5 ms·

> Corporations are soulless money maximizers, even without the assistance of AI. Funny you should say that. Charlie Stross gave a talk on that subject - or mor

• slg 3y ago
  > While they are made up of humans I don’t know why we always gloss over this bit. Corporations don’t have minds of their own. People are making these decisions. We need to get rid of this notation that a person making an amoral or even immoral decision on behalf of their employer clears them of all culpability in that decision. People need to stop using “I was just doing my job” as a defense of their inhumane actions. That logic is called the Nuremberg Defense because it was the excuse literal Nazis used in the Nuremberg trials.
  • int_19h 3y ago
    The way large organizations are structured, there's rarely any particular person making a hugely consequential decision all by themselves. It's split into much smaller decisions that are made all across the org, each of which is small enough that arguments like "it's my job to do this" and "I'm just following the rules" consistently win because the decision by itself is not important enough from an ethical perspective. It's only when you look at the system in aggregate that it becomes evident. (I should also note that this applies to all organizations - e.g. governments are as much affected by it as private companies.)
    • slg 3y ago
      > I should also note that this applies to all organizations Yes, including the Nazi party. Like I said, this is the exact defense used in Nuremberg. People don’t get to absolve themselves of guilt just because they weren’t the ones metaphorically or literally pulling the trigger when they were still knowingly a cog in a machine of genocide.
      • mindslight 3y ago
        You're not really engaging with the problem. Sure, one can take your condemnation to heart, and reject working for most corporations, just like an individual back in Nazi Germany should have avoided helping the Nazis. But the fact is that most people won't. Since assigning blame harder won't actually prevent this "nobody's fault" emergent behavior from happening, the interesting/productive thing to do is forgo focusing on collective blame and analyze the workings of these systems regardless.
        • slg 3y ago
          > Sure, one can take your condemnation to heart, and reject working for most corporations, just like an individual back in Nazi Germany should have avoided helping the Nazis. But the fact is that most people won't. I would argue that one reason most people don’t is because we are not honest about these issues and we give people a pass for making these decisions on an individual level. Increasing the social stigma of this behavior would make it less common. It is our society that led us to the notation that human suffering is value neutral in a corporate environment. That isn’t some universal rule. I understand blaming society might not be seen as a productive solution, but the cause being so large does not mean any singular person is helpless. Society, like a corporation, is made up of individual people too. Next time you are in a meeting at work and someone suggests something that will harm others, question it.
• NumberWangMan 3y ago
  And this is why I'm really scared of AGI. Because we can see that corporations, even though they are composed of humans, who do care about things that humans care about, they still do things that end up harming people. Corporations need humanity to exist, and still fall into multi-polar traps like producing energy using fossil fuels, where we require an external source of coordination. AGI is going to turbo-charge these problems. People have to sleep, and eat, and lots of them aren't terribly efficient at their jobs. You can't start a corporation and then make a thousand copies of it. A corporation doesn't act faster than the humans inside it, with some exceptions like algorithmic trading, which even then is limited to an extremely narrow sphere of influence. We can, for the most part, understand why corporations make the decisions they make. And corporations are not that much smarter than individual humans, in fact, often they're a lot dumber (in the sense of strategic planning). And this is just if you imagine AGI as being obedient, not having a will of its own, and doing exactly what we ask it to, in the way we intended, not going further, being creative only with very strict limits. Not improving sales of potato chips by synthesizing a new flavor that also turns out to be a new form of narcotic ("oops! my bad"). Not improving sales of umbrellas by secretly deploying a fleet cloud-seeding drones. Not improving sales of anti-depressants using a botnet to spam bad news targeting marginally unhappy people, or by publishing papers about new forms of news feed algorithms with subtle bugs in an attempt to have Google and Facebook do it for them. Not gradually taking over the company by recommending hiring strategy that turns out to subtly bias hiring toward people who think less for themselves and trust the AI more, or by obfuscating corporate policy to the point where humans can't understand it so it can hide rules that allow it to fire any troublemakers, or any other number of clever things that a smart, amoral machine might do in order to get the slow, dim-witted meat-bags out of the way so it could actually get the job done.
  • turtleyacht 3y ago
    Well, if it means anything I think there may be legislation to "bring my own AI to work," so to speak, recognizing the importance of having a diversity of ideas--just because, it would disadvantage labor to be discriminated. "I didn't understand what was signed" being the watchword of AI-generated content. Someday, perhaps. Sooner than later.
  • 3y ago