Your disdain is showing.
That you jump immediately to criticizing AI ethicists as counting angels on pins and implying that's why they left OpenAI rather than OpenAI not being a place where AI ethics is a priority is, well, let's say generous to these AI labs.
I think the field is changing from one of high theory to high application. People good at one are not usually good at the other, and says nothing about OpenAI's view of AI ethics as a priority...merely the people in the field and how they relate to the greater industry.
AI ethics is first and foremost about setting policy and advising on how those systems should be constructed.
This is because ethics isn't some separable function. It threads through everything an organization does. You can't just treat it as another department/function/unit if you want any hope of actually making it work.
Specifically because in these companies they aren't optimizing for ethical behaviour.
They're optimizing for profit. And those damn ethicists just get in the way.
Funny thing: that doesn't typically happen to the internal legal counsel or accounting that's responsible for guiding processes/practices that are required for compliance or similar.
Why?
Because there's consequences.
I wouldn’t be surprised if many AI ethics responsibilities move to legal in the future.
Another example you might be familiar with is enterprise architects. When you spend all of your time in theory you lose sight of practical implications. Of course, since you only had the idea, when it doesn't go to your ideal it can always be blamed on the implementers.
I take it you've never worked with an in-house legal counsel, accounting department, or good ol' fashioned HR?
HR is a bit different and strange to bring up, especially considering I used enterprise architect as an example. AI safety would presumably be not cross-cutting for all domains at a company (does the janitorial staff need to know about it? no but they do need sexual harassment training), but be more like the enterprise architects designing in the sky and handing it down for implementation.
Yes but ultimately legal isn't putting policy into practice, which is my point.
> HR is a bit different and strange to bring up, especially considering I used enterprise architect as an example. AI safety would presumably be not cross-cutting for all domains at a company
Frankly, you're nitpicking the analogy while missing the broader point it's serving to make.
I agree with you, but then we have HR for a reason.