Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

My problem with this take is that you forget, the corporations are made up of people, so in order for the corporation to be evil you have to take into account the aggregate desires and decision making of the employees and shareholders and, frankly, call them all evil. Calling them evil is kind of a silly thing to do anyway, but you can not divorce the actions of a company from those who run and support it, and I would argue you can't divorce those actions from those who buy the products the company puts out either.

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.

> made up of people

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.

I don't really agree with some of your assumptions. At many companies, many of the people also are evil. Many people who hold shares and public office are also evil.

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.

You could use this logic to posit that any government, group, system, nation state, militia, business, or otherwise, isn't "evil" because you haven't gauged the thoughts, feelings and actions of every single person who comprises that system. Thats absurd.

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.

You'd never figure out who was "evil" because it's just based on your own interpretation of what evil is. Unless of course you want to join me as a moral objectivist? I don't think Google doing military work with the US government is evil. On the other and I think the influence and destruction caused by advertising algorithms is. Who gets to decide what is evil?

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.

If your defense is trying to argue about what’s evil, you’ve already lost.

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…

By definition we can never know for sure, but I believe the number of people who stay silent is many times bigger than those who voice their opinion. They've learned it is unproductive (as you say) or worst case, you're told you've got it all wrong technically speaking.

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).

My point was that complaining isn't enough and in my experience most people just complain but don't even take the smallest action in line with their views because it inconveniences them. Instead they lull themselves to sleep that something was done because they complained about it, and there's no need to adjust anything in their lives because they "did all they can do".

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.

> Putting money before other considerations is what’s evil.

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.

Again, you say that as if I am using the products of companies I consider evil.

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.

I was writing about the general case. I apologize if that wasn't clear from the start. I don't know anything about you personally though I'm sure we'd have some great conversations over a glass of wine (or coffee or whatever :) )!

> 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.

Ahh ok, sorry for misunderstanding you.

It's my fault. Sometimes I'm not very clear.

corporations, separate from the people in them, are set up in a way that incentivizes bad behaviour, based on which stake holders are considered and when, along with what mechanisms result in rewards and which ones get you kicked out.

the architecture of the system is imperfect and creates bad results for people.

A large corporation is more than the sum of its owners and employees, though. Large organizations in general have an emergent phenomenon - past a certain threshold, they have a "mind of it own", so to speak, which - yes - still consists of individual actions of people making the organization, but those people are no longer acting as they normally would. They get influenced by corporate culture, or fall in line because they are conditioned to socially conform, or follow the (morally repugnant) rule book because otherwise they will be punished etc. It's almost as if it was a primitive brain with people as neurons, forced into configurations that, above all, are designed to perpetuate its own existence.

> 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…

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.

Corporations are totalitarian systems. Just because the dictatorship has people, doesn't indicate anything about it.

I’m not really judging other people here. I remember working on a project and realizing I was one of those cogs keeping ICBM’s operating and it really just hit home.

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.

I don't think it's the default. Lots of people think about what they do, in my experience. If you think ICBMs are purely bad, fair enough, but I imagine lots of people believe they - particularly when not fired - perform a vital defensive service, and are worth working on for that reason.

It's a voluntary totalitarian system though - you don't have to work at (insert company you think is evil) so your comparison falls short.

A choice between a totalitarian system or starvation is not a choice.