Late reply here but I wanted to point out that you still don’t get it. True empathy in the tech community would be e.g. having the courage to say that building HLAI of the kind we’re now approaching is guaranteed to cause tremendous amounts of suffering for ordinary people (who will not be able to respond elastically to so abrupt a tectonic shift), and therefore the whole enterprise is fundamentally evil.
Let’s get real concrete about what’s going to happen: people will lose their jobs, then their homes, they’ll become destitute, they’ll experience divorces, some will commit suicide, they will suffer desperately in myriad other ways due to economic disenfranchisement, kids will be deprived of a comfortable upbringing, etc.
How many in the tech industry are genuinely discussing the very real consequences of nonlinear degrees of automation for the kinds of ordinary people they barely interact with? How many are pretending that there isn’t something disgustingly immoral about having some of the most affluent and economically insulated people devise and inflict this reality upon countless millions?
I will maintain that this industry is morally bankrupt and nearly entirely devoid of empathy. These are not the people who should be in charge of our future.
> I will maintain that this industry is morally bankrupt and nearly entirely devoid of empathy. These are not the people who should be in charge of our future.
Since the tone of your characterization is so absolute, why doesn't it apply to you? Why are you here in this tech community at all if the whole industry is so morally bankrupt? Why would "present company" ever be excluded for this or that reason? Because they're your friends? You're just projecting your own anger onto an entire group of people that you mostly don't know.
What I think you mean when you say all of this is that those in control of the tech industry are morally bankrupt. And, after 10+ years of getting kicked around as an engineer, I think I would have to agree. But I'm not so foolish as to broadly dismiss everyone in the industry just like me, who started out as a silly nerd who just liked computers and math, and who is essentially still that same person at their core, as a lost cause. I don't do that because I know everyone is fighting their own fight. But it's clear that those who aren't fighting are the ones on top that are sucking the life blood out of society. I'm more and more resentful towards that demographic every year. And I agree with you that they're crossing some kind of moral line by developing this tech, or at least by trying so hard to maintain control over it.
But the tech will get developed either way. If you're in the camp that thinks we should somehow just stop doing all this, you don't seem much different to me from someone that wants to mandate encryption backdoors. Our society will never be well coordinated enough to do that correctly. This isn't like making nuclear bombs, which takes a lot of physical industry. This is something that is just months away from running on commodity gaming hardware. Probably just a few years away from running on the average laptop. It does feel a bit like a harsh reality, just like the fact that a meteor could slam into the earth at any moment. But there it is; what are you going to do about it that isn't either futile or self-destructive?
Let’s get real concrete about what’s going to happen: people will lose their jobs, then their homes, they’ll become destitute, they’ll experience divorces, some will commit suicide, they will suffer desperately in myriad other ways due to economic disenfranchisement, kids will be deprived of a comfortable upbringing, etc.
How many in the tech industry are genuinely discussing the very real consequences of nonlinear degrees of automation for the kinds of ordinary people they barely interact with? How many are pretending that there isn’t something disgustingly immoral about having some of the most affluent and economically insulated people devise and inflict this reality upon countless millions?
I will maintain that this industry is morally bankrupt and nearly entirely devoid of empathy. These are not the people who should be in charge of our future.