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There may not be a definition of “good”.

But there are several workable contextual definitions of bad; it’s your job to know what they are.

For example:

- it would cause a harm to someone who was not made aware of the risk up front.

- it would cause someone to lose a job they didn’t know was under threat.

- the way the harm occurs precludes its only corrective/curative action or has no adequate compensation.

Bad things are almost always contextual but also almost always obvious in that context.

You can’t avoid bad things that you can’t foresee. If you do not attempt to avoid, avert or mitigate bad things that you can foresee, then you are one of the bad things.

Things may not always be black and white but it is wise not to seek the protection of the grey.

> it would cause someone to lose a job they didn’t know was under threat

Under this guidance, wouldn't almost every technological advancement then qualify as bad? i.e. typewriter repair, etc.

To address the second part of the sentence you quoted, in this generic “doesn’t progress mean all jobs are impermanent?” sense, don’t people generically understand their jobs are generically under threat at some baseline level from progress? It doesn’t absolve you from the harm of being specifically responsible.

I mean everyone has to die someday but that doesn’t excuse murder.

Are you saying that it's morally wrong to seek technological progress because it causes people to lose jobs? That doesn't seem like a coherent position unless you're an anarcho-primitivist.

Oh dear me.

But what if (as the commenter you're responding to stated) someone believes that AI will have a positive effect on humanity? Is it morally wrong for them to disagree with your view?

I personally think taking part in an industry that openly and casually argues that the insane losses being racked up are fully affordable as long as people are permanently taken out of the workforce is immoral, yes. Pan-industrial job loss is a harm.

Leaning on "I did what I thought was right for humanity" while not addressing the harms to people along the way is not moral.

Other people can draw their own conclusions.

Personally, I don't know if AI will be a net-positive or net-negative for mankind, but if it's negative it's overwhelmingly likely that it will be due to environmental and/or energy usage concerns. That is, we ought to limit the power consumption and force companies to work more efficiently and sustainably, rather than limiting the research itself.

Arguments as old as time that a new form of automation will put people out of jobs are just not compelling to me, I'm sorry. I also don't believe it's likely that LLMs will ever be ASI, nor ever evil and sentient.

> Arguments as old as time that a new form of automation will put people out of jobs are just not compelling to me, I'm sorry. I also don't believe it's likely that LLMs will ever be ASI, nor ever evil and sentient.

I didn't make either of these arguments.

I was literally talking about what "bad" means, contextually, in the context of a job, responding to the idea that most people just don't see "good/bad" issues in their jobs. When almost all of us do, in fact, see harms we should reduce. Just often smaller harms.

One of the problems in the tech industry is that people always say "well sure, but…" and then try to expand the scenario to an amoral Thanos-level so they can wriggle off what might actually in many cases be much more personal, contextually obvious hooks.

"It happens, I shouldn't worry about my part in it" is not a moral framework.

"- it would cause someone to lose a job they didn’t know was under threat."

Most of my life's work has been in areas of increasing productivity. Is that good or bad? On the good side of the spectrum, it reduces the time hundred of people need to spend on mundane tasks, or reducing the amount of mentally taxing complexity. On the bad side, based on this definition, there is less of a need to hire someone with specialized talent when the software can handle what their job function would be.

I've always felt kind of bad helping companies automate people out of jobs, that's the core of what most of us writing software are doing. Maybe I am a bad person.

> that's the core of what most of us writing software are doing

Is that necessarily so?

No, there are many mission-driven companies from enterprises to startups, but in the USA most software engineers work for Fortune 500 (or Russell 2000, or aspiring) whose underlying mission is extracting profit from revenue.

You can also use moral relativism to cope with doing basically anything unethical, especially so when you’re offered dump trucks full of money.

My point is that these articles are ineffective and miss the point. It's not about moral relativism but rather that morals aren't universally shared or understood.

Ultimately, pretty much everyone feels like they are a good person, so "you doing a bad thing makes you bad" doesn't really square away especially when that person's personal moral calculus can see their actions as being a net good.

It's pretty hard to shame someone out of a job even if most people view at as net negative on society (boat loads of money and all).

That's why I disagree with all the framing of the article.

That is addressed in the article. E.g. how Meta knows about the harms they’re actively causing, and carries on anyway. People and firms do things they know are wrong all the time.

How do you know articles like this are ineffective?

I know people in my life who have discomfort about their jobs at Meta because of how other people view the company. One of them is planning to leave in the next year or so.

The impact may be hard to measure or rather diffuse, but in my experience, it is real.

A few big good/bad decisions are more important than thousands of trivial decisions.

Balancing good against bad is not clear, I agree, but that makes it all the more important to think about it when making a big decision such as what job to take.

Its hard and people do not even agree about how to balance it - e.g. whether the ends justify the means.

Well that's my point. Someone working as a geologist for the oil industry can think climate change isn't real or not a problem so they can view their job of finding more oil as being a clear benefit for society.

No amount of trying to tell them "But you are doing something bad by helping the oil industry" will make them reconsider if they are good or bad. But I also wouldn't say they are necessarily bad people. You can also simply just be wrong or misinformed when you make your moral calculation.

Good people do bad things sometimes. Bad people do good things sometimes. That's why the framing of badness as a taint isn't really helpful IMO. It creates a "us vs them" sort of attitude that ultimately doesn't address whatever issue is at hand.

I agree.

In the particular case of AI companies, I think a handbrake should be pulled when they start claiming things like "10% chance we're ending humanity."

This. I wouldn't step on an airplane if someone told me there's a 10% chance it could explode into a ball of flames. Would anyone?

I would rather say the argument is simplified, but on a decent track. Because there are two angles to it.

I've been wondering what sectors I wouldn't maintain and develop infrastructure for, because I consider it a strength of mine that I don't entirely care about that. I'm not excited about your product, for good or bad.

Defense for example is on an edge there. Supporting the creation of death and suffering in other humans does not sit right with me. Being defenseless doesn't sit right either, as it can create suffering and death for people I know as well.

Online gambling is more on the nope side. Maybe with a decent regulated german company, but if you start working with some eastern-europan online video gambling sites with pretty girls as dealers, you are suddenly very close to human trafficking and many more things connected to it.

So I guess directly causing human suffering and pain is a boundary for me. And yes, if you push that argument to an extreme, if you search long enough, you realize that pure existence causes suffering to other people, animals and the planet and must be ceased.

But then there is that other side - in the current system (and arguably many before) you have to do a job to get money to live, and a lot of people like the person making cars have no choice about that. I guess we are contributing to that suffering as well by existing.

So, minimizing the direct suffering and pain I cause seems to be a sensible directive.

To be crystal clear in case there is confusion, we should also not confuse "everything is a shade of gray," with "all grays are the same shade."

We can still have moral good and bad, even subjective good and bad, without reducing everything to one or the other or placing everything in a non-existent moral center. Far too often a sliver of good is given equal weight to a enormous lot of bad. We should be ready to cut the cord far sooner than we do in practice.

I like to think of good in terms of direct positive effect, and bad in terms of direct negative externalities. Second order effects become too fuzzy.

Do the people working for AI labs believe that it has a better direct beneficial effect, or makes for a worse outcome on society?

What I've read thus far heavily lead me to believe that the balance is well tilted towards the negative.

If you're one of the "f u got mine" belief system, you do not care about effects but only your wallet.

This is also in some way how my perception has been tinted by effective altruists; which (through media representation) seem activiley present as employees at AI labs. Are those people actively donating away 10-20% of their base salary every year, or "whatever it takes to make me a billionaire" and "after that I'll do some philantrophy"?

Effective altruism hasn't really crossed the atlantic into the balkans, feel free to correct me and elucidate me on the positive effects in the US of this ideology.

I like the concept of deontological ethics where instead of just plain good and bad, we consider what is one’s duty. People make decisions based on who they are responsible for.

Yeah that’s why ea is like catnip for these folks, justify anything by some handy hallucination about how the outcome will help more than it hurts. Suffering is fungible

> there's no objective measure of what is good or bad. Everything is a shade of gray.

So, there's an ojective measure of shade of gray? /i

Precision is not objectivity.

> So, there's an ojective measure of shade of gray?

Very much no. More that almost all actions have good and bad impacts and how good or bad those impacts are can be judged completely differently between large groups of people.

To someone that's Hindu, eating a cow is a supremely bad act. For your standard meat eater, it's just lunch. The cow eater is only a "bad person" to the Hindu. To them, the act is likely a white or light gray act.

Now apply this logic to human slavery. The "good impacts" are what profits the slave holders, what makes their lives easier at the expense of the enslaved. Apply it to child labor and labor exploitation in general before labor laws. Then you'll see one side is behaving in a greedy manner, ignoring the humanity of the other side.

"Life isn't black and white with "good/bad"."

Really? You can't think of an act in history that society might agree was evil?

And I'm not sure why everything has to have a "measure". Someone who approaches the world we live in (and their own life) in such absolute, reductionist terms is living, in my opinion, a very ufortunate life.

"Nothing is simple, therefore it is impossible to act ethically."

Only bad things have happened so far in AI. This is why they need the daily propaganda to whitewash themselves.