the CEO agreed because (I imagine) he really needed someone to take that position. and as everyone should probably have seen coming, the first time he really wanted to send out a release bugs and all, he called the guy into a room and pretty much browbeat him for an hour about how making the promosed release date was more important than making a good release, until he said "fine but I'm not responsible if it breaks".
the CEO held this up as an example of how he had kept his word not to send the release out without the guy agreeing to it. that startup, needless to say, is long dead.
This could be a lesson for us engineers to be a little less glib and a little more introspective, especially as you gain more power and influence in an org.
From the (ethics) team obviously, because the investors just have goals and aren't a team!
Big irony marker of course. But remarkably, in human history, this line of thinking would not be unheard of. Of course, I don't think it easily adapts to companies, so I don't really disagree with you.
Remember that MTV show offering people like 5 grand or something to lick an elevator handway in front of a camera?
Well, if someone has a useful idea in this world, and want to build a company from it, the MTV "lick-the-stairway" offers will be the largest and first hurdle before anything else happens. People will simply offer to buy you out, and that's not limited to founders and creatives.
That's how our system works.
> People will simply offer to buy you out, and that's not limited to founders and creatives.
A less-obvious failure case would be bankrupcy court, where all sorts of ethical promises and even explicit contracts may be voided in pursuit of recovering a buck for creditors.
Treating value as purely monetary profit is a perversion of that. To a certain degree it's inevitable as the number of shareholders grows, so seeing it in public companies isn't surprising. But even then, if a company focused on creating equipment for sustainable, pesticide free farming were to pivot into making Hellfire missiles that might be insanely profitable while still destroying a large part of what existing shareholders value about the company
Being "downstat" (iirc) is when you're not productive in comparison to your coworkers, which makes you "outethics" and a "potential trouble source (PTS)." If you're outethics, then you get called in for "auditing" which is when they interrogate you with a lie detector to find out if you're associating with "suppressive people (SP)" (who are people who are causing you to be downstat because they despise human happiness.) If those people can't be found, then the problem is obviously in your "withholds" (again, iirc) which are your secret deep-down desires to destroy the organization that you may not even be aware of. You see, your "reactive mind" is raging at being forced to be "ethical." The conclusion is that either you find the SP and "disconnect" from them, you discover the nature of your withhold and admit that you were plotting against the organization and why, or you're the SP and you get declared and ejected from the organization.
Welcome to "ethics." The original AI alignment scholars.
The specific, named people who run these organizations are moral black holes. Anybody that they're hiring for "ethics" they're hiring to define an ethics for their own benefit.
The EA group have a ton of parallels to the Scientologists, so all of this is not surprising.
I'm kind of surprised by the cynicism. There are real problems in AI ethics that contribute to model training. Someone has to own those problems. How that team is incentivized is outside the scope of my comment.