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Comment by orochimaaru | Hacker News Reader

Why is it morally wrong for a US citizen to work with their government?

The acts of the government being wrong in an upsetting amount of cases would be a big reason.

Because, we have pretty convincing historical precedent that 'just following orders' does not work as a defense when your government does something indefensible.

Worked just well for the paperclip guys.

Let’s steel-man the parent comment. Obviously “just following orders” is not generally a morally sufficient argument even if you end up not facing repercussions for your actions.

It’s not, but legal is not the same as ethical.

For a long time, and probably still, it was legal for the US to torture enemy combatants. It was never ethical.

If you add to that the very broad limits of what the current administration considers "legal" (as in "pretty much anything we want to do"), I can understand feeling uneasy as a Google employee...

You’d need some shared ethical/moral framework to make that claim, which doesn’t really seem to exist anymore

You don't need a shared moral framework to come to a personal moral conclusion.

What does that mean? How does one come to a personal moral conclusion? Vibes?

(I take "moral framework" to mean a principled stance that gives objective grounding for a moral judgement. I agree that we can come to a moral judgement without putting it through a systematic and discursive defense, and I reject the notion that there are many moralities or that they are arbitrary, but it is also true that diverging conceptions of the basis of morality will frustrate agreement. Stopping at personal moral judgement does not lend itself to fruitful dialogue and understanding, as it constraints the domain of what is intersubjectively knowable.)

My moral framework can be different from yours. Me the individual can come to the conclusion that something is immoral when the rest of the group doesn’t agree with me. And (at least for my own moral framework) I should take action accordingly.

So I don’t need a shared framework to make the claim that something is immoral (to me).

The second is that it isn’t very interesting to stop at “personal moral judgement”. You’re having a dialogue, right? So, if you want to have a dialogue, you must explain your moral reasoning. I don’t like your parent’s use of the term “moral framework”, because it does lends itself to a relativistic interpretation - though charitably, the parent need not be a relativist, and is merely acknowledging the different stances of various moral theories. But also charitably, if we lack sufficient common moral ground, the first task is to find that moral common ground before you can discuss something with two incommensurate views in play.

Oops, looks like my earlier bullet point was truncated by accident on mobile. I’ll just leave it at this.

Are you intentionally lumping in all civic service in one moral bucket? Is working at the post office morally equivalent to developing panopticon technology to suppress protest and track citizens?

What makes you think that Googles AI experts are US citizens?

100% of the Google employees who would be working on "classified AI work" are US citizens by law.

So what, they won't be using any of the existing Google Gemini models of infra then? Because all of Google - from Gemini to the data center infra etc - has (and still is) worked on by non-US persons even - gasp - outside the US. They'll do a complete clean-room ground up bootstrap of all the research and infrastructure from zero?

Seems unlikely.

You of course don't have to reinvent science, but it is in fact standard practice to do infrastructure from the literal ground up with US citizens for even unclassified government data.

https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/

Can you provide a different source on that? The govcloud page you've linked says operated by US citizens, not built by US citizens. I'd be pretty surprised if they did the latter. Standard practice as I understand it is to simply run the standard software in a separate environment. A recent Propublica report [0] pointed out that Microsoft was hiring citizens to escort the actual engineers that aren't citizens, for example.

[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts...

working to directly advance a product used substantially to oppress people via surveillance or war crimes, when you have many other choices, is immoral. easy.

It’s not morally wrong per-se but just because you are working with your government does not mean what you’re doing is necessarily moral

Just because you are working with your government does not mean what you’re doing is necessarily immoral, either.

Correct. It depends. For example, it might depend on what the collaboration is likely to result in. Perhaps it would be more likely to be moral there were some boundaries in place, like "no mass domestic surveillance" or "no fully autonomous weapons".

Because the US government currently believes it is legal to blow up civilian drug traffickers and wage war without congressional approval. So at some point, yes, collaboration is immoral.

The US military has deployed fully autonomous weapons since at least 1979, and potential adversaries are now doing the same. For better or worse that ship has sailed.

So we are wrong to express any opposition or desire to maybe raise the bar here? Aren’t we supposed to be “the good guys”? Or should we just accept a role as the menace of the world, wildly throwing its weight around whenever we have an unscrupulous president?

Those questions are moot. There are situations where it's simply impossible to have a human in the loop because reaction time is too slow or the environment is too dangerous or communication links are unreliable. Russia is deploying fully autonomous weapons to attack Ukraine today and they will be selling those weapons (or licensing the technology) to their allies. There is no option to stop. And let's please not have any nonsense suggestions that we can somehow convince Russia / China / Iran / North Korea to sign a binding, enforceable treaty banning such weapons: that's never going to happen.

There's always an option to stop. We can choose civility over barbarity, stop trying to kill people over 1000+ year old dick waving contests, and stop threatening each other with doomsday weapons because your grandpa shot my grandpa. Just because our leaders are too stupid and cowardly doesn't mean there's no option.

Sounds good! Please convince Vladimir Putin to choose civility over barbarity, then get back to us so we can discuss options.

We aren’t Russian and Putin is not our leader. We can choose how we behave and operate. This is like saying we should use chemical weapons if someone else deploys one. You’re speaking as if it’s all so binary. “Do what they do or you lose.”

It's cheap and easy for someone sitting safely behind a computer to pretend to be morally superior when you're not the one who has to make hard decisions, or deal with the consequences. Chemical weapons have seen minimal use after WWI largely because they're not very militarily effective. Autonomous kinetic weapons actually work. Right now Ukrainians are building autonomous weapons to defend themselves against Russian autonomous weapons. For Ukrainians it is binary: do what they do or you lose. Would you prefer that they lose? And don't presume to tell us that the Russians can be persuaded to stop by non-violent means, that would be completely delusional.

>It's cheap and easy for someone sitting safely behind a computer to pretend to be morally superior when you're not the one who has to make hard decisions, or deal with the consequences.

This is a deeply flawed argument that has an obvious application back at you, but either way if you’re going to stoop to personal attacks I think we’re done here.

Not sure you're aware, but the joke may be on you. It's apparently Putin who's convinced Trump and the Mullahs (not the band) to choose civility over babarity by allowing a superyacht of one of his cronies to pass through the Hormuz.[0]

Russian trolling at its finest, truly. This timeline keeps raising the bar on the absurdity quotient.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2pn8zdxdjo

I wasn't aware that the US was throwing away its moral compass for the just cause of frustrating Putin's expansionism. The new story seems to be Putin gets to do what he wants, and so do we.

If you think there's something wrong with giving our warfighters the most effective weapons to carry out their assigned missions with minimum casualties then your moral compass is completely broken. Personally I favor a less interventionist foreign policy but that has to be addressed through the political process. Not by unaccountable individual defense contractor employees making arbitrary policy decisions.

> warfighters

You should know that every single veteran I know ruthlessly mocks Hegseth for trying to use this term non-comedically. It’s a synonym for someone who takes their service way too seriously/makes it their whole identity. It’s almost exclusively used to mock people.

Look, a dumb bomb is a fully autonomous weapon once it's launched. Let's be real: an LLM making decisions on who to target and when and where to launch munitions represents a meaningful change in our concept of autonomous weapons.

Who said otherwise? Clearly it’s about facilitating specific acts by the government. Why are y’all acting like it was so wildly broad? No one said “working with the government is inherently immoral.”

Literally the parent comment:

>Any AI researcher who continues to work here is morally compromised.

…doing this kind of work with the federal government. That is clearly what they are saying. You stripped all context from the discussion.

You’re looking for the least defensible, worse interpretation of their comment.

No. Their comment was: “Any AI researcher who continues to work here is morally compromised.”

But, “…doing this kind of work with the federal government.” is added context that was not there and is based on your own interpretation.

The language of the parent comment charges that simply working at a company that is engaging in this makes one complicit in an immoral act, and the complicity itself is immoral. I disagree with all of that.

Yes. Working at a company explicitly profiting off of doing clearly immoral acts is wrong. It doesn’t mean working for a company contracted with the federal government is always wrong.

Hegseth bombed a girls school in Iran last month. I think it's fair to doubt the moral worth of anyone assisting this admin.

I don't think that was intentional, but invading countries while trying to distract them with negotiations, randomly assassinating leaders and hoping everything just turns out well, threatening to "destroy civilizations", targeting bridges and more, all while aiding and abetting Israel which is intentionally destroying pharmaceutical, educational, and other such civilian institutions is all 100% intentional.

In some ways worse than bombing the school was the effort to implicitly deny it. The school was near a military facility, and itself was a military facility in the past. US intelligence screwed up. They should have simply acknowledged what happened and why. Their response just reeked of cowardice and malice at the highest level.

In a logical or mathematical sense, sure, but when it's the US government and a huge surveillance-tech company it's pretty necessarily immoral (at least in an American context where harming liberty is immoral - other cultures disagree).

Right, so it was a comically bad defense.

Like the guy in an old clip saying "What is my crime? Enjoying a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?" while being arrested for trying to pay with a stolen credit card. The succulence of the meal has nothing to do with it, and that it's your own government has nothing to do with it. It's just a sad way to try to distract from what's actually wrong with helping build tools for mass surveillance and autonomous murder.

Given most government policies and direct engagement in all kind of monstrosities over the last millennia, there is really no reason to limit the case to USA, indeed.

Besides all the questionable and illegal stuff that the current government does, a lot of people don’t want to work on technologies that kill people.

Because the government is comprised of Nazis now and is waging wars of expansionist conquest abroad and murdering domestic dissidents at home. Anyone working toward enabling that deserves to be on the receiving end of the systems they build.

Weird, why is it morally right for anyone to work with immoral organizations? -- That's what's in the focus, right?

Whether the current government is immoral, or if government can be philosophically immoral is up to debate. But your question sounds like a deflection to me.

Heya pigpag. Your account seems to be shadowbanned, even though your comments seem normal. If you want people to be able to see your comments I reccomend creating a new account or appealing to hn@ycombinator.com

Sorry to Godwin the thread but the Third Reich would like a word.

Because their current government is immoral.

Idk about morality, but it’s certainly a way to stop dystopian mass surveillance nightmares if everyone capable of building one refuses.

So if you live in the US and don’t want one government agency in the US to have this power (that is ambiguous under current law), one way you can try to avoid it is by refusing to sell it to them and urging others to do the same.

It’s a long shot sure, but it certainly seems more effective than hoping the legislature wakes up and reigns in the executive these days.

Same thing that's wrong with enjoying a succulent Chinese meal.

Because the American government is a criminal organization

You're using a strawman. This was never about just being employed by a government in the most tepid and universal sense.

Ex: "Why is it morally wrong for a US citizen to work with their government?", asked the employee compiling lists of American citizens of Japanese descent to be rounded up into Internment Camps.

Change the country from 'US' to 'China' or 'Iran'. And ask the question again.

Because the current government is a vindictive, murderous, proto-fascist government. (But you know that already.)

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