alt Hacker Newshard disagree. No matter what gets built, it will be used for bad things if the society is not properly constructed. We need to fix our government and then you can build anything you want. I don't like putting the blame on the builders, building is already difficult as it is. Also you can't built something in isolation, word will get out anyway. That's why this speech is either naive or he just wanted to tick a todo list: say something about AI.
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I get where you are coming from but this is the common "reduction to politics" that anyone who doesn't want to address a problem uses: think of any societal or human problem and you can have your comment with different nouns.
Sure, IF we could just go and fix our governments in some magical way then the problem would disappear. That goes from hunger, climate change, videogame addiction and AI. The problem is that what you value in life in different than what others do, so we now have a system in which sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you don't.
But back to the topic, I do think that how OpenAI and Anthropic handled the government and them asking to drop guardrails is something a company can actually and actively do without having to reinvent the universe.
> I don't like putting the blame on the builders
Like it or not if you knowingly build stuff that is used for evil purposes you are complicit
You can't build an orphan mulching machine and get away with just a shrug. "I don't really agree with mulching orphans but someone else paid me to build that. If I didn't build it someone else would have" just does not absolve you of your involvement in mulching orphans
When he speaks of the builders needing to take responsibility, I think he is directing his comments at tech company leadership. The Sam Altmans of the world, not the poor slobs like us who need a job for health insurance because apparently unemployed people don't deserve to live.
> I don’t like putting blame on the builders
Why does it have to be either/or?
From a high-level view, there are powerful cultural/political forces that nudge us towards building harmful, wasteful things without us being aware of said forces. The government, corporate greed, and billion-dollar marketing budgets are to blame.
But on the ground, from an in-the-trenches perspective, I think an engineer at Meta, for example, shares in some level of blame, too. Mainly because there is plenty of evidence showing how much harm Meta products have brought upon society. Yet Meta couldn’t be built without engineers opting in to work there in exchange for $300k salaries.
We desperately need moral clarity and courage at both the policy-level and the individual level.