- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- brainworms@lemm.ee
For those not aware, Google is rolling out their new AI-based “Generative AI” search, which seems to mesh Bard with the standard experience.
I asked it today why Google no longer follows their “don’t be evil” motto… The results are pretty hilarious.
Reason number one: it’s a publicly traded American company.
Corporations are neither evil nor nice. They are indifferent. By design they only care about money, they don’t care about anything else.
Not really. They’re not indifferent at all. In reality they act like narcissistic and like psychopathic humans. I watched a documentary years ago exploring that and talking with psychologists about symptoms and they agreed that they behave like psychopaths. And don’t forget that they are run by humans.
Corporations:
Didn’t you just list a bunch of reasons for why they’re indifferent? They literally only care about money and are indifferent to externalised costs and ethics.
If a person cared only about money and regularly injured or killed people to get it, would you say they are good, evil, or just “indifferent”?
They would be indifferent if they were also indifferent about money, but they’re absolutely driven by greed, so no, they’re not indifferent: if they see a chance to make more money, they’ll go for it no matter what or who they harm with it.
That is cartoon book clear definition of evil. No empathy, clear goal, willing to do anything to reach that goal - yep that is evil.
Nestlé has entered the chat.
Everything after your first sentence described evil.
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They can’t be both, and since the latter claim is the correct one, then it also supports the claim that they are evil. Because since we know that their sole and primary concern is money, then we also know to which extent they will go to get that money.
Tell that to Comcast…
Not being outright malicious but ending up doing malicious things makes this distinction pretty pointless.
We need good guys with money to stop the bad guys with money
The problem is the money makes them bad guys.
Correct in the sense that it’s the incentive scheme, i.e., capitalism (supported by state power, e.g., by enshrining the entity of a corporation and then enforcing its protection) that is the more meaningful, or at least actionable, cause of these behaviors.
While those incentive schemes are in place, ascribing too much agency to corporations themselves, i.e., calling them evil, is not particularly effective as it’s not going to change the underlying incentives.
Most evil is caused by indifference though.
Someone who hates people can be talked to and potentially can change.
Someone who’s indifferent will use hatred as a tool to control people. When this tactic is successful, and indifferent person can’t be swayed from using it, because it works.
I mean if it were proven that google’s algorithms are encouraging violence, what would an indifferent person do? They’d ask, “is the algorithm making money?” And if the answer is yes, they would make no change to the algorithm. Because they are indifferent to the evil that they are causing.
They are the stereotypical paper clip AI that will drain our blood to extract its iron content for more paperclips. Except it wants money.
Ok but which one is the least evil? I’m gonna throw out Costco.
Reason number 2: they have to continuously show increasing profit year after year.
Making $9 billion one year and 9 billion in next year is not good business apparently (9 billion was a number I pulled out of nowhere random number)
Your reason number 2 is a subset of my reason number 1.
Yup, the board can be sued for not being evil if not being evil ends up tanking the stock price.