This piece fails to understand that, in general, ethics depends on what side you are on. In hindsight, the winner's notion of right and wrong usually dominates.
If ethics mattered, the colonists wouldn't have taken America or slaves. If pre-existing laws mattered, America would have lost the revolutionary war (America legally belonged to the king). If ethics mattered, anyone who made money in cigarettes would be in prison. If ethics mattered, Zuckerberg and his cronies would be in prison.
If you had been concerned about ethics in the past, you would have failed to create America and failed to create Facebook, etc. In my moral framework, the worst (i.e. greediest, most selfish, anti-social) people have been winning over the last 20-40 years.
This dude needs to read some actual philosophy and then ponder it and write it himself, rather than using AI.
Yes, if we had considered ethics in the past, we wouldn't have committed bloody genocide on the Native Americans. We would probably have tried to open up mutually beneficial trade with them. (Sadly, we probably would still have caused the deaths of millions of them simply due to pathogens we didn't know we were carrying when we met them.) Do you think that would have made things worse now?
> In my moral framework, the worst (i.e. greediest, most selfish, anti-social) people have been winning over the last 20-40 years.
This sounds an awful lot like a "might makes right" attitude: "Sure, they're awful people, but they're winning, so we should adhere to their values!"
> tacit knowledge is not easy to add to the AI’s training set.
Is it even possible? Different people do different judgements for the same things, there is no right or wrong really, just the choice you made in that moment, based on whatever you cared about at that point.
This AI written article seems to be substituting ethics for “taste” and making similar arguments to those from the past. Choosing what to do is more important than doing it is a taste problem, of which ethics is an aspect but one of many.
This kind of god-of-the-gaps thing is kind of amusing to watch, especially since I can clearly see myself doing it over time.
Even if the models never get better than they are now, which is unlikely, they're already equipped to usurp taste, ethics, and everything else to a significant degree. Human feedback will always be valuable because we assign value to human feedback, but if you don't think an ethics-bot will ever be a thing, you're not seeing the current state of things.
> Every skill humans once bragged about is getting commoditized. Writing, coding, analysis, translation, design, research. A machine does each of them faster, cheaper, and increasingly better.
This is very much up for debate. I also would have liked your article to delve into whether thing’s that bring us humans joy actually need to be faster, and cheaper.
Knowing why you do something crucially depends on knowing the thing being done. It’s very hard to cast an ethic judgement over a process you don’t understand.
If your argument is that we need to be ethic stewards of machines but need to step aside the doing then your premise might lead you straight into tautology.
Ethics as opposed to morality is about codified rules. This seems to be somewhat conflating the two.
Also this sounds like it's talking about both designing those rules and also applying existing rules, without noticing much distinction between those aspects.
For applying existing rules, is there any reason that can't be mechanized aside from "the tools just aren't that capable yet"?
Designing the rules does have a "will this work as intended" component that can probably be machine-enhanced, but is largely about preferences / "should" questions.
I agree with most of what it says there and the overall sentiment.
Two notes:
1. Whoever wrote this, add your name there. Otherwise it is a 0.2x credibility multiplier.
2. I like this topic a lot and would like to discuss it with others that also like it a lot. Reach out (email in my profile), let's make a small discussion group around this :).
Meta thought: Having recently learned of WeChat Groups in China, I'm now repeatedly noticing situations where familiar alternatives are higher friction.
Machiavellian ethics is also ethics. Ethics has very little to do with how to be good in some public opinion sense. The core question of ethics is what is the appropriate action in a given circumstance. It's an open question that has a lot of different answers.
The opposite of ethics isn't evil, it's moral incontinence.
You could argue that in a corrupt system, ethics tends to work against the interests of that system... but I'd say at the civilizational level they're indispensable, and going back to Aristotle ethics is rooted at the civilizational level (or some would say at the God-and-man level with necessary implications for civilization).
A lot of our relatively new institutions are set up to run like perpetual-motion machines with voracious appetites constrained only by positive law -- so much for those institutions. What we really need is to recognize the many ways in which we've lost our bearings plus a cooling-off period that allows us to search for them again.
> So the filter runs, generation after generation, and what comes out the top is disproportionately people who lie well and feel nothing about it. Not because voters want liars, but because the machinery reliably promotes them.
The reason is that 99% of states are monarchies, and there is immense propaganda effort to make people believe that they in fact live in a democratic system.
Hollywood and the startup world enables nepo kids to lie to themselves and to the public about their "selfmade" status until they receive their ancestral Lordship from the King of England, and this fake meritocracy keeps everyone in line trying their best because one day you could be a billionaire, too.
It's a charade where your last name decides everything, even before you were born. But this is also the most peaceful and stable economic system humanity has come up with after horrors such as the crusades, the Holocaust and Rhodesia. It rewards achievements of many generations past no matter what modern ethics might think about those achievements, and it allows monarchs to peacefully blend in with the peasants.
With this in mind, the only thing a strive for "ethics" gives you is a spot on the weekly kill list.
> This is a selection problem, not a character problem.
This is a times problem, not a selection problem. The unipolar world order is ending, and everyone responds by turning inward and looking for strong leaders who will protect them against the rest.
The US can't force China do what they want and China can now also prevent the US doing whatever it wants to third countries too. Not all of them but definitely some.
It does not seem so to me. There does not seem genuine wish for protection from danger as much as genuine wish to see the leader to be cruel to others or take advantage as others.
This piece fails to understand that, in general, ethics depends on what side you are on. In hindsight, the winner's notion of right and wrong usually dominates.
If ethics mattered, the colonists wouldn't have taken America or slaves. If pre-existing laws mattered, America would have lost the revolutionary war (America legally belonged to the king). If ethics mattered, anyone who made money in cigarettes would be in prison. If ethics mattered, Zuckerberg and his cronies would be in prison.
If you had been concerned about ethics in the past, you would have failed to create America and failed to create Facebook, etc. In my moral framework, the worst (i.e. greediest, most selfish, anti-social) people have been winning over the last 20-40 years.
This dude needs to read some actual philosophy and then ponder it and write it himself, rather than using AI.
...do....do you think that's a gotcha?
Yes, if we had considered ethics in the past, we wouldn't have committed bloody genocide on the Native Americans. We would probably have tried to open up mutually beneficial trade with them. (Sadly, we probably would still have caused the deaths of millions of them simply due to pathogens we didn't know we were carrying when we met them.) Do you think that would have made things worse now?
> In my moral framework, the worst (i.e. greediest, most selfish, anti-social) people have been winning over the last 20-40 years.
This sounds an awful lot like a "might makes right" attitude: "Sure, they're awful people, but they're winning, so we should adhere to their values!"
The bottom line of the article:
This is true. Like with a lot of similar takes on AI, tacit knowledge is not easy to add to the AI’s training set.> tacit knowledge is not easy to add to the AI’s training set.
Is it even possible? Different people do different judgements for the same things, there is no right or wrong really, just the choice you made in that moment, based on whatever you cared about at that point.
This AI written article seems to be substituting ethics for “taste” and making similar arguments to those from the past. Choosing what to do is more important than doing it is a taste problem, of which ethics is an aspect but one of many.
This kind of god-of-the-gaps thing is kind of amusing to watch, especially since I can clearly see myself doing it over time.
Even if the models never get better than they are now, which is unlikely, they're already equipped to usurp taste, ethics, and everything else to a significant degree. Human feedback will always be valuable because we assign value to human feedback, but if you don't think an ethics-bot will ever be a thing, you're not seeing the current state of things.
Incorrect, "ethics" is a good way to get laid off
> Every skill humans once bragged about is getting commoditized. Writing, coding, analysis, translation, design, research. A machine does each of them faster, cheaper, and increasingly better.
This is very much up for debate. I also would have liked your article to delve into whether thing’s that bring us humans joy actually need to be faster, and cheaper. Knowing why you do something crucially depends on knowing the thing being done. It’s very hard to cast an ethic judgement over a process you don’t understand. If your argument is that we need to be ethic stewards of machines but need to step aside the doing then your premise might lead you straight into tautology.
Ethics as opposed to morality is about codified rules. This seems to be somewhat conflating the two.
Also this sounds like it's talking about both designing those rules and also applying existing rules, without noticing much distinction between those aspects.
For applying existing rules, is there any reason that can't be mechanized aside from "the tools just aren't that capable yet"?
Designing the rules does have a "will this work as intended" component that can probably be machine-enhanced, but is largely about preferences / "should" questions.
>Ethics as opposed to morality is about codified rules
That's not accurate. See e.g. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-theory/ section 1.2.1 "Morality and Ethics"
I agree with most of what it says there and the overall sentiment.
Two notes:
1. Whoever wrote this, add your name there. Otherwise it is a 0.2x credibility multiplier.
2. I like this topic a lot and would like to discuss it with others that also like it a lot. Reach out (email in my profile), let's make a small discussion group around this :).
> Reach out (email in my profile),
Meta thought: Having recently learned of WeChat Groups in China, I'm now repeatedly noticing situations where familiar alternatives are higher friction.
ethics doesnt pay
Machiavellian ethics is also ethics. Ethics has very little to do with how to be good in some public opinion sense. The core question of ethics is what is the appropriate action in a given circumstance. It's an open question that has a lot of different answers.
The opposite of ethics isn't evil, it's moral incontinence.
You could argue that in a corrupt system, ethics tends to work against the interests of that system... but I'd say at the civilizational level they're indispensable, and going back to Aristotle ethics is rooted at the civilizational level (or some would say at the God-and-man level with necessary implications for civilization).
A lot of our relatively new institutions are set up to run like perpetual-motion machines with voracious appetites constrained only by positive law -- so much for those institutions. What we really need is to recognize the many ways in which we've lost our bearings plus a cooling-off period that allows us to search for them again.
Real morality doesn’t pay, shallow “ethics” for business, tech, etc. has a whole industry that pays very all.
Child labor pays. Sex trafficking pays. Slavery pays. What kind of person do you want to be?
Well I guess the industry is fucked then!
And this article is largely LLM-generated. Is that ethical?
Doesn't that still ring true with the ideas in the article though? His ethics were in the right place, even if he did use AI to write it?
Proof? Or are you treating a hunch as if it's fact?
It's so banal and middle-of-the-road it has to be AI generated.
> The bottom line
Is how Claude ends 90% of articles. So yes LLM slop.
Wish you could read yourself. This is exactly like how horoscope works. "Born in October? Oh, you must be really insecure!"
> So the filter runs, generation after generation, and what comes out the top is disproportionately people who lie well and feel nothing about it. Not because voters want liars, but because the machinery reliably promotes them.
The reason is that 99% of states are monarchies, and there is immense propaganda effort to make people believe that they in fact live in a democratic system.
Hollywood and the startup world enables nepo kids to lie to themselves and to the public about their "selfmade" status until they receive their ancestral Lordship from the King of England, and this fake meritocracy keeps everyone in line trying their best because one day you could be a billionaire, too.
It's a charade where your last name decides everything, even before you were born. But this is also the most peaceful and stable economic system humanity has come up with after horrors such as the crusades, the Holocaust and Rhodesia. It rewards achievements of many generations past no matter what modern ethics might think about those achievements, and it allows monarchs to peacefully blend in with the peasants.
With this in mind, the only thing a strive for "ethics" gives you is a spot on the weekly kill list.
Excellent post. Interesting that "ethics" is something society expects from normal folks, but the Big Important Leaders never have that concern.
> This is a selection problem, not a character problem.
This is a times problem, not a selection problem. The unipolar world order is ending, and everyone responds by turning inward and looking for strong leaders who will protect them against the rest.
Please explain ‘unipolar world order’.
The US can't force China do what they want and China can now also prevent the US doing whatever it wants to third countries too. Not all of them but definitely some.
It does not seem so to me. There does not seem genuine wish for protection from danger as much as genuine wish to see the leader to be cruel to others or take advantage as others.