IME companies hire an ethics team to say they have an ethics team. The ethics team has no sway, no influence, and will never be able to move the business. They will try, and they will make reasonable recommendations, but the company will say, "that costs money..." and not take them.
OpenAI was probably able to at least pretend that her role mattered... until they let their AI autonomously hack a rival company, then used the incident to score marketing points. I'm not surprised she left.
I doubt she and others left just because of this one incident.
My guess is that OpenAI has been doing more and more domestic spying type work as well as more and more military work - target selection and the like.
That's how the schoolhouse was blown up by a Tomahawk. An AI was fed old information, didn't realize or do proper validation, an analyst copy-pasted, then someone just punched the coordinates into the their control station and hit "fire".
It also wouldn't surprise me if OpenAI et al are being pressured to work with Israelis for targeting and analysis, too, since their "black box" AI that was doing terrorist acid tests and assigning bombing targets has proven nearly useless.
The schoolhouse was an intentional target - the children of some military leaders went there. They triple-tapped the school hoping to kill parents going in to save the kids.
That doesn’t make much sense based on Irans own statements. Three Tomahawks yes. The strikes were reported as being in quick succession. 4 parents were reported as killed and 100+ kids and nearly 30 teachers.
Basically it killed the teachers and little kids. No attempt at the responding parents like you incorrectly imply.
Because the other side is the general informed consensus for which multiple sources are readily available for me to find. I have seen nothing to indicate this side, hence I'm asking for any evidence, because I don't see it. Either could potentially be correct, but I don't think they're equally probable.
To the extent there is a consensus here, it's not an evidence-based one; it's entirely founded on untested statements made by people who have both a track record of lying and incentive to do so.
Demanding evidence from one party while accepting the word of the other is not even-handed.
And how is the corollary from the argument you just presented that neither side needs to provide evidence? Let's start by actually having evidence for "your side", then you can demand evidence from the other.
> And how is the corollary from the argument you just presented that neither side needs to provide evidence?
It's not. I have no idea how you got there.
The right thing is to seek evidence for both perspectives. This is ironically not rocket science. Don't accept any viewpoint just on say-so, but especially don't pretend to sneering objectivity when you do so.
I got there because somebody asked for evidence for a certain viewpoint and you seemed to push back against this ask by suggesting that if you ask for evidence, you need to demand it from both sides. As if somebody failing to do that doesn't entitle them to any evidence from anybody.
> Don't accept any viewpoint just on say-so
Exactly. That's why they asked for a citation. A response providing such citation is more appropriate than essentially saying "well you didn't ask for a citation from $other_side either".
That argument would be coherent if not for the fact that in this case, the commenter had scrolled past one unsupported set of statements, accepted them, then challenged the other set; that's not reasonable.
Accepting something without evidence and only challenging things that disagree with your evidence-less beliefs is the exact opposite of even-handed.
> scrolled past one unsupported set of statements, accepted them
And what tells you that they were not already aware of the evidence for those statements from prior knowledge? If so, then they would naturally only ask for evidence for the claims for they are not yet aware of the evidence. No need to re-ask for that.
Obviously I don't know whether they had such knowledge, but you seem to assume they didn't and are criticising them for this.
Because as much as you attempt to weasel around it, we're not talking about a spherical hypothetical in a void. We're talking about a specific event, for which no such evidence has been released.
In that case I wouldn't ask for citations from either, because I have direct evidence.
But with two competing claims, and no easy way to check ground truth, you absolutely ask for citations from both sides. There's nothing rational about uncritically accepting the narrative you heard first.
Then do it. Tell us. Spill the tea and provide your evidence, don't just vaguely gesture at something behind the curtains like you're discount Morpheus.
You would be creating a counterfactual inconsistent with most’s understanding of the role and bringing this person’s motives and credibility into question without supporting evidence?
Wouldn't that be probably one of the most important places to have an ethics team?
I'd be much more worried if my local water treatment plant or local bar had an ethics team, and people working there probably would feel slightly more useless than Raytheon's ethics team, which I'm sure feel like they're doing something important and worthwhile.
You build internal teams to outsource certain kinds of work to. So when a company has an "ethics" team what it's really saying is that everyone who works at the company is expected to behave unethically, and that team has been brought in to provide an ethical framework and to control how unethical everyone is expected to be. Try it with things like program management, product management, and so on. These groups get added when the company outgrows the "everyone does a little bit of everything" phase and the company executives no longer want everyone in the company to wear those hats.
Water treatment plant? That sounds like an excellent place for an ethics team—though it would, in practice, be nearly synonymous with an environmental impact team.
A bar? Too small an organization; if they had an ethics team I'd just think they were a money laundering front.
Frankly, most organizations above the size of an average mom & pop operation like a local bar should have at least some formal consideration of ethics, and most larger than (say) 50 employees should have at least one dedicated ethicist on staff. With veto power over operations.
Our society has treated ethics like the exclusive domain of ivory tower eggheads and philosophers for far too long, and look at what it has led to. If nearly everyone knew an ethicist in their daily lives, maybe people would actually have some understanding of ethics, even if they only did it grudgingly.
Come on, what do you think the ethics team at Raytheon is going to say "Hmm, our elected leaders are relying heavily on dangerously inaccurate AI to choose bombing targets and our weapons hit a girl's school as a result, let's withhold weapons from our own govt till that's resolved"?
Obviously not. The ethics team at Raytheon is not going to ever be allowed to overrule the leadership or more importantly the political leadership of this country whose support of Raytheon is fundamental to their survival
I have literally no clue, hence I won't try to claim I know exactly what's going on there. For all we know, the ethics team at Raytheon could have stopped multiple international nuclear wars already.
They make sure that they are executing contracts in a way that doesn't break the ethics of the jurisdictions they are operating in, they aren't a bunch of naive people pleading for less war.
Sorry that was meant for who you replied to, I was pointing out the difference in the application of ethics and a personal vs corporate level and that they aren't there to argue a contradictory moral opinion at the company they are there to make sure that the company can execute contracts in a way that abides by the legal ethics of where the are operating - raytheon and stopping war was just an example it applies to all companies and I think most people, myself included, have an incorrect assumption of what those departments are even there for in the first place.
no need for wild speculation, we know that Raytheon is a US Defense contractor and we know that the US targets civilians (including US citizens) abroad for extrajudicial assassinations, starts destabilizing wars without meaningful strategic objectives, supports genocide etc. These things are all extremely well documented, for those paying attention the existence of Raytheon is inherently unethical
There is no value in merely having a position with no power, that only exists to make the organization look good. Do you think a vegan is most effective at a slaughterhouse, given that they'd undermine their employers revenue if they were given a modicum of power. Google's AI ethics team was steamrolled by this reality.
only if you assume that the ethics department at Raytheon has absolute power over which contracts Raytheon takes and what kinds of products it produces. which is plainly absurd.
Why would you assume that? Say they only have 10% influence, 10% influence in "maybe we don't make this sort of weapon" is better than 0%. Of course, that's not even their job description, but that's besides the point.
Obviously so. Raytheon is a private company that has its own equities to consider: including things like public image, legal liability, etc. The idea that the USG says jump and Raytheon says how high is absurd. They make choices and even advise the USG at times.
I hate to break the news to you, but Raytheon doesn't do the targeting.
The idea to bomb that girls school may have came from Grok, but a card carrying, uniform wearing member of the US military agreed it was the thing to do.
Where was the US military ethics team? Hegseth dismissed them earlier in the year to help with 'lethality'.
(in all reality, the intelligence was old. the database said the building was a military target, so it was sorted and assigned. intelligence is old and leaky and full or errors). a mistake. a tragic mistake, but not a deliberate act.
It's RTX now and some of the reverse engineering/vulnerability researcher folks that work/worked there are some of the best people I've met across the entire security industry...
Let's not confuse an ethics team with HR. The later exists to ensure proper legal adherence with a varying degree of benefit to the employees. The former[1] is an electively instated position that usually has a dual mandate somewhere between the polls of "Make leadership confident that teams don't make them lose sleep" and "Make teams confident that leadership doesn't make them lose sleep" (usually leaning strongly towards the second) as a sort of employee moral assurance team. I don't disagree that the ethicist is partially there to justify actions but they're mainly there to be seen as an obstruction to particularly egregious actions so that, if, for instance, you have a boring data center maintenance job, you can have the belief that nobody is using the product of your labor to for something heinous. The efficacy of such teams is quite questionable but there is some logic in assigning the job of worrying about ethical considerations to one person that can shove their nose in every crack and cranny so that every individual employees can talk to/lean on that person instead of needing to go to such lengths themselves if they feel compelled to do so.
Most people don't like to do evil (even if the money is good) so allowing an economy of scale around morale reassurance is rational. This obviously breaks down if the company is seen to hide things from that department or if that department is clearly, themselves, unethical. The first of those conditions are why ethics departments at Meta and OpenAI have very little efficacy.
1. Outside of extreme circumstances where it has been mandated to be a specific regulatory board because of past actions or fear of future actions in which case it's better viewed as part of the bureaucracy of the governing body (usually the state, sometimes a shareholder or other concerned party).
