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Comment by ManFromUranus | Hacker News Reader

Hmm not really. Google is bad and they should feel bad, you're just handwaving away how bad they are because you like them.

Imagine I wanted to have somebody killed and I hired a hitman to kill them and when I go to pay the hitman I accidentally wire the money to the wrong place and inadvertantly pay off the victims mortgage instead of paying the hitman. Now the victim doesn't die and gets their mortgage paid off. I'm not a good guy what I did is not a good thing, I just fucked up, that's all. Had everything gone to plan the guy would be dead and I would be blameless.

Similarly if everything had gone to plan Google AI would now be powering various autonomous murder bots except they realized that they didn't want to be associated with this, not because they have any morals, but because WE DO. They are still bad.

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>Imagine I wanted to have somebody killed and I hired a hitman to kill them and when I go to pay the hitman I accidentally wire the money to the wrong place and inadvertantly pay off the victims mortgage instead of paying the hitman. Now the victim doesn't die and gets their mortgage paid off. I'm not a good guy what I did is not a good thing, I just fucked up, that's all.

That's an odd analogy considering the the would-be conspirator didn't make a decision to not go through with it. Do you believe Google published this article by accident? And really; comparing Google's actions to murder... c'mon.

> comparing Google's actions to murder

you think people weren't/wouldn't be killed off intel gathered from the project?

Not comparing googles actions to murder specifically, that's simply you not being able to see the forest for the trees. The only reason they wrote the article is to make it seem like what they did was a proactive moral choice when in reality it was a retroactive action to frame their realization that in supplying AI for the DoD murder bots they would be part of the evil empire. I mean it's literally twisty mustache tier lack of scruples.

They didn't fess up because they realize that the outcome of their actions woudl be bad, they fess up because YOU realize that the outcome of their actions would be bad.

Beleive me when I say that I do not like Google. But what is a person or a group of people supposed to do when they have done something wrong? All they can do is stop doing it, and try to prevent doing it in the future.

You can speculate about their motives, I personally beleive it to be PR motivated aswell, but what matters in the end is that it stopped happening.

That's all fine, but that person or group shouldn't expect everybody to love them afterwards. If anything, they should expect distrust and dislike.

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