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It’s not morally wrong per-se but just because you are working with your government does not mean what you’re doing is necessarily moral
by _vertigo 5mo ago
It’s not morally wrong per-se but just because you are working with your government does not mean what you’re doing is necessarily moral
- cooper_ganglia 5mo agoJust because you are working with your government does not mean what you’re doing is necessarily immoral, either.
- _alternator_ 5mo agoCorrect. It depends. For example, it might depend on what the collaboration is likely to result in. Perhaps it would be more likely to be moral there were some boundaries in place, like "no mass domestic surveillance" or "no fully autonomous weapons". Because the US government currently believes it is legal to blow up civilian drug traffickers and wage war without congressional approval. So at some point, yes, collaboration is immoral.
- nradov 5mo agoThe US military has deployed fully autonomous weapons since at least 1979, and potential adversaries are now doing the same. For better or worse that ship has sailed.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoSo we are wrong to express any opposition or desire to maybe raise the bar here? Aren’t we supposed to be “the good guys”? Or should we just accept a role as the menace of the world, wildly throwing its weight around whenever we have an unscrupulous president?
- nradov 5mo agoThose questions are moot. There are situations where it's simply impossible to have a human in the loop because reaction time is too slow or the environment is too dangerous or communication links are unreliable. Russia is deploying fully autonomous weapons to attack Ukraine today and they will be selling those weapons (or licensing the technology) to their allies. There is no option to stop. And let's please not have any nonsense suggestions that we can somehow convince Russia / China / Iran / North Korea to sign a binding, enforceable treaty banning such weapons: that's never going to happen.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- t-3 5mo agoThere's always an option to stop. We can choose civility over barbarity, stop trying to kill people over 1000+ year old dick waving contests, and stop threatening each other with doomsday weapons because your grandpa shot my grandpa. Just because our leaders are too stupid and cowardly doesn't mean there's no option.
- nradov 5mo agoSounds good! Please convince Vladimir Putin to choose civility over barbarity, then get back to us so we can discuss options.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoWe aren’t Russian and Putin is not our leader. We can choose how we behave and operate. This is like saying we should use chemical weapons if someone else deploys one. You’re speaking as if it’s all so binary. “Do what they do or you lose.”
- nradov 5mo agoIt's cheap and easy for someone sitting safely behind a computer to pretend to be morally superior when you're not the one who has to make hard decisions, or deal with the consequences. Chemical weapons have seen minimal use after WWI largely because they're not very militarily effective. Autonomous kinetic weapons actually work. Right now Ukrainians are building autonomous weapons to defend themselves against Russian autonomous weapons. For Ukrainians it is binary: do what they do or you lose. Would you prefer that they lose? And don't presume to tell us that the Russians can be persuaded to stop by non-violent means, that would be completely delusional.
- _alternator_ 5mo agoLook, a dumb bomb is a fully autonomous weapon once it's launched. Let's be real: an LLM making decisions on who to target and when and where to launch munitions represents a meaningful change in our concept of autonomous weapons.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoWho said otherwise? Clearly it’s about facilitating specific acts by the government. Why are y’all acting like it was so wildly broad? No one said “working with the government is inherently immoral.”
- cooper_ganglia 5mo agoLiterally the parent comment: >Any AI researcher who continues to work here is morally compromised.
- Forgeties79 5mo ago…doing this kind of work with the federal government. That is clearly what they are saying. You stripped all context from the discussion. You’re looking for the least defensible, worse interpretation of their comment.
- cooper_ganglia 5mo agoNo. Their comment was: “Any AI researcher who continues to work here is morally compromised.” But, “…doing this kind of work with the federal government.” is added context that was not there and is based on your own interpretation. The language of the parent comment charges that simply working at a company that is engaging in this makes one complicit in an immoral act, and the complicity itself is immoral. I disagree with all of that.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoYes. Working at a company explicitly profiting off of doing clearly immoral acts is wrong. It doesn’t mean working for a company contracted with the federal government is always wrong.
- Jtarii 5mo agoHegseth bombed a girls school in Iran last month. I think it's fair to doubt the moral worth of anyone assisting this admin.
- conartist6 5mo ago[flagged]
- conartist6 5mo ago[flagged]
- cooper_ganglia 5mo agoYou should probably give this a second look: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- conartist6 5mo agoIf speaking vigorously in defense of morality is wrong, I guess that's something I'll just have to live with.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ThrowawayR2 5mo agoYou'll have to live with it somewhere else. Neither HN's administrators nor readership will tolerate that kind of behavior. If you intend to participate on Hacker News over the long term, please take up the suggestion by the other poster to review the guidelines and adhere to them.
- conartist6 5mo agoI thought what I said was borderline, but we seem to believe in free speech in this country and here in this place. And you haven't disagreed with what I said, only how I said it ;)
- t-3 5mo agoIn a logical or mathematical sense, sure, but when it's the US government and a huge surveillance-tech company it's pretty necessarily immoral (at least in an American context where harming liberty is immoral - other cultures disagree).
- vintermann 5mo agoRight, so it was a comically bad defense. Like the guy in an old clip saying "What is my crime? Enjoying a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?" while being arrested for trying to pay with a stolen credit card. The succulence of the meal has nothing to do with it, and that it's your own government has nothing to do with it. It's just a sad way to try to distract from what's actually wrong with helping build tools for mass surveillance and autonomous murder.