfish wrote: post #25

their only ethicist left? gasp ! now they are exactly like every other company that has zero ethicists on staff and expect the employees to weigh the ethical ramifications of their work.

What companies do you think expect their employees to weigh the ethical ramifications of their work?

I’d argue a lot of them expect the opposite. To suppress the ethical concerns.

Even in recent memories you had Mark Zuckerberg telling his employees to use pirated sources. And executives at fossil fuel companies have to act unethically.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#37

Post by shafyy »

estearum wrote: post #31
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's everywhere, there are homeless people everywhere. The difference is Silicon Valley feels so guilty about it's wealth it refuses to do the normal things that societies do to prevent people from living like animals because 'rights' or something, so they let drug addicts live in their common spaces without treatment. This normally isn't tolerated in a functioning society where people are pressured into behaviors…

No, homeless people are not everywhere. Homelessness is created by high rents. High rents are created by high local productivity. The people who are productive enough to make it over the rent-bar are housed, and their marginal productivity above the rent-bar serves to raise the rent-bar (talk to any landlord about how they set rent prices: it's the local wages, stupid). This then pushes a greater proportion of people…

> High rents are created by high local productivity.

Wrong. High rents have many reasons and also good policies to get them down and have affordable housing for more people, also in otherwise expensive and popular cities.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#38

Post by outside1234 »

pants2 wrote: post #35
cyanydeez wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So more of an ethicist-for-pay than for the challenge of it.

I'd think an ethicist at Meta/OpenAI involves extremely challenging mental gymnastics

Severance in real life

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#39

Post by nixon_why69 »

cyanydeez wrote: post #7
fidotron wrote: post #6

> Before working at OpenAI, she was Meta’s chief ethicist

So more of an ethicist-for-pay than for the challenge of it.

Any ethicist for a corporation is clearly a PR move, right?

Like, a pure researcher for a corporation might have some genuine overlap and shared interests where breakthroughs in the research benefit both parties, but an ethicist?? For a legal construct that's defined by and bound to sociopathically pursue profit? Come on now.

Re: OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

#40

Post by applicative »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #14
lenerdenator wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, economics in general doesn't, but yes. There isn't much ethical merit in building a wall around a city with guard towers, attack dogs, and anti-personnel mines to keep the citizens in so that they can contribute to your economic vision, for example.

You mean like in East Berlin?

BRD and DDR were in a quite particular competition. The DDR contained less than 20% of the German people, and West Germany would happily have absorbed them all.

The capitalistic world state system was only completed in the last 50 or so years and was of course seconded by the Stalin machine. Its purpose is in the first instance to keep working populations in place, which is why all the states agree to it as they form. The system holds solid where capital moves (as did 'communism' and Comecon) but the peoples don't.

It is only when you think of individual states and not the system that you can fail to notice that we get the same result if they all try to keep their citizens in, and if they all try to keep the others' citizens out.

Post reply on HN