Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

A megacorp is made up of people. So it's people who are fundamentally evil.

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.

You're half right. Corporations are just made of people. But, they're more than the sum of their parts. The numbers and complexity do more than provide anonymity: they provide a mechanism where individuals can work in concert to accomplish bad things in the aggregate, without (necessarily) requiring any particular individual to violate their conscience. It just happens through the power of incentives and specialization. If you're in upper management, the complexity also makes it easier to turn a blind eye to what is happening down below.

>A megacorp is made up of people. So it's people who are fundamentally evil.

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.

Not a useful framing in my view. People follow private incentives. Private incentives are by default not perfectly aligned with external stakeholders. That leads to "evil" behavior. But it's not the people or the org, it's the incentives. You can substitute other people into the same system and get the same outcome.

Not useful, but ultimately true.

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.

But people are aware companies are evil. Why don't they sell the stock? Why do people still buy the stock?

Obviously because they don't give a shit.