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Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

(www.washingtonpost.com)
617 points jbegley | 1 comments | 04 Feb 25 20:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.326s | source
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a_shovel ◴[04 Feb 25 20:43 UTC] No.42938313[source]▶
I initially thought that this was an announcement for a new pledge and thought, "they're going to forget about this the moment it's convenient." Then I read the article and realized, "Oh, it's already convenient."

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.

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Retric ◴[04 Feb 25 21:00 UTC] No.42938601[source]▶
> while megacorps aren't fundamentally "evil" (for some definitions of evil),

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.

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mananaysiempre ◴[04 Feb 25 21:08 UTC] No.42938723[source]▶
Most suggestions of this nature fail to explain how they will deal with the problem of people just seeing there’s no point in trying for more. On a personal level, I’ve heard people from Norway describe this problem for personal income tax—at some point (notably below a typical US senior software engineer’s earnings) the amount of work you need to put in for the marginal post-tax krone is so high it’s just demotivating, and you either coast or emigrate. Perhaps that’s not entirely undesirable, but I don’t know if people have contemplated the consequences of the existence of such a de facto ceiling seriously.
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1. sweeter ◴[04 Feb 25 21:24 UTC] No.42938946[source]▶
We're talking about corporations here, where are they going to go? If you had a competent government, you would say "fine, then leave. But your wealth and business is staying here" at some point the government has to do its job. These corporations pull in trillions of dollars, its wild to me to suggest that suddenly everyone would stop working and making money because they were taxed at a progressive rate. Its an absurd assumption to begin with.

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.