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Seems to be the MO around here - create and profit off of horrors beyond our wildest imaginations with no accountability and conveniently disappear before shit hits the fan. Not before writing an op-ed though.

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Is it really fair to saddle the conscientious objectors with this critique? What about the people that stay and continue to profit exponentially as the negative outcomes become more and more clear? Are the anti-AI and anti-tech doomers who would never in a million years take a tech job actually more impactful in mitigating harms?

To be clear, I agree with the problem from a systemic perspective, I just don't agree with how blame/frustration is being applied to an individual in this case.

Is that the right word for it? I feel that a "conscious objector" is a powerless person whose only means of protesting an action is to refuse to do it. This researcher, on the other hand, helped build the technology he's cautioning about and has arguably profited from it.

If this researcher really thinks that AI is the problem, I'd argue that the other point raised in the article is better: stay in the organization and be a PITA for your cause. Otherwise, for an outside observer, there's no visible difference between "I object to this technology so I'm quitting" and "I made a fortune and now I'm off to enjoy it writing poetry".

Yes, it’s fair.

Yes, people that never participated are more impactful.

Nuremberg/just following orders might fly if we were talking about a cashier at Dollar General.

This is a genius tech bro who ignored warnings coming out institutions and general public frustration. Would be difficult to believe they didn't have some idea of the risks, how their reach into others lives manipulated agency.

Ground truth is apples:oranges but parallels to looting riches then fleeing Germany are hard to unsee.

Unfortunately, the real horrors are just the mundane uses of AI: Whitewash excuses to keep the same people out of prison, put the same people in prison, hire the same people you want to hire, and do whatever you want because the AI can do no wrong.

Hint, there's no AGI here. Just stupid people who can spam you with the same stuff they used to need to pay hype men to do.

And people kept downvoting me when I said it has always been about advertising and marketing. It's optimal personalized mattress sales all the way down.

That is not a polite way to talk about his poetry.

I don't think thats fair - many of us are enamored by the technology and its implications and are sincerely motivated to bring out the best in it

End stage capitalism- yes is a shitshow - I am not defending tech bro culture however

I mean what do you actually propose?

prose

prosé

rosé

It's claimed Adam Smith wrote hundreds of years ago that (paraphrased) division of labor taken to extremes would result in humans dumber than the lowest animal.

This era proves it out, I believe.

Decline in manual, cross context skills and rise in "knowledge" jobs is a huge part of our problem. Labor pool lacks muscle memory across contexts. Cannot readily pivot to in defiance.

Socialized knowledge has a habit of being discredited and obsoleted with generational churn, while physical reality hangs in there. Not looking great for those who planned on 30-40 years of cloud engineering and becoming director of such n such before attaining title of vp of this and that.

It's really hard to take people like this seriously. They preach sermons about the perils of AI, maneuver themselves into an extremely lucrative position where they can actually do something about it, but they don't actually care. They came to get that bag. Now they got it, so instead of protecting the world from peril, they go off and study poetry. LOL. These are not serious people.

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