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Comment by nemomarx | Hacker News Reader

maybe we should work on existing slavery and sweat shops before hypothetical future exploitation, yeah? we're still slave masters today. you've probably used something with slavery in the supply chain in the last year if you get various imported foods

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Why not both? Why do people on the internet always act like we can only have one active morality front at a time?

If you're working on or using AI, then consider the ethics of AI. If you're working on or using global supply chains, then consider the ethics of global supply chains. To be an ethical person means that wherever you are and whatever you are doing you consider the relevant ethics.

It's not easy, but it's definitely simple.

>Why do people on the internet always act like we can only have one active morality front at a time?

They don't, they just use it as a tool to derail conversations they don't want to have. It's just "Whataboutism".

Why? Why does one have a dependence on the other? Maybe we should also cure cancer first too?

There is prison labor in lots of places, including the US. We just don't like to think about it as slavery.

Prison labor, underpaid and abused illegal agricultural workers worldwide, sweatshop workers for Nike, H&M, etc, miners in 3rd world countries, these abuses are incredibly widespread and are basically the basis of our society.

It's a lot more expensive currently to clothe and feed yourself ethically. Basically only upper middle class people and above can afford it.

Everyone else has cheap food and clothes, electronics, etc, more or less due to human suffering.

That's a great point, and I'm guessing you know how I would rebut it, so I won't bore you by making you read it :)

I don’t.

They're both valid concerns.

There’s a difference between “valid concern” and “any possibility.” LLMs are possibly sentient in the same sense that rocks are, technically we haven’t identified where the sentience comes from. So maybe it is in there.

Personally, I’m coming around to the spiritual belief that rocks might be sentient, but I don’t expect other people to treat their treatment of rocks as a valid problem and also it isn’t obvious what the ethical treatment of a rock is.

The actual harms being done today are still more pressing than the hypothetical harms of future. And should be prioritized in terms of resources spent.

If it's a valid dichotomy (I don't think it is) then the answer is to stop research on LLMs, and task the researchers with fighting human slavery instead.

I do not think that those researchers are fungible. We could however allocate a few hundred million less to AI research, and more to fighting human exploitation. We could pass stronger worker protection and have the big corporations pay for it - which then they have less money to spent on investments (in AI). Heck we could tax AI investments or usage directly, and spend it on worker rights or other cases of human abuse.

It isn’t the primary motivation of capitalists unfortunately, but improving automation could be part of the fight against human slavery and exploitation.

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