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IME companies hire an ethics team to say they have an ethics team. The ethics team has no sway, no influence, and will never be able to move the business. They
by forestrywat 2mo ago
IME companies hire an ethics team to say they have an ethics team. The ethics team has no sway, no influence, and will never be able to move the business. They will try, and they will make reasonable recommendations, but the company will say, "that costs money..." and not take them.
- temp0826 2mo agoScapegoat team (when working for an obviously unethical company).
- kps 2mo agoI have no knowledge of this particular person, but usually the job of an ‘ethicist’ is to find excuses for something obviously wrong.
- munk-a 2mo agoLet's not confuse an ethics team with HR. The later exists to ensure proper legal adherence with a varying degree of benefit to the employees. The former[1] is an electively instated position that usually has a dual mandate somewhere between the polls of "Make leadership confident that teams don't make them lose sleep" and "Make teams confident that leadership doesn't make them lose sleep" (usually leaning strongly towards the second) as a sort of employee moral assurance team. I don't disagree that the ethicist is partially there to justify actions but they're mainly there to be seen as an obstruction to particularly egregious actions so that, if, for instance, you have a boring data center maintenance job, you can have the belief that nobody is using the product of your labor to for something heinous. The efficacy of such teams is quite questionable but there is some logic in assigning the job of worrying about ethical considerations to one person that can shove their nose in every crack and cranny so that every individual employees can talk to/lean on that person instead of needing to go to such lengths themselves if they feel compelled to do so. Most people don't like to do evil (even if the money is good) so allowing an economy of scale around morale reassurance is rational. This obviously breaks down if the company is seen to hide things from that department or if that department is clearly, themselves, unethical. The first of those conditions are why ethics departments at Meta and OpenAI have very little efficacy. 1. Outside of extreme circumstances where it has been mandated to be a specific regulatory board because of past actions or fear of future actions in which case it's better viewed as part of the bureaucracy of the governing body (usually the state, sometimes a shareholder or other concerned party).
- wavemode 2mo agoOpenAI was probably able to at least pretend that her role mattered... until they let their AI autonomously hack a rival company, then used the incident to score marketing points. I'm not surprised she left.
- mvkel 2mo ago[flagged]
- AnimalMuppet 2mo agoWhat if you actually told us, instead of just asking a question? If you have something to say, say it. Don't vaguepost.
- Brajeshwar 2mo ago“When you have to shoot, shoot; don’t talk.” — Ugly
- teddyh 2mo agoHis name is Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez, a.k.a. “The Rat”.
- testbjjl 2mo agoYou would be creating a counterfactual inconsistent with most’s understanding of the role and bringing this person’s motives and credibility into question without supporting evidence?
- blitzar 2mo agoIt would be deeply unethical to manufacture an incident to grab some headlines about how amazing your hacking machine really is.
- nozzlegear 2mo ago
- RobotToaster 2mo agoIf you ever feel like your job is useless, remember that raytheon has an ethics team.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- embedding-shape 2mo agoWouldn't that be probably one of the most important places to have an ethics team? I'd be much more worried if my local water treatment plant or local bar had an ethics team, and people working there probably would feel slightly more useless than Raytheon's ethics team, which I'm sure feel like they're doing something important and worthwhile.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- aprilthird2021 2mo agoCome on, what do you think the ethics team at Raytheon is going to say "Hmm, our elected leaders are relying heavily on dangerously inaccurate AI to choose bombing targets and our weapons hit a girl's school as a result, let's withhold weapons from our own govt till that's resolved"? Obviously not. The ethics team at Raytheon is not going to ever be allowed to overrule the leadership or more importantly the political leadership of this country whose support of Raytheon is fundamental to their survival
- embedding-shape 2mo agoI have literally no clue, hence I won't try to claim I know exactly what's going on there. For all we know, the ethics team at Raytheon could have stopped multiple international nuclear wars already.
- twister2920 2mo agono need for wild speculation, we know that Raytheon is a US Defense contractor and we know that the US targets civilians (including US citizens) abroad for extrajudicial assassinations, starts destabilizing wars without meaningful strategic objectives, supports genocide etc. These things are all extremely well documented, for those paying attention the existence of Raytheon is inherently unethical
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- amelius 2mo agoMaybe in this case all they needed an ethics team for was to teach the LLM about ethics?
- noir_lord 2mo ago> They will try, and they will make reasonable recommendations, but the company will say, "that costs money..." and not take them. > “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” - Upton Sinclair Think I first saw that on a usenet post, as true now as then and just as true as it was in the 1930's when he wrote it (in at least that form).