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Comment by thetruthseeker1 | Hacker News Reader

I also think that disengaging is the wrong approach. Google once disengaged with China because they didn’t agree with China on some freedom of expression laws and all the management now think that it was a bad decision. In similar vein, if you are not part of it, somebody else will shape the outcome of this.. It should be rather you if you really care and could play a role in minimizing the negative impact of such tech

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This sounds like some next-level rationalization to me. You can justify anything by theorizing that somebody else will do the same-thing-but-even-worse:

"If we don't employ child labour, somebody else will! It should be us, so we can at least make sure our child-slaves get fed once a day!"

The fact of the matter is that Google has rare talent in AI. There isn't another company with their kind of expertise waiting in line behind them, and even if there were, sometimes you should keep your hands clean.

Your comparison is like comparing apples and oranges. You can’t do child labor because there are laws in the US to prevent that. If you lobby to pass a law that prevents AI for defense purposes then that would be similar. Here the US govt is a client, if not google they will go to some-other company for that tech as long as there is no law that prevents that.

Also, if they don’t go to google, sure they may not see as much of a rapid growth in AI tech, but if you think they will never be able to get anywhere significant, you sir are underestimating others IMO

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