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617 points jbegley | 8 comments | | HN request time: 0.64s | source | bottom
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a_shovel ◴[] 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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1. nirav72 ◴[] No.42938964[source]

They’re not evil, they’re amoral and are designed to maximize profits for their investors. Evil is subjective.

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2. moralestapia ◴[] No.42939076[source]

>Evil is subjective.

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.

3. pseudalopex ◴[] No.42939472[source]

> They’re not evil, they’re amoral

Most people consider neglect evil in my experience.

4. mainecoder ◴[] No.42939787[source]

>Evil is subjective. Everything is subjective - moralist bro It's all priced in - Wall street bro learn to code - tech bro

5. kelipso ◴[] No.42939988[source]

Paperclip maximizing robot making the excuse that it's just maximizing paperclips, that's what it was designed to do, there's even a statute saying that robots must do only what it was designed to do, so it's not evil just amoral.

Weird thing is for corporations, it's humans running the whole thing.

6. rmrf100 ◴[] No.42943997[source]

This is evil.

7. josefx ◴[] No.42944519[source]

> they’re amoral and are designed to maximize profits

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.

8. StanislavPetrov ◴[] No.42946575[source]

Brings to mind the book, "The Banality of Evil".

Seems it would be informative to many of the people posting on this thread.