alt Hacker NewsThis... this... this! This resonates soooo deeply with me.
The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people. It's often impossible to look at individual people and say, "they're the cause of this damage." I believe that some form of evil (this word feel inadequate) emerges amidst these large systems that is incredibly hard to pinpoint. It's why dissension is so fucking critical. Tech companies continue to profit from the status quo and we need courageous people who disrupt that.
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Too many tech people only focus on developing enhanced capabilities and find philosophy, let alone moral systems like religion, useless or absurd.
But with powerful AI models the philosophical and moral and religious questions have become impossible to ignore.
I think that CEOs of those companies are ethically challenged people, narcissists and sociopaths.
They are not evil and there is no evil emerging in big systems. It is that in the above have advantage in winner takes all economy and use that advantage to gain more advantages. So they end up on top. And once they are high enough, law dont apply to them. Which makes them go even higher.
> The wild thing is that these tech "systems" (aka companies) are made up of ostensibly good people.
I don't think that's the case. The people running these companies certainly aren't good people and everyone else in any position of power is either happy to hurt anyone and anything in exchange for a paycheck, or they're willing to take the money and turn a blind eye to the things they know are wrong. It's difficult to know where people stop being complicit. The amazon warehouse employee who is forced to piss in bottles or wear diapers to keep their job isn't really the problem, and I'm sure many of them hate the company they work for, but the company only works because of their efforts.