Google is a megacorp, and while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil), they are fundamentally unconcerned with goodness or morality, and any appearance that they are is purely a marketing exercise.
... or at least that's what these people have to be telling themselves at all times.
Ultimately every sufficiently large company seems to become an arms dealer, a drug dealer or a bank.
We need look no further than Lavender [1] to see where this ends up.
This is extremely disconcerting.
Google as a tool of surveillance is the kind of thing that could so easily be abused or misused to such catastrophic ends that I absolutely think the hard line should be there. And I only feel significantly more this way given the current geopolitical realities.
while knowing this seems useless, it's actually the missing intrinsic compass and the cause for a lot of bad and stupid behavior (by the definition that something is stupid if chosen knowing it will cause negative consequences for the doer)
Everything should primarily be measured based on its primary goal. For "for-profit" companies that's obvious in their name and definition.
That there's nothing that should be assumed beyond what's stated is the premise of any contract whether commercial, public or personal (like friendship) is a basic tool for debate and decision making.
Really if a company wants people to trust claims like this, they should make them legally binding. Otherwise it's all PR.
I think megacorps being evil is universal. It tends to be corrupt cop evil vs serial killer evil, but being willing to do anything for money has historically been categorized as evil behavior.
That doesn’t mean society would be better or worse off without them, but it would be interesting to see a world where companies pay vastly higher taxes as they grow.
This whole thing where the average person feels that they can use rules against a more powerful person? That's really an invention of maybe the last 80 years, if not more recently than that.
With the exception of that human lifetime-sized era, the vast majority of history is a bunch of psychopaths running things and getting to kill/screw whoever they wanted and steal whatever they wanted. Successful revolts are few and far between. The only real difference is the stakes.
This is a very important point to remember when assessing ideas like "Is it good to build swarms of murderbots to mow down rioting peasants angry over having expenses but no jobs?" Most people might answer "no," but if the people with money answer "yes," that becomes the market's objective. Then the incentives diffuse through the economy and you don't just get the murderbots, you also get the news stations explaining how the violent peasants brought this on themselves and the politicians making murderbots tax deductible and so on.
That's old thinking. Now we have servitization. Now the business who can most efficiently offer value deserves the entire market.
Basically, iterate until you're the only one left standing and then never "sell" anything but licenses ever again.
Genuine questions. Unlike "don't be evil," this promise has a very narrow and clear interpretation.
It would be nice if companies weren't able to just kinda say whatever when it's expedient.
No, no. Call a spade a spade. This behavior and attitude is evil. Corporations under modern American capitalism must be evil. That's how capitalism works.
You succeed in capitalism not by building a better mousetrap, but by destroying anyone who builds a better moustrap than you. You litigate, acquire, bribe, and rewrite legislation to ensure yours is the best and only mousetrap available to purchase, with a token 'competitor' kept on life support so you can plausibly deny anticompetitive practices.
If you're a good company trying to do good things, you simply can't compete. The market just does not value what is good, just, or beneficial. The market only wants number to go up, and to go up right now at any cost. Amazon will start pumping out direct clones of your product for pennies. What are you gonna do, sue Amazon?! best of luck.
1. https://drakelawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/lrdisc...
So in effect you have to call the employees and shareholders evil. Well those are the same people who also work and hold public office from time to time, or are shareholders, or whatever. You can't limit this "evilness" to just an abstract corporation. Not only is it not true, you are setting up your "problem" so that it can't be addressed because you're only moralizing over the abstract corporation and not the physical manifestation of the corporation either. What do you do about the abstract corporation being evil if not taking action in the physical world against the physical people who work at and run the corporation and those who buy its products?
I've noticed similar behavior with respect to climate change advocacy and really just "government" in general. If you can't take personal responsibility, or even try to change your own habits, volunteer, work toward public office, organize, etc. it's less than useless to rail about these entities that many claim are immoral or need reform if you are not personally going to get up and do something about it. Instead you (not you specifically) just complain on the Internet or to friends and family, those complaints do nothing, and you feel good about your complaining so you don't feel like you need to actually do anything to make change. This is very unproductive because you have made yourself feel good about the problem but haven't actually done anything.
With all that being said, I'm not sure how paying vastly higher taxes would make Google (or any other company) less evil or more evil. What if Google pays more taxes and that tax money does (insert really bad thing you don't like)? Paying taxes isn't like a moral good or moral bad thing.
It would be a bit of a Pyrrhic victory to repel an attempted takeover of your land, only for that land to end up contaminated with literally millions of landmines because you didn't have a mutual agreement against using them.
I think if you look at quality of life and happiness ratings in Norway it's pretty clear it's far from "entirely undesirable". It's good for people to do things for reasons other than money.
It’s the companies that horde everyone’s personal information, who eroded the concept of privacy while mediating lives with false promises for trust turning into state intelligence agencies that bothers me
The incentives and results become fucked up, safe guards less likely to work I get not a lot of people care but it’s dangerous
[1]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...
The subject being, how far large corporations are willing to go for the sake of profit maximisation.
The market fairy has also decided that medication commercials on TV is good for you. That your car should report your location, speed, and driving habits to your insurer, car manufacturer, and their 983,764 partners at all times.
Maximally beneficial indeed.
And if Googs doesn't do it, someone else will, so it might as well be them that makes money for their shareholders. Technically, couldn't activist shareholders come together and claim by not going after this market the leadership should be replaced for those that would? After all, share prices is the only metric that matters
Nothing is going to stop USA's adversaries from deploying AI against US citizens. Pick your poison, but I prefer to compete and win rather than unilaterally disarm and hope for goodwill and kindness from regimes that prioritize the polar opposite.
However, when you change a promise publicly, you signal a change in direction. It is much more honest than leaving it in place but violating it behind the scenes. If the public really cares, they can pass a law via their democratic representatives (or Google can swear a public oath before God I suppose).
That’s one of the reasons for the turbulent times. Let’s face the truth, most of the defense can easily be used for offense and given the state of online security every progress gets into the wrong hands.
Maybe it’s time to pause to make it more difficult for those wrong hands.
We could literally have high speed rail, healthcare, the best education on the planet and have a high standard of living... and it would be peanuts to them. Instead we have a handful of people with more wealth than 99% of everyone else, while the bottom 75% of those people live in horrifying conditions. The fact that medical bankruptcy is a concept only in the richest country on earth is deeply embarrassing and shameful.
By weaponising AI?
Who else right? If not them, there will be no one saving democracies with weaponized mass-surveillance AI. It is their quest and privilege, right? Medicine, just society, and all such crap have to wait!
I bought that!
(not)
Want to make more? then take personal risk.
Yes, many defensive uses of technologies can be used for offense. When I say defense, I also include offense there as I don't believe you can just have a defensive posture alone to maintain one's defense, you need deterrence too. Personally I'm quite happy to see many in Silicon Valley embrace defense-tech and build missiles (ex. recent YC co), munitions, and dual-use tech. The world is a scary and dangerous place, and awful people will take advantage of the weakness of others if they can. Maybe I'm biased because I spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, but I much prefer the U.S. with all our faults to another actor like China or Russia being dominant
People making meaningful decisions at mega corporations aren’t a random sample of the population, they are self selected to care a great deal about money and or power.
Honestly if you wanted to filter the general population to quietly discover who was evil I’d have a hard time finding something more effective. It doesn’t guarantee everyone is actually evil, but actually putting your kids first is a definite hindrance.
The morality of the average employee on the other hand is mostly irrelevant. They aren’t setting policies and if they dislike something they just get replaced.
Edit: answered, not asked
I don't think it's necessary to conclude that because a company is evil then everyone who works at the company is evil. But it's sort of like the evilness of the company is a weighted function of the evilness of the people who control it. Someone with a small role may be relatively good while the company overall can still be evil. Someone who merely uses the company's products is even more removed from the company's own level of evil. If the company is evil it usually means there is some relatively small group of people in control of it making evil decisions.
Now, I'm using phraseology here like "is evil" as a shorthand for "takes actions that are evil". The overall level of evilness or goodness of a person is an aggregate of their actions. So a person who works for an evil company or buys an evil company's products "is evil", but only insofar as they do so. I don't think this is even particularly controversial, except insofar as people may prefer alternative terms like "immoral" or "unethical" rather than "evil". It's clear people disagree about which acts or companies are evil, but I think relatively few people view all association with all companies totally neutrally.
I do agree with you that taking personal responsibility is a good step. And, I mean, I think people do that too. All kinds of people avoid buying from certain companies, or buy SRI funds or whatever, for various ethically-based reasons.
However, I don't entirely agree with the view that says it's useless or hypocritical to claim that reform is necessary unless you are going to "do something". Yes, on some level we need to "do something", but saying that something needs to be done is itself doing something. I think the idea that change has to be preceded or built from "saintly" grassroots actions is a pernicious myth that demotivates people from seeking large-scale change. My slogan for this is "Big problems require big solutions".
This means that it's unhelpful to say that, e.g., everyone who wants regulation of activities that Company X does has to first purge themselves of all association with Company X. In many cases a system arises which makes such purges difficult or impossible. As an extreme, if someone lives in an area with few places to get food, they may be forced to patronize a grocery store even if they know that company is evil. Part of "big solutions" means replacing the bad ways of doing things with new things, rather than saying that we first have to get rid of the bad things to get some kind of clean slate before we can build new good things.
"Google Petard, formerly known as Boombi, will be shutting down at the end of next month. Any existing explosion data you have in your Google Account will be deleted, starting on May 1, 2027."
This is a meme that needs to die, for 99% of cases out there the line between good/bad is very clear cut.
Dumb nihilists keep the world from moving forward with regards to human rights and lawful behavior.
Sounds like the effort needed for bonuses here in the US. Why try if the amount is largely arbitrary and generally lower than your base salary pay rate when you consider all the extra hours. Everything is a sham.
Their entire economy and society are structured around oil extraction.
There are no lessons to learn from Norway unless you live somewhere that oil does from the ground.
If using AI and other technology to uphold a surveillance state, wage war, do imperialism, and do genocide... isn't evil, than I don't know if you can call anything evil.
And the entire point of taxes is that we all collectively decide that we all would be better off if we pooled our labor and resources together so that we can have things like a basic education, healthcare, roads, police, bridges that don't collapse etc.. Politicians and corporations have directly broken and abused this social contract in a multitude of ways, one of those ways is using loopholes to not pay taxes at the same rate as everyone else by a large margin... another way is paying off politicians and lobbying so that those loopholes never get closed, and in fact, the opposite happens. So yes, taxing Google and other mega-corporations is a single, easily identifiable, action that can be directly taken to remedy this problem. Though, there is no way around solving the core issue at hand, but people have to be able to identify that issue foremost.
Moral character is something that has to be taught, it doesn't just come out on its own.
If your parents don't do it properly, you'll be just another cog in the soulless machine to which human life is of no value.
This is an excellent overview of why: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
By the way humans: "principles page includes provisions that say the company will use human oversight". ... which human? Trump? Putin is human too, but I guess he is busy elsewhere. Definitely not someone like Mother Theresa, she is dead anyway, and I cannot think of someone from recent years playig in the same league, somehow that end of the spectrum is not represented that well recently.
I take issue with "don't blame the employees". You need people to run these organizations. If you consider the organization to be evil you don't get to then say well the people who are making the thing run aren't evil, they're just following orders or they don't know better. BS. And they'd be replaced if they left? Is that really the best argument we have against "being evil"?
Sorry I'd be less evil but if I gave up my position as an evil henchman someone else would do it! And all that says anyway is that those replacing those who leave are just evil too.
If you work at one of these companies or buy their products and you literally think they are evil you are either lying to yourself, or actively being complicit in their evil actions. There's just no way around that.
Take personal responsibility. Make tough decisions. Stop abstracting your problems away.
Looks very incomplete....
A lot of what is going on in the world right now makes me think we are in a war that hasn't yet been officially acknowledged.
This is a cliche you hear from right winger in any country that has a progressive tax system.
Regarding Norway, taxes aren't in the same ballpark as in some US blue states.
Also, it's a very simplistic view to think that people are only motivated by money. Counter examples abound.
Putting money before other considerations is what’s evil. What’s “possible” expands based on your morality it doesn’t contract. If being polite makes a sale you’re going to find a lot of polite sales people, but how much are they willing to push that expended warrantee?
> Sorry I'd be less evil but if I gave up my position as an evil henchman someone else would do it!
I’ve constrained what I’m willing to do and who I’m willing to work for based on my morality, have you? And if not, consider what that say about you…
Complaining is not unproductive, it signals to others they are not alone in their frustrations. Imagine that nobody ever responds or airs their frustrations; would you feel comfortable saying something about it? Maybe you're the only one, better keep quiet then. Or how do you find people who share your frustrations with whom you could organise some kind of pushback?
If I was "this government", I would love for people to shut up and just do their job, pay taxes and buy products (you don't have to buy them from megacorp, just spend it and oh yeah, goodluck finding places to buy products from non-megacorps).
At the same time the Ukraine war has changed a lot of the battlefield strategies that will require development of new advanced weapons. Most obviously in the areea of drones / counter-drone space. but lot of other technology as well.
With all that money of course companies will chase it. OpenAI is already joined up with Anduril.
Most people consider neglect evil in my experience.
„Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.“
Propaganda and disinformation were problems before the AI hype but now it got worse.
In the race for AGI they ignored the risks and didn‘t think of useful counter measures.
It’s easier to spread lies with AI than to spread the truth.
We enter dark aged where most people can’t distinguish fake from real because the faked became so convincing.
Audio, photo and video lost their evidential value.
Instead of taking action they complain, set up an abstract boogeyman to take down, and then nobody can actually take action to make the world better (based on their point of view) because there's nothing anyone can do about Google the evil corporation because it's just some legal fiction. Bonus points for moralizing on the Internet and getting likes to feel even better about not doing anything.
But you can do something. If someone thinks Google is evil they can stop using Gmail or other Google products and services, or even just reduce their usage - maybe you can switch email providers but you only have one good map option. Ok at least you did a little more than you did previously.
Depends on the considerations and what you consider to be evil. My point wasn't to argue about what's evil, of course there is probably a few hundred years of philosophy to overcome in that discussion, but to point out that if you truly think an organization is evil it's not useful to only care about the legal fiction or the CEO or the board that you won't have any impact on - you have to blame the workers who make the evil possible too, and stop using the products. Otherwise you're just deceiving yourself into feeling like you are doing something.
The fact you assume people are going to do things they believe to be morally reprehensible is troubling to me.
I don’t assume people need to be evil to work at such companies because I don’t assume they notice the same things I do.
> The fact you assume people are going to do things they believe to be morally reprehensible is troubling to me.
This seems to be very common behavior in my experience. Perhaps the rhetoric doesn't match the true beliefs. I'm not sure.
Increasing marginal income tax rates on highly compensated employees might be a good policy overall. But where are we on the Laffer curve? If we go too far then it really hurts the overall economy.
Weird thing is for corporations, it's humans running the whole thing.
We all recognize that a democracy is the correct method for political decision making, even though it's also obvious that theoretically a truly benevolent dictator can make better decisions than an elected parliament but in practice such dictators don't really exist.
The same reasoning applies to economic decision making at society level. If you want a society whose economics reflects the will and ethics of the people, and which serves for the benefit of normal people, the obvious thing is the democratize economic decision making. That means that all large corporations must be mostly owned by their workers in roughly 1/N fashion, not by a small class of shareholders. This is the obvious correct solution, because it solves the underlying problem, not paper of the symptoms like taxation. If shareholder owned corporations are extracting wealth from workers or doing unethical things, the obvious solution is to take away their control.
Obviously, some workers will still make their own corporations do evil things, but at least it will be collective responsibility, not forced upon them by others.
Reality is in a war between the West vs Russia/Iran/North Korea/China whomever we end up fighting, we’re going to do whatever we can so the Western civilization and soldiers survive and win.
Ultimately Google is a western company and if war breaks out not supporting our civilization/military is going to be wildly unpopular and turn them into a pariah and anything to the contrary was never going to happen.
There was no war forthcoming between an integrated West and any other power. War is coming because there no longer is a West.
...I just picture a similar conversation with a CEO going: "Sir, shareholders want to see more improvement this quarter." CEO: "Do we run ads? Have we run ads? Will we run ads this time?" (The answer is inevitably yes to all of these)
So... when the Russian tanks start rolling on the way to Berlin and Chinese troops are marching along that nice new (old) road they finished fixing up - otw to Europe, so if that happens, which looks possible - you think there will be no West??
If the world is to be divided Europe is the lowest hanging and sweetest fruit.
I think there will still be West even if there is a King in the US demanding fealty to part of it - we are the same as they are, it's ridiculous to pretend we are.
Ideology is one thing, survival of people and culture is another.
This is flatly untrue. Corporations are made up of humans who make decisions. They are indeed concerned with goodness and/or morality. Saying otherwise lets them off the hook for the explicit decisions they make every day about how to operate their company. It's one reason why there are shareholder meetings, proxy votes, activist investors, Certified B-Corporations, etc.
Who's paying for that tho ? The same dumbass who get spied over, i don't see it as a reason why it wouldn't happen. Cash is unlimited.
I guess corrupt cop vs serial killer is like amorality (profit-driven systems) vs immorality (active malice)? A company is a mix of stakeholders, some of whom push for ethical practices. But when shareholders demand endless growth, even well-intentioned actors get squeezed.
I want to get upset over it, but I sadly recognize the reality of the why this is not surprising to anyone. We actually have competitors in that space, who will do that and more. We already have seen some of the more horrifying developments in that area.. and, when you think about it, those are the things that were allowed to be shown publicly. All the fun stuff is happening behind closed doors away from social media.
There are many 'interesting' event that happened because of the invasion of irak, looking for weapon of mass destruction that never existed.
This led to the destabilization of the entire middle east, several war and ISIS.
One could say that the unconditional support to the israelian policy in middle east since 1950 also brought it's load of conflicts.
The whole south America is fcked because of usa illegal intervention from WW2 to the end of cold war.
And the list goes on and on.
I mean it would be much faster to stay what good impact had the usa foreign policy on the world in the last 100 year.
the architecture of the system is imperfect and creates bad results for people.
Actually I think a lot of people have it - just yesterday I saw someone on reddit claim Google was evil because it was secretly founded by the US military. And they were American. That's their military!
Propping up evil figure/regime/ideology (Bolsheviks/Communists) to justify remorseless evilness (Concentration camps/Nuclear bomb) isn't new nor unique, but particularly predictable.
Company says won't work for DoD
DoD initiates arm twisting and FOMO
Company now works for DoD
The origins of investment will often lead to relative outcomes of that investment. It's almost like DoD invested in Google for an informational weapon, which really should surprise no one.
There is also tremendous interest, though only a few of them have been fielded on the actual battlefield so far, to the remotely controlled and autonomous ground platforms, and Google is the leader in the civilian ones, and it looks to me there is a relatively easy path to transferring the tech into the military systems.
It isn't this that's insane, but a total belief purity of weapons that is.
The problem with building AI weapons is that eventually it will be in the hands of people who are morally bankrupt and therefore will use them to do evil.
Communication is about communicating information, sometimes a terse short and aggressive style is the most effective way. It activates neurons in a way a paragraph of polite argumentation doesn't.
This isn’t new. Facebook, for example, received early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, and its origins trace back to DARPA’s canceled LifeLog project—a system designed to track and catalog people’s entire lives. Big Tech and government surveillance have been intertwined from the start.
That’s why these companies never face real consequences. They’ve become quasi-government entities, harvesting data on billions under the guise of commerce.
Second, don’t understand how the atomic bomb argument makes sense. Germany was developing them and would have used them if it got there first.
Are you suggesting the US really is truly the only nation that would ever have used atomic weapons? That if Japan made it first they would have spared China or the US?
Maybe you'd prefer if we were all maximally polite drones but that's not how humans are, going back to GPs point, and I don't think it's a state than anyone truly wants either.
There is at this moment little evidence that autonomous weapons will cause more collateral damage than artillery shells and regular air strikes. The military usefulness on other other hand seems to be very high and increasing.
So what? Can't Google find other sources of revenue than building weapons?
Weird, because in my experience, that has happened to every single person I know and myself. Whether it's at the start or end of a comment is not really the point.
More accurately in the context of the comment, its "Im gonna be an asshole to you because I think you don't have the life experience I do", which is at least, some kind of signal.
I wasn't the original responder btw.
Ideally no one, and if the cost / expertise is so niche that only a handful of sophisticated actors could possibly actually do it, then in fact (by way of enforceable treaty) no one.
In my garage, I have some pretty nasty "weapons" - notably a couple of chainsaws, some drills, chisels, lump/sledge/etc hammers and a fencing maul! The rest are merely: mildly malevolent.
You don't need an AI (whatever that means) to get medieval on someone. On the bright side the current state of AI (whatever that means) is largely bollocks.
Sadly, LLMs have and will be wired up to drones and the results will be unpredictable.
A car is a tool. It can be used as a weapon.
Even water and air can be used as a weapon if you try hard enough. There is probably nothing on this planet that couldn't be used as a weapon.
That said, I do not think AI weapons are a reasonable thing to build for any war, for any country, for any reason - even if the enemy has them.
They already dumped "do no evil" many years ago and they are now all in on fuck the poor and fuck the rest: I'm making profits and all is fine.
Google makes money and they don't appear to care how - its all about the money.
I'm sure this sounds like a big nothingburger from the perspective of, you know, people he isn't threatening.
How can you excuse that behaviour? How can you think someone like that can be trusted with any weapons? How naive and morally bankrupt do you have to be to build a gun for that kind of person, and think that it won't be used irresponsibly?
Anyone who wants to establish deterrence against superiors or peers, and open up options for handling weaker opponents.
> enforceable treaty
Such a thing does not exist. International affairs are and will always be in a state of anarchy. If at some point they aren't, then there is no "international" anymore.
Look it up.
On the one hand I think they were afraid many of their employees might protest again like they have in the past, signaling that Google isn't that awesome, progressive place everybody should work. This would mean they could be potentially losing some of the top notch SV talent that they are in constant competition with from other companies.
On the other hand, they've made it clear they aren't above firing employees who do protest as they just did when 28 employees were fired over the recent Nimbus Project contract worth an estimated $1.2B dollars with Israel:
They staged sit-in protests in Google's offices in Silicon Valley, New York City and Seattle – more than 100 protestors showed up. A day later, Google fired Montes and 27 other employees who are part of the No Tech for Apartheid group.
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/19/1245757317/google-worker-fire...
I think they try too hard to tow the line between the two, but like you said, its clear they're really all about the money.
How would we go about doing that?
Every kind of nefarious way to keep the truth at bay in authoritarian regimes is always on the table. From the cracking of iPhones to track journalists covering these regimes, to snooping on email, to using AI to do this? Is just all the same thing, just updated and improved tools.
Just like Kevin Mitnick selling zero day exploits to the highest bidder, I have a hard time seeing how these get developed and somehow stay out of reach of the regimes you speak of.
That it won't is a mixture of cowardice, cynical opportunism, and complicity with unprovoked aggression.
In which case, I posit that yes, if you're fine with threatening or inflicting violence on innocent people, you don't have a moral right to 'self-defense'. It makes you a predator, and arming a predator is a mistake.
You lose any moral ground you have when you are an unprovoked aggressor.
Successful politicans and sociopaths are experts in double meanings.
"I will not drop bombs on Acmeland." Instead, I will send missiles.
"At this point in time, we do not intend to end the tariffs." The intent will change when conditions change, which is forecast next week.
"We are not in negotations to acquire AI Co for $1B." We are negotiating for $0.9B.
"Our results show an improvement for a majority of recipients." 51% saw an improvement of 1%, 49% saw a decline of 5%...
> ... evil cannot by itself flourish in this world. It can do so only if it is allied with some good. This was the principle underlying noncooperation—that the evil system which the [British colonial] Government represents, and which has endured only because of the support it receives from good people, cannot survive if that support is withdrawn.
If you are a good person working for the big G...
We're talking about making war slightly more expensive for yourself to preserve the things that matter, which is a trade-off that we make all the time. Even in war you don't have to race for the bottom for every marginal fraction-of-a-percent edge. We've managed to e.g. ban antipersonnel landmines, this is an extremely similar case.
> How would you enforce it after you get nuked?
And yet we've somehow managed to avoid getting into nuclear wars.
Like skydiving without a parachute, I think we should accept it is a bad idea without needing a double blind study
Just like Meta announced some changes around the time of inauguration, I'm sure Google management has noticed the AI announcements, and they don't want to be perceived in a certain way by the current administration
I think the truth is more in the middle (there is tons of disagreement within the company), but they naturally care about how they are perceived by those in power
When you publicly quote: You are mostly lost to reason and profit is everything! That's why you do it.
If you have other intentions then go with a Not for Profit (I'm sure most countries have a similar structure) or similar setup.
Who, in that business, cares?
AI will provide a fig leaf for the indiscriminate large scale killing that is regularly done since the start of industrialised warfare.
Using robots spare drone pilots from PTSD
From the perspective of the murderous thugs that run our nations (way way before the current bunch of plainly bonkers ones in the USA), what is not to like?
Whilst there are all sorts of quibbles about weapons generally being evil, this is evil.
I pledge to not drink coffee
Somebody hands me coffee
I retract the pledge and start drinking
---
I have to wonder what the value of a pledge is if you can just stop pledging something at the earliest convenience, do the thing, and people cheer you on for it
The alignment-faking research seems to indicate that LLMs exercise of this kind of reasoning.
Yes I read the whole series. It was a fucking marathon.
I can’t quite tie your point into the series directly, other than to agree that elected officials are, almost by definition, professional liars.
(Tugs on braid)
Only in the United States do we have the privilege to pretend like we can ignore it.
Additionally, the US has been vociferous about limiting access to foreign tech companies with "military links" in China, so perhaps Google should be placed in that category by all non-Five-Eyes countries.
In other words, everything would be terrible, but at least it'd be terrible for everyone.
Until we realized we could sacrifice some for the betterment of the rest, find a way to rationalize it, and then we throw it all out the window.
Imagine you have a weapon that can find and kill all the 'bad guys'. Would you not be in a morally compromised position if you didn't use it? You're letting innocents die every moment you don't.
* warning definitions of bad guys may differ leading to further conflict.
Plus, in a healthy economy if everyone is bribing the government shouldn’t it all cancel out? Well it turns out the poor don’t bribe the government very often, so they are easily ignored.
And suddenly, when the government is co-opted into believing anything that gets in the way of “business” is bad, they figure out that money that could be spent on social services could also be spent on corporate tax incentives! Eventually the entire country becomes one big profit maximizer.
No matter which way you look at it, we live on a planet where resources are scarce. Which means there will be competition. Which means there will be innovation in weaponry.
That said, we've had nukes for decades, and have collectively decided to not use them for decades. So there is some room for optimism.
Eventually tech and even startups follow the money. Palantir is considered cool. YC started accepting defense startups. Marc Andreessen is on X nonstop promoting conservative views of all kinds. PG becomes anti-wokism warrior.
This is how it happens. Step by step.
Now that's off the table, I think America should have AI weapons because everyone else will be developing them as quickly as possible.
> Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity.
Companies technically have disproportionate power.
It's better that they shift according to the will of the people.
The alternative, that companies act according to their own will, could be much worse.
… it will be named “Cyberdyne”
When people talk about AI being dangerous, or possibly bringing about the end of the world, I usually disagree. But AI weapons are obviously dangerous, and could easily get out of control. Their whole point is that they are out of control.
The issue isn’t that AI weapons are “evil”. It’s that value alignment isn’t a solved problem, and AI weapons could kill people we wouldn’t want them to kill.
And even if it was, they wouldn’t tell the system it was part of old non-evil Google.
I’m sure they are clutching their pearls while waiting for their money to be deposited into their bank account and their RSUs to be deposited into their brokerage accounts.
Yes I did a stint at BigTech. But I didn’t lie to myself and think the company I worked for was above reproach as my adult son literally peed in bottles while delivering packages for the same company.
Not a cliché - a fact. I'll explain to you.
The incentive structure of progressive taxation is wrong: it only works for the few percent that are extremely money hungry: the few that are willing to work for lower and lower percentage gains.
Normal people say "enough" and they give up once they have the nice house and a few toys (and some retirement money with luck). In New Zealand that is something like USD1.5 million.
I'm on a marginal rate of 39% in New Zealand. I am well off but I literally am not motivated to try and earn anything extra because the return is not enough for the extra effort or risk involved. No serial entrepreneurship for me because it only has downside risk. If I invest and win then 39%+ is taken as tax, but even worse is that if I lose then I can't claim my time back. Even financial losses only claw back against future income: and my taxable income could move to $0 due to COVID-level-event and so my financial risk is more than what it might naively appear.
Taxation systems do not fairly reward for risk. Especially watch people with no money taking high risks and pay no insurance because the worst that can happen to them is bankruptcy.
New Zealand loses because the incentive structure for a founder is broken. We are an island so the incentive structure should revolve around bringing in overseas income (presuming the income is spent within NZ). Every marginal dollar brought into the economy helps all citizens and the government.
The incentives were even worse when I was working but was trying to found a company. I needed to invest time, which had the opportunity cost of the wages I wouldn't get as a developer (significant risk that can't be hedged and can't be claimed against tax). 9 times out of 10 a founder wins approximately $0: so expected return needs to be > 10x. A VC fund needs something like > 30x return from the 1 or 2 winning investments. I helped found a successful business but high taxation has meant I haven't reached my 30x yet - chances are I'll be dead before I get a fair return for my risk. I'm not sure I've even reached 10x given I don't know the counterfactual of what my employee income would have become. This is for a business earning good export income.
Incentive structures matter - we understand that for employees - however few governments seem to understand that for businesses.
Most people are absolutely ignorant of even basic economics. The underlying drive is the wish to take from those that have more than them. We call it the tall poppy syndrome down here.
(reëdited to add clarity)
So you're in favor of losing a war and becoming a subject of the enemy? While it's certainly tempting to think that unilateralism can work, I can hardly see how.
That being said the only way I could imagine we'd get a single world order is one country dominating everyone else, just like superpowers and regional powers dominate their respective parts of the globe.
Never ever ever are people just going to give up their control out of some form of "enlightenment" that has never existed among the human race.
Of course it's not that as bad as you describe because it's not as simple as you describe.
Would China, Russia, or Iran agree to such a preemptive AI weapons ban? Doubtful, it’s their chance to close the gap. I’m onboard if so, but I don’t see anything happening on that front until well after they start dominating the landscape.
https://itif.org/publications/2024/09/16/china-is-rapidly-be...
For example the most advanced batteries in the world are designed and manufactured in China.
In fact, when you look at the last decade of Google saying they're an "AI first" company and literally inventing transformers, and look at what their stock price has done and how they've performed in relation to other major companies involved in this current AI spring, there is simply no way not to be disappointed.
Eliminating the need to lie/misguide people to sway them would be such a crazy world.
When China attacks with AI weapons do you expect the free world to fight back armed with moral superiority? No. We need even more lethal AI weapons.
Mutual assured destruction has worked so far for nukes.
Should companies with consumer brands never make weapons? Sure, and while we're at it, let's ban knives because they can be used for both chopping vegetables and stabbing people. The issue isn't the technology itself. It's how it's regulated, controlled, and used. And as for cyber terrorism? That's a problem with bad actors, not with the tools themselves.
So, by all means, keep pointing out the hypocrisy of a company that makes YouTube Kids and killer AI. Just don't pretend like you're not benefiting from the same duality every time you use a smartphone or the internet which don't forget is a technology born, ironically, from military research.
The US is politically and economically declining, already. And its area of influence has been weakening since, the 90's?
It would be bad strategy to not do anything until you feel hopelessly threathened.
we have, of course, developed all three. they have gone a long way towards keeping us safe over the past century.
OpenAI has already signed a collaboration with Anduril.
Killer robots will be a reality very soon; everyone is very obviously getting prepped for this. China has a massive advantage.
Deception is bad enough, knowing people’s true motivations and opinions surely would be worse.
What truly motivates other people is largely a mystery, and what motivates oneself is wildly mysterious to that oneself indeed.
if you're mad about the existence of weapons then please review the prisoners' dilemma again. we manage defection on smaller scales using governments but let's presuppose that major world powers will not accept the jurisdiction of some one-world government that can prevent defection by force. especially not the ones who are powerful and prosperous (like us) who would mostly lose under such an arrangement.
I guess there's a lot missing in semantics, is the AI specifically for targeting or is a drone that can adapt to changes in wind speed using AI considered an AI weapon?
At the end of the day though, the biggest use of AI in defense will always be information gathering and processing.
There are more options than arming an aggressor and capitulating to foreign powers. It's a false dichotomy to suggest it.
- 1mmTC is enough to do this depending on how one allocates spending. land in many parts of the country is not that expensive.
and yes, America has done that for the "pax Americana" period. unfortunately we were short-sighted and allowed people too much free reign to be stupid and anti-American.
Actually, this reminds me of when Paul Graham came to Google, around 2005. Before that, I had read an essay or two, and thought he was kind of a blowhard.
But I actually thought he was a great speaker in person, and that lecture changed my opinion. He was talking about "Don't Be Evil", and he also said something very charming about how "Don't Be Evil" is conditional upon having the luxury to live up to that, which is true.
That applies to both companies and people:
- If Google wasn't a money-printing machine in 2005, then "don't be evil" would have been less appealing. And now in 2020, 2021, .... 2025, we can see that Google clearly thinks about its quarterly earning in a way that it didn't in 2005, so "don't be evil" is too constraining, and was discarded.
- For individuals, we may not pay much attention to "don't be evil" early in our careers. But it is more appealing when you're more established, and have had a couple decades to reflect on what you did with your time!
These weapons could also come in handy domestically if people find out that both parties screw them all the time.
I wonder why people claim that China is a threat out side of economics. Has China tried to invade the US? Has Russia tried to invade the EU? The answer is no. The only current threats to the EU come from the orange man.
The same person who also revoked the INF treaty. The US now installs intermediate range nuclear missiles in Europe. Russia does so in Belarus.
So both great powers have convenient whipping boys to be nuked first, after which they will get second thoughts.
It is beyond ridiculous that both the US and Russia constantly claim that they are in danger, when all international crises in the last 40 years have been started by one of them.
Otherwise why bother?
> We are clarifying that, as we continue to increase the breadth and depth of the content we make available to you, circumstances may require that certain titles and types of content include ads, even in our 'no ads' or 'ad free' subscription tiers.
So at this point they aren't even bothering to rename the tier from "ad free" even as they put ads in it. Or maybe it's supposed to mean "the ads come free with it" now? Newspeak indeed.
The real danger is when they can't. When they, without hesitation or remorse, kill one or millions of people with maximum efficiency, or "just" exist with that capability, to threaten them with such a fate. Unlike nuclear weapons, in case of a stalemate between superpowers they can also be turned inwards.
Using AI for defensive weapons is one thing, and maybe some of those would have to shoot explosives at other things to defend; but just going with "eh, we need to have the ALL possible offensive capability to defend against ANY possible offensive capability" is not credible to me.
The threat scenario is supposed to be masses of enemy automated weapons, not huddled masses; so why isn't the objective to develop weapons that are really good at fighting automatic weapons, but literally can't/won't kill humans, because that's would remain something only human soldiers do? Quite the elephant on the couch IMO.
No, OP is right. We are truly at the dystopian point where a sufficiently rich government can track the loyalty of its citizens in real time by monitoring all electronic communications.
Also, "expensive" is relative. When you consider how much US has historically been willing to spend on such things...
OpenAI is sneaky slimey and headed by a psycho narcissist. Makes Pichia looks like a saint.
Ethically, it’s the same. But if someone was pointing a gun at me I’d rather have someone with some empathy behind the trigger rather than the personification of a company that bleeds high level execs and… insert many problems here
Today people have differing views of nuclear weapons, but people who fought near Japan and survived believe the bomb saved their life.
It's easy to pretend you don't have a sides when there is peace, but in this environment google's going to take a side.
As for sending people in harm's way: if that were the effect, it would only apply to those "with AI". In essence, AI becomes a weapon you use to threaten someone with war since your own cost will be low and their cost will be high.
Also, scale plays a significant part as well. Any high-exposure organization which operates on a global scale has access to an extremely large pool of candidates to staff its offices... And such candidate pools necessarily include a large number of any given personas... Including large numbers of ethically-challenged individuals and criminals. Without an interview process which actively selects for 'ethics', the ethically-challenged and criminal individuals have a significant upper-hand in getting hired and then later wedging themselves into positions of power within the company.
Criminals and ethically-challenged individuals have a bigger risk appetite than honest people so they are more likely to succeed within a corporate hierarchy which is founded on 'positive thinking' and 'turning a blind eye'. On a global corporate playing field, there is a huge amount of money to be made in hiding and explaining away irregularities.
A corporate employee can do something fraudulent and then hold onto their jobs while securing higher pay, simply by signaling to their employer that they will accept responsibility if the scheme is exposed; the corporate employer is happy to maintain this arrangement and feign ignorance while extracting profits so long as the scheme is kept under wraps... Then if the scheme is exposed, the corporations will swiftly throw the corporate employee under the bus in accordance to the 'unspoken agreement'.
The corporate structure is extremely effective at deflecting and dissipating liability away from itself (and especially its shareholders) and onto citizens/taxpayers, governments and employees (as a last layer of defense). The shareholder who benefits the most from the activities of the corporation is fully insulated from the crimes of the corporation. The scapegoats are lined up, sandwiched between layers of plausible deniability in such a way that the shareholder at the end of the line can always claim complete ignorance and innocence.
Unprecedented levels of peace in Europe happened not because of competing nation states, but in spite of that competition. It was the unipolar control exerted by the US and the destruction of the Soviet Union and the creation of the EU (a proto pan-European state) that caused the 1990s. There was one and only pole -- the West. Not 2 (or more) different adversaries with opposed interests engaging in an arms race.
As we go back to a world with more fragmented and distributed power, we will get more war and more arms races. An especially toxic setup in the age of AI.
This doesn't have to be a binary, anyways. You could set it up as some kind of federation where there's still economic competition. Just not military competition.
Not really, though. Like any tool, its misuse or failure is the responsibility of the wielder.
> As for sending people in harm's way: if that were the effect, it would only apply to those "with AI". In essence, AI becomes a weapon you use to threaten someone with war since your own cost will be low and their cost will be high.
Agree about that part but that's just the nature of war, there are always going to be armies that are scarier than others.
It hardly matters what employees think anymore when the executives are weather-vanes who point in the direction of wealth and power over all else (just like the executives at their competitors).
In case you missed it, a few days back Google asked all employees who don't believe in their "mission" to voluntarily resign.
https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/
And Google is profiting of this, helping enforce a brutal illegal occupation.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-provided-a...
That is not the same thing as asking everyone who doesn't believe in the mission to please resign.
Military power is what has kept the EU safe, and countries without strong enough military power — such as Ukraine, which naively gave up its nuclear arsenal in the 90s in exchange for Russian promises to not invade — are repeatedly battered by the power-hungry.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-provided-a...
While the music played you worked by candlelight
Those San Francisco nights
You were the best in town
Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl
You turned it on the world
That's when you turned the world around
Did you feel like Jesus?
Did you realize
That you were a champion in their eyes?
On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen clean
Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home
Every A-Frame had your number on the wall
You must have had it all
You'd go to L.A. on a dare
And you'd go it alone
Could you live forever?
Could you see the day?
Could you feel your whole world fall apart and fade away?That word comes with a lot of boot-up code and dodgy dependencies.
I don't like it.
Did Robert Louis Stevenson make a philosophical error in 1882 supposing that a moral society (with laws etc) can contain within itself a domain outside of morals [0]?
What if coined the word "alegal"?
Oh officer... what I'm doing is neither legal nor illegal, it's simply alegal "
The main thing here I think is anonymity through numbers and complexity. You and thousands of others just want to see the numbers go up. And that desire is what ultimately influences decisions like this.
If google stock dropped because of this then google wouldn't do it. But it is the actions of humans in aggregate that keeps it up.
Megacorporations are scapegoats when in actuality they are just a set of democratic rules. The corporation is just a window into the true nature of humanity.
Of course. My point was, it is insane for those who do.
That is to make a mistake of composition. An entity can have properties that none of its parts have. A cube made out of bricks is round, but none of the bricks are round. You might be evil, your cells aren't evil.
It's often the case that institutions are out of alignment with its members. It can even be the case that all participants of an organization are evil, but the system still functions well. (usually one of the arguments for markets, which is one such system). When creating an organization that is effectively the most basic task, how to structure it such that even when its individual members are up to no good, the functioning of the organization is improved.
It could have wondrously good impacts, but that only matters in a moral framework where good actions morally cancel out bad ones.
—Eugene Gendlin
I don't think the entities that are using it in this way care.
https://www.statnews.com/2023/03/13/medicare-advantage-plans...
https://www.hfma.org/revenue-cycle/denials-management/health...
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24151437/ai-israel-gaza-w...
Also, AFAIK all of those nations consolidated because of military conquest. Countless European wars and empires.
The EU isn't like that, but they're an alliance and not one country. You can't just leave a country like England did.
People have the incentive to not do evil and to do evil for money. When you abstract the evil away into 1 vote out of thousands then you abstract responsibility and everyone ends up in aggregate doing an inconsequential evil and it adds up to a big evil.
The tragedy of the commons.
Obviously because they don't give a shit.
That creates limits to growth of an Ad based ecosystem.
So the thing to pay attention too is not Revenue growth or Profit growth of a Platform but Price of an Ad, Price to increase reach, price to Pay to Boost your post, price of a presidential campaign etc etc. These prices cant grow forever just like with housing prices or we get the equivalent of a Housing Bubble.
Want to destabilize the whole system pump up ad prices.
Growing up in soviet bloc I took that story at face value. After all democracy was still a new thing, and people haven't invented privacy concerns yet.
Since then I always thought that some sort of cooperation between companies like Facebook or Google and CIA/DOD was an obvious thing to everyone.
And if one wants to know why big tech from China isn't welcome, be it phones or social media, it's not because fear of them spying on Americans, but because of the infeasibility of integrating Chinese companies into our own domestic surveillance systems.
The orange man is completely ineffectual on both fronts. Will not spend the money on the military and too inept to make a deal that doesn’t cost in the long run.
Lot of this thread has reduced the issue to whether it is more ethical for one country to deploy relative to others. In any case, a lot of countries will have this capability. A lot of AI models are already openly available. The required vision and reasoning models are being developed currently for other uses. Weaponization is not a distant prospect.
Given that, the tech community should think about how to tackle this collective major problem facing humanity. There was a shift, which happened to nuclear scientists, from when they were developing the bomb to the post World War situation when they started thinking about how to protect the planet from a MAD scenario.
Important questions - What would be good defense against these weapons? Is there a good way of monitoring whether a country is deploying this - so that this can be a basis for disarmament treaties? How do citizens audit government use of such weapons?
I never said that. Please don't reply to comments you made up in your head.
Using AI doesn't automagically equate to winning a war. Using AI could mean the AI kills all your own soldiers by mistake. AI is stupid, it just is. It "hallucinates" and often leads to wrong outcomes. And it has never won a war, and there's no guarantee that it would help to win any war.
The difference is Norway’s economy being far less dependent on petroleum which is only 40% of their exports.
It's legitimate to worry about scaled, automated control of weapons, since it could allow a very small number of people to harm a much larger number of people. That removes one of our best checks we have against the misuse of weaponry. If you have to muster a whole army to go kill a bunch of people, they can collectively revolt. (It's not always _easy_ but it's possible.)
Automating weapons is a lot like nuclear weapons in some ways. Once the hard parts are done (refining raw oar), the ability for a small number of people to harm a vast number of others is serious. People are right to worry about it.
The income tax rate isn't all that relevant to the costs and benefits of starting a company, so I don't understand that part of your story. The rewards for founding a successful company mostly aren't subject to income tax, and NZ has a very light capital gains regime.
I have started my own company and I do agree that there are some issues that could be addressed. For example, it would be fairer if the years I worked for no income created tax-deductible losses against future income.
But NZ's tax rates are lower than Australia and the USA and most comparable nations, and NZers start a lot of businesses, so I don't think that is one of our major problems at the moment.
Google rushed to sell AI tools to Israel’s military after Hamas attack:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/01/21/google-...
> Years ago a friend working in security told me that every telco operator in Elbonia
See info about the fictional country of Elbonia here, from the Dilbert comics:
Isn't that a contradiction? Morality is fundamentally a sense of "right and wrong". If they reward anything that maximizes short term profit and punish anything that works against it then it appears to me that they have a simple, but clearly defined sense of morality centered around profit.
Right, and everytime that happens because of miscalculations by our government they lose the very real and important public license to continue. Ultimately modern wars led by democracies are won by public desire to continue them. The American public can become very hesitant to wage war very fast, if we unleash Minority Report on the world for revenge
Every kinetic reaction by Russia in Georgia and Ukraine is downstream of major destabilizing non-kinetic actions by the US.
You don't think the US fomenting revolutions in Russia's near-abroad was in any way a contributing factor to Russian understanding of the strategic situation on its western border? [1] You don't think the US unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty[2], and then following that up with plans to put ABMs in Eastern Europe[3], were factors in the security stability of the region? You don't think that the US pushing to enlarge NATO without adjusting the CFE treaty to reflect the inclusion of new US allies had an impact? [4][5] It's long been known that the Russian military lacked the capacity for sustained offensive/expeditionary operations outside of its borders.[6][7] Until ~2014 it didn't even possess the force structure for peer warfare, as it had re-oriented its organization for counter-insurgency in the Caucasus. So what was driving US actions in Eastern Europe? This was a question US contrarians and politicians such as Pat Buchanan were asking as early as 1997. We've had almost 3 decades of American thinkers cautioning that pissing around in Russia's western underbelly would eventually trigger a catastrophic reaction[8], and here we are, with the Ukrainians paying the butcher's bill.
In the absence of US actions, the kleptocrats in Moscow would have been quite content continuing to print money selling natural resources to European industry and then wasting their largess buying up European villas and sports teams. But the siloviki have deep-seated paranoia which isn't entirely baseless (Russia has eaten 3 devastating wars originating from its open western flanks in the past ~120 years). As a consequence the US has pissed away one of the greatest accomplishments of the Cold War: the Sino-Soviet Split. Our hamfisted attempts to kick Russia while it was down have now forced the two principle powers on the Eurasian landmass back into bed with each other. This is NOT how we win The Great Game.
> Maybe I'm biased because I spent a lot of time in Eastern Europe and Ukraine, but I much prefer the U.S. with all our faults to another actor like China or Russia being dominant.
It would help to lead with this context. My position is that our actions ENSURE that a hostile Eurasian power bloc will become dominant. We should have used far less stick to integrate Russia into the Western security structure, as well as simply engaged them without looking down our noses at them as a defeated has-been power (play to their ego as a Great Power). A US-friendly Russia is needed to over-extend China militarily. We need China to be forced into committing forces to the long Sino-Russian border, much as Ukraine must garrison its border with Belarus. We need to starve the PRC's industry of cheap natural resources. Now the China-Russia-Iran soft-alliance has the advantage of interior lines across the whole continent, and a super-charged Chinese industrial base fed by Siberia. Due to the tyranny of distance, this will be an near-impossible nut to crack for the US in a conflict.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa
[2] https://www.armscontrol.org/events/2001-12/abm-treaty-withdr...
[3] https://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/en/analyses/americas-abm...
[4] https://www.sipri.org/yearbook/2003/17
[5] https://www.armscontrol.org/act/1997-08/features/nato-and-ru...
[6] https://warontherocks.com/2021/11/feeding-the-bear-a-closer-...
[7] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...
That's good that it motivates you. It doesn't motivate me any more. I'm not interested in "investing" more time for the reasons I have said.
> the taxes paid aren't burned, they mostly go to things I care about.
I'm pleased for you. I'd like to put more money towards things I care about.
> The income tax rate isn't all that relevant to the costs and benefits of starting a company
I am just less positive than you: it feels like win you lose, lose you lose bigger. I'm just pointing out that our government talks about supporting businesses but I've seen the waste from the repetitive attempts to monetise our scientific academics.
> The rewards for founding a successful company mostly aren't subject to income tax
Huh? Dividends are income. Or are you talking about the non-monetary rewards of owning a business?
> NZ has a very light capital gains regime
Which requires you to sell your company to receive the benefits of the lack of CGT. So every successful business in NZ is incentivised to sell. NZ sells it's jewels. Because keeping a company means paying income tax every year. NZ is fucking itself by selling anything profitable - usually to foreign buyers.
The one big ticket item I would like to save for is my retirement fund. But Labour/Greens want to take 50% to 100% of capital if you have over 2 million. A bullshit low amount drawdown at 4% is $80k/annum before tax LOL. Say investments go up by 6% per year and you want to withdraw 4%. Then a 2% tax is 100% of your gains. Plus I'm certain they will introduce means testing for super before I am eligible. And younger people are even more fucked IMHO. The reality is I need to plan to pay for the vast majority of my own costs when I retire, but I get to pay to support everybody else. I believe in socialist health care and helping our elderly, but the country is slowly going broke and I can't do much about that. I believe that our government will take whatever I have carefully saved - often to pay for people that were not careful (My peer-group is not wealthy so I see the good and the bad of how our taxes are spent). Why should I try to earn more to save?
Dr Pippa Malmgren (political advisor) also pushes the idea that WW3 is on-going, and it will look nothing like WW2. She appears on podcasts once in a while and has a blog. Not sure if I care for calling it a war if it doesn't look like a war, but there sure are human conflicts all over the little ball of life now.
We smell money, is what they meant.
My point though is that this is the only use case for such systems. The common comparisons to things like knives are invalid for this reason.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/14/1218643254/israel-is-using-an...
What are you are saying is: optimising for commercial success is incompatible with morality. The conclusion is that publicly traded megacorps must inevitably trend towards amorality.
So yes, they aren't "evil" but I think amorality is the closest thing to "evil" that actually exists in the real world.
otherwise, we may be surrounded by both the US and Russia
or, maybe, the current situation is the result of decisions made after careful consideration at the time, by whom deeply understand all you said now.
maybe, they just considered... EU is also a threat to them, they don't want a united europe, so a conflict between two enemies... is just fine? an angry russia will make EU more united(with the US)
I love this so much, it's so poetic
there's a famous poem by a Chinese liberal:
> If I am doomed to die in war in this life, then let me be a ghost under the precision-guided bombs of the United States. - Written on the 15th day of the Iraq War.
> all that aside, I am an American and place the interests of my people ahead of those of foreigners. as such, I will support a world order led by the government most likely to maximize our welfare and very nearly any means needed to preserve that.
how wonderful
I would argue that is fundamentally evil. Because evil pays the best. Its like drunk driving, on an empty road it can only harm you, but we live in a society full of other people.
It's going to happen.
Seems it would be informative to many of the people posting on this thread.
I find it hard to understand how $60K means no motivation but $100K would be highly motivating.
> I'd like to put more money towards things I care about.
You said later that you care about the public health system and helping the elderly. That's where a large percentage of our taxes go.
> Huh? Dividends are income. Or are you talking about the non-monetary rewards of owning a business?
No, I'm talking about selling all or part of the business. I agree with you that it's a problem our businesses often sell out to overseas interests who hollow out the company. But the general pattern of making most of your money by selling shares in the business is completely normal worldwide.
It either takes risk of private capital or future taxpayers' taxes to create big leagues. I'd take the former over the latter.
I think "this isn't free; you pay with ad views and your data is sold" is something that should be on a price tag on services that operate this way, though. It doesn't work if the price isn't clearly advertised.
This ad hominem stuff is very out of place. Why not solely engage with the argument?
One of the second order consequences of progressive taxation is that it increases gross wages for higher earners, as people care about their net pay being larger, not their gross pay.
An extreme example, in the UK the tax rate is an effective 60% between £100k and £120k (ish), so people's salaries get driven through that zone quickly. This obviously means there's less money to give to other people.
This sort of discussion gets a bit tricky because it often turns out one person is not having a discussion; they're trying to advertise something about themselves.
It is important to stress that the money-oriented kleptocrats and siloviki (KGB-oldtimers) are two opposite groups. Kleptocrats dominated in the 1990s, but lost to KGB oldtimers like Putin, who consolidated power by the late 1990s, because they were more ruthless. In the following decade, they crushed all opposition and turned the country from a dysfunctional democracy into a full dictatorship, and then set their sight on their long-term goal of restoring "the lost empire", which includes roughly 100 million Europeans who regained their freedom when the USSR collapsed. Revanchism has always been at the very core of siloviks.
The countries in Eastern Europe were first to recognize which way the ball was rolling by mid-to-late 1990s, and that's why they set EU and NATO integration as their main foreign policy goals, hoping that tight integration into international organizations would increase their security. Your notion that the US "pushed" NATO enlargement is just plain wrong. Almost the entire Eastern Europe was begging to get into NATO, against very lukewarm reception.
Their completely rational fears were dismissed by existing members with the erroneous belief that Russians were motivated by money, and would not risk harming piggy banks like Gazprom by invading Eastern Europe again. Ironically, that made the eventual entry into NATO easier, as existing members didn't think at the time that Russia posed any real danger. The largest entry took place in 2004, as the NATO was being transformed into an anti-terrorism force in the aftermath of 9/11.
If there's anything to blame the Americans for, then -- according to Andrei Kozyrev, the foreign minister of Russia from 1990 to 1996 -- the Americans could've put more pressure on Russia already in the 1990s to prevent it from declining into a dictatorship. But it was more convenient to remain ignorant of the destruction of Russian democracy and the long downward spiral into a totalitarian dictatorship, and remain seduced by naive illusions like the ones you present us.
For example, the entire idea of Russia as an ally against China is ridiculous. Russians don't care about China one bit and China is not a meaningful part of the public discourse. Russia is a colonial empire run by the city-state of Moscow, with St Petersburg having some historical importance. Take a look at a map. Both St Petersburg and Moscow are few hundred kilometers from the European border. This is where the mental center of Russian government lies, and this is the area where their ambitions are. China, in contrast, is many thousands of kilometers away, and culturally even more distant. China is a strange, faraway place. The Russians who matter (elites in Moscow and St Petersburg) have very little to do with it. Russia does not have a huge outsourced manufacturing in China, nor do they compete in science or technology. Russians are completely outclassed, simple consumers of cheap Chinese goods like most of the world.
Instead, Russians fantasize about the "multipolar world" and other alternative realities where they could be a carbon copy of the US in Europe, but they are in no position to make it a reality. The post-WWII Europe with a hundred million Europeans living under Russian dominance was a historic glitch. Russians cling to this as a mythical "golden era" and are willing to throw everything away in a futile attempt to turn back time. Relations, money, people -- everything. Nothing else matters.
These fantasies are driven by the fact that Russia is a still a feudal society that has not gone through enlightenment. As such, it is incapable of engaging with other European nations on equal terms, in peaceful ways, for mutual benefit. And this has nothing to do with the Americans, NATO, or any other commonly presented excuse. The reasons are purely internal: failure to develop past feudal society, into a modern state, run by professional bureaucracy, guided by laws, adopted by politicians, voted into office by the people, serving the interests of the electorate.
That's why it's being tentatively called "Technofeudalism".
It eerily reminds me of a research piece I read recently detailing how the Nazis turned to automation for their mass exterminations because most of them couldn't bear the mental toll that came with their direct action.
Unfortunately, I couldn't quickly find that series of articles back.
Seems fundamentally evil.
There is no such thing as "our" or "their" civilization. We have only one. Maybe such concept had some ground a few centuries ago still, but by now this idea that "we" are significantly different than "them" is a dangerous fantasy for most people.
The marginal rate in NZ is 39%!? That’s LOWER than in California, the land of “serial entrepreneurship”, for anyone with a successful startup. Not to mention the US tax rate doesn’t include a myriad of other small taxes that for some reason are not included in that number. On top of having a higher tax rate the average Californian entrepreneur also has to source extremely expensive healthcare.
It sounds more like an excuse to keep doing what you already wanted to do rather than an actual demotivating factor.
From there:
-----
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ...
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). ...
Still, we must accept that there is nothing wrong with wanting some security. The issue is how we go about it in a non-ironic way that works for everyone. ...
-----
Here is something I posted to the Project Virgle mailing list in April 2008 that in part touches on the issue of Google's identity as a scarcity vs. post-scarcity organization: "A Rant On Financial Obesity and an Ironic Disclosure" https://pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Proje... "Look at Project Virgle and "An Open Source Planet" ... Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with financial obesity too :-). And that jest came almost half a century after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial fitness)...Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites may well take many more decades to shake off that ideological discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way there. :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder they probably think being financially obese is a good thing, not an indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( ..."
Last April, inspired by some activities a friend was doing, I asked an LLM AI ( chatpdf ) to write a song about my sig, using the prompt 'Please make a song about "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."'. Then that friend made the results into an AI-generated song: "Challenge to Abundance" https://suno.com/song/d3d8c296-c2c4-46c6-80fb-ca9882c5e00a
"(Verse 1) In the 21st century, we face a paradox so clear, Technologies of abundance, yet scarcity we fear, Irony in our hands, what will we choose to see, A world of endless possibilities or stuck in scarcity?
(Chorus) The biggest challenge we face, it's plain to see, Embracing abundance or stuck in scarcity, Let's break free from old ways, embrace what could be, The irony of our times, let's set our minds free. ..."
I hope Googlers and others eventually get the perspective shift that comes with recognizing the irony of what they and many others are doing with weaponizing and otherwise competetizing AI...
Also on that larger theme by Alfie Kohn: "No Contest: The Case Against Competition" https://www.alfiekohn.org/contest/ "No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other — at work, at school, at play, and at home — turns all of us into losers. Contrary to the myths with which we have been raised, Kohn shows that competition is not an inevitable part of “human nature.” It does not motivate us to do our best (in fact, the reason our workplaces and schools are in trouble is that they value competitiveness instead of excellence.) Rather than building character, competition sabotages self-esteem and ruins relationships. It even warps recreation by turning the playing field into a battlefield. No Contest makes a powerful case that “healthy competition” is a contradiction in terms. Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable, we will have to restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our society. ..."
Russia has been invading and massacring their neighbours for centuries. They just use whatever bs excuse that sounds kind of plausible or amusing at the time. You know - they have to invade Ukraine because the popularly elected jewish comedian is a nazi dictator etc. I think they just like tolling their victims as they rape, murder, steal and torture.
If you can fault the Americans it was propping them up after WW2, after they started it in collaboration with Hitler, so they could continue the evil. Patton had the right idea https://www.quora.com/When-Patton-said-we-defeated-the-wrong...
Oh look, China has 5 year plans.
Of course the efficiency of a one party state comes at the cost of stability: there are no internal checks on corruption. A two party state is more stable (the US has lasted 240 years) but not infinitely stable.
The Trump voters I’ve heard seem to not understand what is currently happening with the administration. Similarly, the pro-Israel folks seem to not realize how bad the ethnic cleansing campaign is.
Anyway, the US is significantly less safe than it was last month.
A couple years ago, my state banned single use plastic bags. The very moment they did, all of my local Walmarts switched to heavier plastic bags that technically weren't single use. They still gave them away for free just as they did with the first ones. (These we're good quality bags and I was frustrated that Walmart didn't just give them away by default). Eventually my state banned those too, and like clockwork, Walmart was giving away paper bag bags -- decent quality ones, too. Though I still really liked the thicker plastic ones since I could use them for other things.
This made me realize that no corporation would do anything slightly better for the environment unless forced. I think this is the case for anything a corporation would do, including evil things. I think they just follow the money, no ethics, and it's up to the government to provide those ethics.
And I don’t doubt there’s still a lot of subterfuge happening as we speak, most of which we’ll never hear about until something goes very wrong.
Our society mostly works because of our non-monetary rewards, not because of monetary incentives. My teaching and nursing friends work for their own satisfaction, and more money is not a high priority to them.
I am not particularly motivated by money. I suspect you are a businessperson that believes money is strongly motivating? I chased financial success for 15 years when I started from $0: however I now hope I have enough and I hope it won't be unfairly taken from me. Yes, money was a big incentive then (and my personal costs have been very high), but now I have other goals.
I suspect I psychologically find high marginal taxation demotivating (48% if we include GST). Maybe because I have too many acquaintances and family sucking at the government tit. I see where government money goes because I have a wide variety of acquaintances including retirees, elderly, unhealthy, and unemployed. Yeah, I know they are not living the high life (well, maybe my drug-abusing anti-social acquaintances think they are).
> No, I'm talking about selling all or part of the business
Which requires an intense amount of work, and sometimes a significant loss, and usually requires selling 100%... Why should I sell at 4x earnings when I can hold on to the business - even if I don't want it? Taxation has too much influence on my investments because rebalancing across other investments has too high a cost/risk.
I guess I'm an idealist. I believe in startups, and I believe they help all New Zealanders. But the incentives of our taxation system mean that founding a startup is foolish: I don't recommend to anyone that they should be a founder (even though I have won the gamble). The unrecoverable costs of anything but spectacular success are too high. The non-monetary rewards are poor in my experience. The expected median return for a startup founder is about $0. Our social systems and taxation systems need to encourage business inception and growth so that all of NZ can be better off.
Thank you for your questions. It is always good to be asked why!
Would you say that the chances / motives / possibilities to invade Ukraine is remotely comparable with any other European country ?
And no, Turkey for example is not a European country.
Each disintegrated part will of course defend itself in case of war, but other scenarios are possible. For example, the EU could actually move closer towards China for trade.
When the US threatens allies with economic disruption or even an invasion, don't be surprised if those countries make alternative plans and team up with alternative powers.
It's not really appropriate for an AI weapons firm to be an integrated part of something which has access to information from which sensitive information such political beliefs etc. can be easily extracted.
It's a problem if someone is looking at sensitive user data one day and at how to categorize people so they can be put on kill lists the other.
Sales tax 15%, 91 petrol USD5.34/gallon, means testing for many things, no tax friendly retirement savings (IRAs/ROTHs whatever). Auckland housing is less affordable than San Francisco https://www.visualcapitalist.com/least-affordable-cities-to-...
I pay for private healthcare insurance because I want better outcomes than waiting for years to get urgent surgery. I have seen loved ones literally killed by our healthcare system (unnecessary death - not just normal risks of medicine). Our public health system is good when it works but it has some sharp edges. Although I assume poor NZers are better off than poor Californians for heathcare access.
> It sounds more like an excuse to keep doing what you already wanted to do rather than an actual demotivating factor.
I am telling you that it demotivates me. We don't always know why we think things and I don't have to be perfectly rational. You might be right, but calling it an excuse is extremely rude.
If a major force does not add AI capabilities to their military, the others will. It's a new cold war arms race. So you have to do it. There is no ethical discussion to be had where the outcome is that you refuse to do this on moral grounds.
So when you have to do it, there's only a few candidates that can. Google is the logical choice as it has the least business in China, unlike Microsoft.
“I love hanging out with Tim he’s a funny guy helped me move a couch last week, kind of which he hadn’t pushed me in front of that bus that one time but ehh I doubt he’d do that again…”
I don't quite understand it because atomic clocks deal with the electrons, while nuclear clocks, nuclear bombs, and thermo-nukes are all dealing with the nucleus of the atom.
I've always preferred fission vs fusion bomb, or nuke vs. thermo nuke.
Not thinking anything about who you’re working for is just kind of the default. However, IMO if you do feel something is wrong then that’s when the obligation to carry through comes in.
Hard to avoid cheaters.
A policy could be that the government could pay for 2 years of current salary and you only get one chance per person -- however I can't imagine how the government could get that into the budget.
The policy I implied is be to reward winners with a tax break to offset their risk. Difficult to sell to any voters that don't understand risk/reward or voters that believe business owners are greedy worthless bâtards.
Ha: if the business fails you lose money (the wages you didn't receive), and if the business wins you are taxed: "Privatise the losses, socialise the gains" ;)
Allallarmia https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichere_Inter-Netzwerk_Archite...
(Really süperspeciälly VPN-hardware used to securely suck data out of ISPs with extradeutsche Gründlichkeit,
mandatory to be installed by law,
just in case,
for some random chase.)
Edit: Thinking of it this is bubbling up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex ,
where Magagagia built some little base just 'a stones throw' away from Allallarmias former monopol government Telcos early internet exchange and HQ .
( https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernmeldetechnisches_Zentralam... )
What are the odds?
So the difference between earning a decent salary of $80-100k and a great salary north of $150k isn't much tax-percent-wise. If you make another $1000 you take home about $500.
Also keep in mind we don't have to pay for health insurance, we don't have to pay for our kids to go to school, if we get sick and can't work we have a social security net that will take care of us indefinitely. Norway is a great place to live. The people who complain about taxes are idiots who don't know how good they have it. If you make $200k+ you're living a fucking great life, if you make $400k it's even better. Hell i used to make like $35k and I got by on that. $50k is perfectly liveable. And those people pay like 20-25%.
I'm happy to pay taxes, I'm doing great and I don't even earn that much yet. I expect to nearly double my salary within the next 5ish years. Maybe more than double.
Then you have middle class+ Norwegians with a big house, $100k+ car, sweet boat, cabin in the mountains etc complaining about taxes. Man shut up you're literally top .1% in the world you won the damn lottery.
As for chance / motive to invade other European countries - for some reason Baltic states feel very threatened by Russia. Try to understand their reasons why.
That's one of the weaknesses of the West is that we've started to _care_ about things like this, but other nations don't and that means that it can potentially become a weakness that can be exploited.
The same thing is for example, the fact that if someone was racist to me in many countries I'm pretty sure nothing would happen at all versus nationals of those countries crying racism at the drop of a hat when they're in the West.
Which is a real shame because we should all be nicer to each other, but contrary to popular belief unless they behaviour is absolute across our species then it doesn't make us stronger, it makes us weaker.