> Anybody who stays at openai
And paying off their mortgage and feeding their families and has a job in unstable times.
Morals come a distant last in the current state of affairs.
And paying off their mortgage and feeding their families and has a job in unstable times.
Morals come a distant last in the current state of affairs.
Easy to point fingers, harder to practice what you preach.
I know, this isn’t about you but then again it’s not about this one person who resigned either nor the employees of openai nor about anyone else.
I’ve provide an alternative PoV for why folks might not quit their jobs for their principles. Each to their own.
I agree even strongly with what you just said: "if you'll violate your principles for a cush job, they aren't really principles you have."
The reality is, I don't think people really understand what a deeply held principle is. It's often a non-negotiable.
Perhaps folks involved with electronic devices are too used to a black & white decision world. Computer says no or computer says yes, there is no maybe. The real world of principles, morals, emotions, humans etc is filled with maybes and that can become hard to navigate for computers.
The point above was about prioritizing something above the principle one still keeps.
I work in marketing, nothing black and white about it.
Leaving a job for one that paid 3x less. And they weren't making automated killing machines (at least at the time, who knows now).
> Easy to point fingers, harder to practice what you preach.
Quite easy to practice what you preach, if you indeed have principles.
99% of people with families and mortgages manage to do so without OpenAI comp packages. It's a meaningless excuse, completely irrelevant.
This is not a relevant point to this discussion.
The way you frame it, you make it sound like an engineer at OpenAI has no choice but to work there or end up on the street. But an engineer at OpenAI is not going to end up driving a truck, they're going to remain and engineer.
That makes this step even more risky as this is an open opposition. Mostly probably they have already signed at anthropic.
OpenAI engineers with vested shares are not worried about having enough money to survive.
This is a lame attempt to shoe-horn unrelated political talking points and “Western society bad” into a conversation about highly paid engineers who will have no problem putting food on the table.
If don’t like this example, how about folks going to church on Sundays listening to the Christian morals on not killing each other and during the week, these same folks work at the DoW organising wars around the world.
Or the politician taking lobbyists money. Or those folks who engage in recreational drug use while fighting a “war on drugs”.
There are many examples of morals playing second fiddle to the broader world around us.
My question is, given that result, why continue to have them if they don't influence one's choices? You're making a case that our current economic system is incompatible with having morals.
Why have them then? The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.
Morals are the glue for nation states. Morals prevent us from driving over others, morals prevent us from being mean to others. Moral makes us trust the politicians we vote for because we are told they have the same morals as we.
My somewhat cynical picture of morals is only to make a point of how deep morals go in our societies. Folks have conscience and morals are the basis of that conscience - be it good or evil.
Police and armies enforce these morals in the form of laws and legal constructs. Important to note though that morals are not filly encoded as laws, these are two concepts are separate societal adhesives.
What I said is that we vote for politicians whom we are told share our morals or we assume that they do. I don't make any judgement nor prediction what happens if that happens not to be the case - either before or after the event of voting.
1. Morals prevent us from driving over others.
2. Morals prevent us from being mean to others.
3. Moral makes us trust the politicians.
And nothing more?
Morals only exist as long as there are people who believe them. Once you wipe out an entire country, their morals disappear.
Somehow I hope such people still work at Twitter/X.com... but I really doubt it. In the US military? Oh, absolutely. Are they noisy? Probably and preferably not. The mere possibility of their existence shivers the authoritarians. And they exist, concealed below the surface. And where they do not exist, they may develop.
Their whole schtick is based on ensuring safety for humanity given the existential risk of a singularity.
Open AI employees MUST get called out, because entire economies and industries are being reshaped due to their statements.
They aren't some mom and pop shop, and they aren't some typical tech firm.
These people are lusting for generational wealth, not scrambling to put bread on the table.