alt Hacker News> people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment).
Honestly, we should judge. There should be judgment for people who are solely money motivated and making the world a worse place. I know, blah blah privilege, something something mouths to feed. Platitudes to help the rich assholes sleep at night. If you are wealthy and making stuff that hurts people, you are a piece of shit and should be called out, simple.
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Shame is a powerful social tool, but sadly some are simply immune.
Work is and has always been an economic bargain: Your time for their money. Morality is a luxury that only the independently wealthy can afford. Any business that allows it's employees to function according to their own morals becomes uncompetitive against its peers. That's why small companies by individual founders who want to stay true to their mission often stay small. They inevitably get bought out by one of the larger ones.
The problem with this argument is you can’t know or control what will happen in the future with something you built. This is the same moral dilemma the scientists faced after developing nuclear bombs.
And the future is not deterministic (or if it is, it is highly chaotic) so the existence of a thing does not have a simple relationship with what will happen in the future. Scientists who developed convolutional neural nets could not know how much good or evil was caused by image recognition technologies. The same technologies that are used to detect tumors in images can be used to target people for assassination.
There are exceptions, but my opinion is the supply chain of evil is paved with mundane inventions.
>> If you are wealthy
Then.. you wouldn't be working...
I completely agree. The tech industry has long been overrun by people sacrificing morals for money and it's destroyed society and presumably the world. We've given people a free pass to work for companies we've all known are harming the fabric of society and look where it's gotten us. I'm sorry, I would rather be poor and switch careers if my only option was xAI and making image generation models that explicitly allow people to undress others. At X's scale, technology like that harms an unfathomable amount of people. I could never have that on my conscience. All so I could make more money than a job at another tech company? I'd rather work somewhere innocuous like Figma, Cloudflare, Notion, Jetbains, Linear, etc. Hell, if you only wanted to work for an AI company then at least go to Anthropic.