@janl THIS!

@janl ethical and environmental concerns

@janl Ethics or Morals? In this modern world there are 3 competing ethical systems. Corporate Ethics, Political Ethics, Individual Human Ethics. Putting Human Ethics aside is exactly what the Corporate Ethical system does all the time in the pursuit of quarterly growth. The Political Ethics system is supposed to keep a check on this for longer term social benefits. But in practice that's been captured by the Corporate system.

@janl What I do when I start with "setting ethical concerns aside for the moment" it'll be in order to discuss why it's terrible even if you're an ethically bankrupt sociopath, but I'll always end with, "and then let's not set aside the ethical concerns."

@janl That's why the billionaires had to invent hogpodge like #tescrealism and are basically worshipping Max Boström's racist ass as a saint!

@janl : Yes...

@janl Mostly at this point it is users who are trying to say this to feel better about their inability to say no and take a stand.

The companies keep saying that they cannot profit if they're ethical or even if they follow laws. They know and admit "ethics be damned".

@janl odd how ethics is always disposable and optional but economics never is.

@janl holy shit I've been saying this for months and literally just said it to one of the more senior people in the place I work. Stop hand waving and making excuses!

There can be some thoughtful deliberation about using specific types of AIs for specific purposes (I saw an article about a use case needing dramatically fewer resources to run the tech).

But no one is doing any critical thinking at all about the now well documented harms, let alone harm reduction.

@janl This is a fantastic point, and it goes so much deeper, culturally, than AI. For about 20 years or so, some writers have openly prized amoral business behaviour. The cringey days of idiots going on about 'wow, sociopath CEOs are so cool' and quoting Walter White and Tywin Lannister are hopefully gone, but the attitude is still there.

'Ethical concerns aside' have been code for 'shove that ethics shit, check out this cool new grift!' ever since the CharismaonCommand types grew up.

@janl
Ethical concerns are what keeps us from jumping over the table and strangling middle managers with their own neckties when they suggest using AI, and I don't know how we could make that any more obvious.

@janl @FantasticalEconomics
💯

@janl
Its a classic sign of a Business Idiot...

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

@janl ..the same applies to eating meat by the way…

@janl so labor ethically especially in foreign countries where labor practices can be seen as abuses
Ethical conditions regarding the environment and how the impact to environment yields health outcomes that are negative take xAI in Memphis Tennessee they didn’t follow laws for clean air act and you have black particulates in the air and increase in illnesses around respiratory issues
Ethical in the data scrapping in that consent in not given

The use of AI to target marginalized communities
The use of AI in warfare
The use of AI to further consumption consumer model of capitalism and in turn full white supremacy and the systems that allow it to propagate
These are human ethical considerations that should be understood and converse about because if we don’t speak about the negative impacts and choose to continue them without addressing the root causes we are doomed as a species
I can image lot people disagree with me and that’s fine but conversation on consent in tech, ethical and humane practices in building and sourcing raw materials, and the systems that allow exploitation is what this reply is for

Now you can start

This is again making meaningful numbers and I still have no SoundCloud, so I’ll ask you again to protect trans kids and let’s add abolish borders.

@janl

THIS is why I say I don’t hate #AI per se, but I DO hate AI *companies* and investors, because *their* ethics are *nonexistent*.

And that imho should disqualify them from working on and selling AI systems to the world. I want no part of their goods or services because those people cannot be trusted.

@janl My feeling is that without ethics, we don't have a positive form of humanity.

@janl
I may be too optimistic, I always interpret it as "let's assume for a moment that there was one that was made ethically".

@janl This is an incredibly good point, not only applies to AI. thanks.

@janl putting ethics second (or in some cases never) is a big part of how we’re at the point we’re at right now.

@janl

White middle class privilege of not having to deal with reality.

Pure bullshit.

A small one of the myriad reasons I care is personal: every time you use spicy autocomplete to do any coding, it has been trained on source code that I have made available under specific licenses, and your use of my code does not happen under the terms of these licenses. So you’re stealing from me and my friends and that’s not a great start to the conversation of validating your greed ✌️

@janl An excellent point

@janl

You beg the question of AI being unethical on a per se basis. Every technology goes through this transformation:

First a toy
Then a tool
Then a weapon

My gripe is this: the philosophers need to get busy and give us an appropriate vocabulary, lexicon - as component descriptive to AI. Problem is, philosophy people probably didn't take linear algebra in college.

@janl Do you have a specific example of what people say after brushing aside ethics? I'm curious what type of argument they're making where they feel justified in doing so. Is it they are saying even ignoring ethics it'd be a bad idea, or that it'd be good if you only you ignore ethics?

@janl I think they call that “woke” and has been weaponized as an argument against anything moral or ethical. Good luck to us.

@janl
"It is *impossible* to put ethics aside."
Unless one wants to live in a dystopia, which apparently many tech bros, fascists, dictators, totalitarians, morbidly rich, and USians are eager to do, Jan.

@janl this is exactly like “removing dei” - say what you mean, you want specific skin tones and sexual preferences only in positions of power and potential wealth.

People are terrible.

@janl My favorite strawman argument: “if we don’t do it China will”.

@janl applies to all #science #technology

@janl yes!!

@janl My way of explaining that is, if your argument could be used to defend the Holocaust, it's a pretty bad argument.

@janl
My spouse is a student working toward becoming a social worker. She got a group assignment on "AI and social work" and her group wanted to write about the perks of using a LLM to write administrative documents.

I said: "Stop right there. You should consider writing about the ethics of helping people with AI while abusing the same people: the people you help are the wage slaves click workers training those AI".

@janl I recently had to evaluate a research proposal that lamented that most of the discussion so far had been on ethical concerns. 😩

And, of course, the only dimensions I was supposed to evaluate were things like feasibility and how clearly the goals were stated, none of which captured the glaring issues with the whole approach, which is probably why this still haunts me. (I did flag my concerns though.)

@janl "say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, at least it's an ethos"

@SylviaFysica Good on you!

@giuseppe It’s never “if we don’t do it, they won’t have to, either”

@tewalds “here’s a thing I built”

@janl
I totally feel the same. And at the same time, given the current developments, it feels like that fight has already been lost. This upsets me in a myriad of ways.

Do you have any ideas about how to cope with that? I mean, I could fight more, but that will not make me happier. And also, I doubt we could win that fight 😔.

@janl

You're not wrong, but the ethical concerns are their own quagmire and it's helpful to be able to conversationally skip over them to get to the part where "AI" is also basically a party trick that doesn't actually do anything useful in the real world.

I mean, the implication of the phrase is that the other person is a sociopath, and that seems plausible to me at least some of the time.

@janl i totally agree, but I also realize that the majority of the stuff on Stack Overflow is also stolen. People post code there that is not theirs all the time.

I'd bet some of your code (and mine) is there, posted by someone else.

The only difference is whether a human or a machine is regurgitating it – which is a big difference, but is it a difference without a distinction?

@jimmylittle my main point is that we can all look at the same SO discussion and that has value. LLMs force us to individually deal (and pay) and any insight gained is not visible to all but only benefit one human and the LLM.

It’s a form of disenfranchising a commons, even though SO is not Wikipedia.

@janl To be fair soundcloud is also meddling in this AI thing, so it's a very good time to not have one right now.

@ErikJonker or children

@janl @ErikJonker eating human children?

I mean, ok, I'm not saying it isn't a logical extension to the argument, but it's a bit of a sudden escalation imho, and would be unlikely to win over any omnivores. (Not that it's what you're attempting to do here, I'm just leading into the following.)

I think there's a limit to what one can expect inherently flawed humans to do in terms of ethical purity. I'm exhausted by what I often interpret as disparagement of those who might not fully behave as one prefers at the expense of opportunities to make things better overall. All I ask is that people at least *try* to be ethical and, when confronted with challenges to their thoughts or behavior, to be open to learning how to more fully prioritize ethical behavior and consider honestly why alternative behaviors might be more ethically aligned.

I feel that just slowing down the obviously deliberate efforts to further reward and facilitate unethical behavior while allowing ongoing efforts to encourage more ethical behavior would be a massive win if it were to happen in my lifetime. [Looks around at the current State of things] Unfortunately, it is something that I fully expect to never see.

@kcheek @ErikJonker https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

@janl @ErikJonker Ah, thank you!

@jbond You’re missing the point by a bunch of miles.

@janl @jbond so corporations and politicians are allowed to "put ethics aside"? what even is your point then?

@janl Yes, I'm probably messing the pitch by unnecessarily widening the points. In normal speech we use Moral and Ethical interchangeably. We implicitly judge corporations by our own personal moral code. On that basis we can criticise corporates for deliberately refusing to address moral concerns. They should not be allowed to get away with this. But from their POV, they are still following their own system of Business Ethics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_ethics