Hacker News Reader

Comment by robonerd | Hacker News Reader

Google AI ethicists and other researchers would be wise to recognize the delta between why Google ostensibly has them, and why Google actually has them. If they aren't tailoring their research to whatever Google executives want to hear, then they aren't doing what they're actually being paid for. And if they want to be honest researchers instead of corporate whores, they picked the wrong company to work for.

Would an honest climatologist last long working for Exxon? Would an honest cancer researcher last long working for Phillip Morris?

View on HN

Maybe they thought Google was a mostly okay company with good potential and were under the impression that what they were hired for was to help them improve? There was after all a time when many of us really believed Google was a good kind of company and that it generally adhered to the "don't be evil" ethos.

I can see myself falling into a similar trap of wishful thinking, especially if corporate communication reinforces it (until the cold shower wakeup happens).

> Maybe they thought

Pretty sure the thoughts that existed before they viewed their offer letter were different from the thoughts they had afterwards. And there's nothing wrong with it unless you for some reason want to ignore the biggest bias in the room.

What did the offer letter contain?

I have no background in ethics research so this is a layman's view but what strikes me as bizarre is that ethics researchers are trying to decide what is ethical. 2 reasonable people can look at the same set of ethical issues, weigh the potential pros and cons and come to different decisions about what course of action is the ethical one. It does not seem to be a field where an ultimate truth exists. I would think an ethics researcher should be examining AI technology to determine the ethical impacts a technology, implementation or use may generate both positive and negative, so that a decision maker can properly weigh them. Once you try to determine what you consider the ethical decision to be and insist that is the only acceptable decision for another to make, you are no longer a researcher but an advocate. Having a belief of what is ethical and advocating for it is fine but it shouldn't be framed as research.

Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com