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> You are basically paying people to shit on your own products. Makes no sense.

They hired them to control them. And it's a diversion to keep people thinking about the wrong things.

Another useful (to Google) aspect of hiring an ethical AI team is also that is allows Google to shut down ethical concerns raised in other parts of its own organization by going "we agree that ethics is an important, but please focus on your own job", i.e. an internal AI team can act as a sort of "controlled opposition". The fact that the ethical AI team is now being undermined within the company after trying to do their job and making clear that they are not content to be relegated to such a role is pretty consistent with this motive.

Yes, and just to expand on what I meant with "thinking about the wrong things", they've got everyone thinking about killer robots and automated weapons systems and surveillance (by government entities). When in reality Google's AI is, and has long been, vastly deployed to understand human behavior for the express purpose of maximizing advertising revenue and modification of behavior through pervasive messaging, recommendations, addictive dark patterns, etc. They've basically built a completely automated real distortion system designed to trap people into spending their time staring at whatever the highest (fully automated) bidder thinks they should see. It's dystopian and all the local incentives are wrong now. They've got a crapton of money, computational power, and self-justification. The reality distortion field is powerful. We should be very wary.

Yeah, it was a PR move.

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