The more I learn about how AI companies trained their models, the more obvious it is that the rest of us are just suckers. We're out here assuming that laws matter, that we should never misrepresent or hide what we're doing for our work, that we should honor our own terms of use and the terms of use of other sites/products, that if we register for a website or piece of content we should always use our work email address so that the person or company on the other side of that exchange can make a reasonable decision about whether we can or should have access to it.
What we should have been doing all along is YOLO-ing everything. It's only illegal if you get caught. And if you get big enough before you get caught then the rules never have to apply to you anyway.
And if you were in any doubt before, this lesson is now exemplified by the holder of the highest office in the land and approved by popular vote. The rewards of acting ethically are, unfortunately, sometimes only personal. This must be a hard environment to raise children in, given the examples they see around them.
Parent here: it takes a lot of discussion, but it's a great time to talk about the reality of evil and villains. My kids are on the good side, or at least I like to think so ...
This argument may focus too much on the category of external rewards.
I might well be kidding myself or self-justifying, but I believe internal rewards are at least as important. Some materially successful people are deeply unhappy.
He didn't state 'by majority' anywhere in that comment. Approved. By popular vote, by some portion of the totality of popular vote, unspecified as far as the post goes.
Approved by enough popular vote to attain plurality. I'll take your quibble as a cute fixation with correctness when it comes to statistics, and not as it otherwise tends to manifest.
>What we should have been doing all along is YOLO-ing everything
No it isn't. The actual sucker attitude is copying what they do. You should act morally and with integrity out of respect for yourself. I never had any illusions that large tech companies act with respect towards the law, but it also has nothing to do with me.
If you have a spare few hours, the Acquired podcast episode on Meta is enlightening. They just stumbled through growth hack experiment after experiment without seemingly any risk assessment or ethics.
This sort of mindset is devoid of morals and honor. Don’t fall into the this mindset trap.
Like when Trump said he is “smart” for evading taxes during the presidential debates (IIRC the first ones, not recent ones).
It’s absolutely despicable. Have a moral compass. Treat people fairly. Be nice. Let’s be better than toddlers who haven’t learned yet that hitting is bad, and you shouldn’t do it even if mommy and daddy aren’t in the room.
I agree with you and will die to defend that position, but what existential reasons do we have to behave well? In reality, it seems like humans are just a bunch of animals, and the only important thing is survival.
My wife, just today, told me that she was very upset that I refused to interview and take jobs for things like building weapons, the panopticon, or advertising (two of those are the same thing), which I refuse to do because of my personal morals and ethics. How do I explain to her that I just can't do that, and give her a good reason why we should lose our home and live in one room with her mother because of my brain refusing to work in such industries? I really want to know, so I can explain to her and my son why such things matter, because for some reason they are concrete and foundational in my brain, there is no changing that.
> what existential reasons do we have to behave well?
Fundamentally we’re built for small group survival, so playing nice and sharing resources increases your odds for survival. That’s why we care about others, in an evolutionary perspective.
> In reality, it seems like humans are just a bunch of animals, and the only important thing is survival.
At the end of the day, yes we’re animals. But we also have built hugely complex societies and think about philosophy etc.
Throwing away all morality and just doing whatever you can get away with is like being an animal. It strips out humanity.
And personally I’d urge you to find some places you’d want to interview for that align with your morals. If your wife, or anyone, asks you to compromise your morals then try bringing home the consequences to something they care about.
For example, won’t build weapons? Ask “Would you be ok if I worked for X, and my work resulted in the deaths of children?”
> “Would you be ok if I worked for X, and my work resulted in the deaths of children?”
At this point, one can very well expect that working for X (as in 'X, the website formerly known as Twitter') will MOST SURELY result in the deaths of children.
> what existential reasons do we have to behave well?
Overall humans play pretty nice, all things considered. If you get sick someone will help you, if you lose your job you can fall back on assistance. Hell, even the fact you HAVE a job is a privilege granted to you.
Other animals don't do that. They eat their young, because they feel like it. Without the will and kindness of other humans, a fact that we take so for granted we fail to recognize it as "society", most of us wouldn't live 10 days. That's not an exaggeration either - check out infant mortality statistics throughout human history.
What we should have been doing all along is YOLO-ing everything. It's only illegal if you get caught. And if you get big enough before you get caught then the rules never have to apply to you anyway.
Suckers. All of us.