Good people refuse to do bad things

jmclnx

Nice to see people standing up for their beliefs even when it could hurt them. Story time :) I remember when I was first starting out as a programmer. At QE (always occurred on a weekend) a slew of financial reports were created and printed for review the following Monday then I think used for summaries for Wall Street to look at. A high level finance manager came to me and asked if the report could be changed, not knowing what he was asking I said sure. After a long discussion turned out he wanted the numbers on the report changed and re-printed. I said it was possible but the numbers would be all wrong. So he said "do it". I went to my manager and told them what he wanted, then I refused to do it. I said I would quit first because I did not want the SEC to come after me. Luckily they all supported me and the finance manager was told to "FO". FWIW, that company is long gone.

ArcHound

Generally, I agree. Imagine: you start working at the company with a good will towards them. As you learn more and see more decisions, you slowly realize how bad it is. Now you've already contributed. Then you leave. It might be possible to build everything with this goodwill and that's how we'd still end up with a torment nexus even if you immediately drop it. What I'm saying is, at one point you have to break the company fully. I'm not sure what more we need to wait for, if the claim "10% it ends humanity" is not enough.

carterschonwald

theres a certain amount of financial security needed for folks to do this kinda thing.

moondistance

The root issue is a lack of honour in the world today.

cluckindan

Good people are easy to mislead into thinking they’re doing a good thing.

rochansinha

It’s an excellent article marred by the last line/ heading. People do things. Good or bad is relative to their own biases/experiences/ beliefs and moral compass. Very few people are truly sociopaths who do evil stuff for personal gain. Most do it because of the curse of the “banality of evil” (re: < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem?wprov=sf... >) Doesn’t make it right, but like everything else in life the reality is much more complex than saying “good people refuse to do bad things”

dgellow

That Coxon guy looks as delusional as the AI leadership. If you watch interviews he gave he doesn’t articulate what he’s concerned about, only sharing vague information about a supposed AI god that will take over the world, but without articulating why now, and how that would even happen. The more I look into his story the more that move looks like what a grifter would do

oconnor663

> do not consider yourself a contributor to humankind Good lord. You could apply the same logic to any taxpaying resident of any country whose government is doing something bad. There's some truth to it, it's worth bearing in mind, but it's also the very definition of an Isolated Demand for Rigor.

petesergeant

These replies will be full of people showing how worldly and clear-eyed they are by dismissing the same threat the guy resigned over as a marketing stunt.

BatchJob

but what if dude already did it (destroyed the world but it hasnt happened yet) before he quit? The rule of all games played in capitalism is there's a sucker born every minute. you can work a few years or your whole life before you realize you've been had. and most do....

bravoetch

If everyone doing a 'bad thing' stepped off the hamster wheel today, the world economy would collapse before markets closed. The biggest companies have built an attention and surveillance nightmare machine that funnels all the money to a relatively small number of shareholders.

Aurornis

> More than half of tech workers (53%) would steer a newcomer away from their own field, and they stay. It would be nice to see this survey repeated across professions. In my experience, most people have gripes about their profession because it’s what they know. Only half of respondents saying they would steer newcomers away feels a lot better than what my friends in medicine say all the time. Among my college professor and professor-track friends, this number probably reaches 100%.

nilslindemann

He may also have gotten paid for it by players, which dont want AGI, because it would disturb their plans. Imagine AGI works out a plan, which, when applied by everyday people without needing any government help, enforces the end of wars, poverty, pollution, illness, unhappiness, worldwide.

cogman10

I disagree with this article and here's why. Life isn't black and white with "good/bad". Further, there's no objective measure of what is good or bad. Everything is a shade of gray. You certainly could argue that some actions are absolutely good or absolutely bad, but those aren't the majority of actions people take on a day to day basis. People aren't often faced with "should I kill this person" or "should I publish the cure for cancer". Instead it's "should I eat a hamburger or a salad" or "Should I finish this jira case or that jira case". For example, you could argue that anyone working in an automotive plant is doing something bad because they are helping to produce vehicles which burn fuel which perpetuates climate change. But those plants also often produce parts for farm equipment or vehicles used to transport necessities like food. People working at AI companies can make similar personal calculations. Like yeah there are bad things happening because of AI, but also they can believe that there are good things that can come as a result such as research and product developments.

livvy

Coxon is a shithead who thought he could have a better career as an AI scaremonger than an engineer. He's still working in service of the AI companies though (same narrative) and no doubt will land a cushy job at so-callef "AI Safety" labs or make a living on the news/podcast circuit.

chilmers

Why is it that every one of these anti-AI screeds that gets upvoted on HN has been clearly written by AI? Here is one of his posts from 2022: "Since a long time now I was interested in learning computer graphics and “do stuff” with computer graphics APIs. I began to work on a very simple Game engine in Swift / Metal last year but I began to switch to a Windows machine a few months ago, and Swift / Metal is not compatible with Windows (and will never be I think)." https://carette.xyz/posts/opengl_and_cpp_on_m1_mac/ This is the same person who is apparently now writing: "It is a transaction where you sell the part of you that was supposed to care. Do that often enough, and it does not come back. That is not burnout, but it is still a disease. Although, like every disease, it spreads: first to your team, then to your product, then to the people using it."

tptacek

The author of this blog is an AI skeptic (see the backlog of posts). That's fine, but it's hard to square with this particular post. To take Coxon's argument seriously, you have to believe frontier models are hypercapable, and not just hype objects. That's what Coxon believes and why he left.

fi-le

It's refreshing to see a well-argued and balanced essay on AI risk being upvoted on Hacker News.

armchairhacker

It's impossible to judge long term effects. My only advice is to think long and deep, then do what is true to yourself. Jacob Coxon and Frances Haugen are good people by any reasonable metric, and maybe someone who stays but tries to steer the system from the inside is good too.

skyberrys

I understand the concern about your work being used to cause harm, but I also worry about the development of 'forbidden knowledge'. What does it mean to say a branch of science and engineering is too dangerous of a path to go down? Does it mean scientists are persecuted just for asking questions and designing experiments to find answers? Will there be witch hunts against ML researchers? Part of teaching is trusting your students to use the learnings wisely.