"Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it."
Therefore builders "bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility" because "every design choice reflects a vision of humanity."
The questions shouldn't just be 'can we build it?' or 'will people want this?'
We need to also ask 'should we build it?' and 'will this make humanity better?'
The encyclical calls on us to “join forces in building up the common good.”
This is a message we need right now.
"Software engineers shall act consistently with the public interest. In particular, software engineers shall, as appropriate:
1.01. Accept full responsibility for their own work.
1.02. Moderate the interests of the software engineer, the employer, the client and the users with the public good.
1.03. Approve software only if they have a well-founded belief that it is safe, meets specifications, passes appropriate tests, and does not diminish quality of life, diminish privacy or harm the environment. The ultimate effect of the work should be to the public good. ...
"From the IEEE, which also encompasses computer engineering, their first principle and its first few sub-items are:
"To uphold the highest standards of integrity, responsible behavior, and ethical conduct in professional activities.
1. to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public, to strive to comply with ethical design and sustainable development practices, to protect the privacy of others, and to disclose promptly factors that might endanger the public or the environment;
2. to improve the understanding by individuals and society of the capabilities and societal implications of conventional and emerging technologies, including intelligent systems; ...
"Of course people are going to ignore it if there's no force behind it.
> It is the pursuit of the common good that gives life to a people, understood not as a mere collection of individuals, but as a living reality in which people learn to recognize that they themselves are interconnected and jointly responsible for the res publica. In this sense, every person contributes to the building up of one’s people...
> When it comes to decisions regarding economic flows and digital platforms, as well as the governance of data and algorithms, we cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own; instead, we must build forms of cooperation that respect the various levels of the global community and make them jointly responsible for the common good.
> We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called “alignment” of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice.... What is needed is a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating, and of protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions.
The casual reference to a 135 year old encyclical that dealt with the seismic shift of industrialisation took me quite aback for a number of reasons.
Why does it have to be either/or?
From a high-level view, there are powerful cultural/political forces that nudge us towards building harmful, wasteful things without us being aware of said forces. The government, corporate greed, and billion-dollar marketing budgets are to blame.
But on the ground, from an in-the-trenches perspective, I think an engineer at Meta, for example, shares in some level of blame, too. Mainly because there is plenty of evidence showing how much harm Meta products have brought upon society. Yet Meta couldn’t be built without engineers opting in to work there in exchange for $300k salaries.
We desperately need moral clarity and courage at both the policy-level and the individual level.
It's not either/or in strict terms, it absolutely is either/or in practical terms. When the conscientious engineer chooses not to take the 300k job, the next one in line does. If enough choose not to, it just became a 400k job.
Can you change society in such a way that nobody would take such jobs? In strict terms, sure, in practical terms it probably entails enormous costs, both economical and societal. And then you still have other countries.
There's an entire legal code filled with things on which we can't rely on the morals of the people. We can't stop theft, rape and murder, what makes you think that stopping engineers is any more feasible?
The best thing builders can do is use their knowledge and authority to pressure the other side.
Ofc they share the blame, but it is not solving the problem.
You can say for example: loan sharks are bad for society; so government gives anyone 0 percent credit. You just removed one problem, created another.
Just and sustaining system with individual morality is destined to fail. Only option is social regulation. Which is at government level.
Sure, IF we could just go and fix our governments in some magical way then the problem would disappear. That goes from hunger, climate change, videogame addiction and AI. The problem is that what you value in life in different than what others do, so we now have a system in which sometimes you get what you want and sometimes you don't.
But back to the topic, I do think that how OpenAI and Anthropic handled the government and them asking to drop guardrails is something a company can actually and actively do without having to reinvent the universe.
Like it or not if you knowingly build stuff that is used for evil purposes you are complicit
You can't build an orphan mulching machine and get away with just a shrug. "I don't really agree with mulching orphans but someone else paid me to build that. If I didn't build it someone else would have" just does not absolve you of your involvement in mulching orphans
> This is a message we need right now.
Feels good man. The solution found by the private parties driving technological change is sainthood. Or aiming for it. At least, better than you. They have the vision of what's good for the herd, but the more time I spend as a sheep, the more it seems the "herd" is just a way to recycle the story of their own exceptionalism stripped of any mark of individuality. A simple visit to fiftyyears.com will greet you with "We back the indispensable". I guess it's the same "we".
From Crichton's book Jurassic Park, which like most of his books is about the perils of technological advancements.
They used the quote in the movie, slightly tweaked.
Engineers/technologists tend to have no such guardrails, and are also usually embedded into entirely profit motivated environments, whatever their own values might be.
> The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes
Sure hope your rosy inflection point happens real soon.
Otherwise, the direction this is taking us is pretty obvious.
I think reading this helps me imagine a version of the future I'd actually like to live in. A version where technology is used well (rather than preaching for abstinence from technology) and where values other than "intelligence" (in whatever guise) are on an equal footing.
Even writing that makes me feel naive (and to an extent I know it is) but I think it would be inconsistent for someone who cheers for humanity's efforts to solve/chip away at "impossible" problems (like LLMs were thought to be not so long ago) to shirk from the challenge of making the world better for _everyone_.
Even with all morally good actors locally, there is no guarantees for external forces. Thinking it hypothetically, even with global coordination ( all good actors ) there is not a proven path that would lead us to better place from any starting point from past.
In the AI case, each firm is in an arms race, and nobody can slow down without effectively collapsing due to positive gross margins only being viable with a frontier model that attracts marginal demand. An appeal to morality might have an impact but more effective action would be to address the structure that the AI companies are situated in that causes this dynamic in the first place. In practice, thats going to be a global agreement to slow down, and global regulations.
- Fuck you, got mine
- If I don’t do it, someone else will
- Might makes right
- Greed is good
Ironically, these are often the same people denouncing multiculturalism, yet the culture they strive for is completely morally bankrupt.
I believe the Amish figured this out over a century ago.
The Amish rather came to a different conclusion (which I don't want to judge on, but on which I nevertheless have a different opinion than the Amish).
Woman have less value under the church than man. Alternative sexual views are evil.
Church and any kind of believe system hurts our society and divides us.
Any belief system? And yet I bet you value freedom over slavery, wisdom over ignorance and compassion over brutality. That’s a belief system, despite not being a religion.
ok
"and any kind of believe system hurts our society and divides us."
People shouldn't believe anything?
Disagreement and conflict are natural. How we handle these disagreements while striving for widespread peace and prosperity is the question.
> much more compelling than those found in the various "manifestos" which come out of Silicon Valley.
As an aside, at least Trump is drawn to the grandeur of high culture from historical times, but he also doesn't understand a jota about aesthetics, and so the White House gets turned into a tacky gypsy-style abomination with one dollar ornaments.
When you compare the robber barons to Google and Meta it’s kind of embarrassing- they build massive empires of iron horses screaming across the world and covered cities in magnificent buildings (stations, libraries, etc). G&M built an empire of advertising and … not much else?
Ask a scientist or engineer what philosophy or theology has taught us about the source of morality and their education, training and experiences havent prepared them to answer that question.
This didnt matter so much in the past because their activities never had the scale it does today. For basic training in philosophy if you are mid or upper level exec whose decisions are going to effect a whole lot of people, go to open yale courses and take the intro to Philosophy classes. It will help develop your answer to the question - why do you do what you do if you are going to die anyway tomorrow.
I quickly learned as an adult that whether you're a person of faith or not, it's not pointless at all. It's the foundation of everything. Philosophy is how you explain the deeper reasons behind why you follow whatever religion you do, or adhere more meaningfully to whatever kind of agnosticism, atheism and/or 'spirituality' (with or without woo) you espouse.
Maybe you mean mathematics is amoral and are committing the common conflation of "engineering is just applied science and science is just applied mathematics," which is a really bad case of missing the forest for the trees.
The scandal broke out in worldwide media starting in 2002 (not coincidentally, the same year South Park released Red Hot Catholic Love). This reminds me of when Contrapoints off-hand commented about how things were different in the 70s but that was "30 years ago".
https://monoskop.org/images/1/1f/Wiener_Norbert_God_and_Gole...
Norbert Weiner was an atheist but he talks about three areas religion is the only thing to have really examined that relate to capable AI: omniscience, omnipotence, and worship (gadget worship). It has very prescient stuff on blackbox learning/distillation, reinforcement learning/reward hacking, alignment through human feedback.
His The Human Use of Human beings and Cybernetics are extremely good too and have more of a mash of the themes between Rerum Novarum and Magnifca Humanitas, and more near-term automation.
Would you also recommend "The Human Use of Human Beings"?
God & Golem is the most succinct and up to date though, probably a 2hr read.
The book Cybernetics is a lot of math and ergodic theory stuff that went beyond me, but is the longest and you still get a lot out of it skimming over that stuff if you don't have the background for it. The last revision of it in the 50s added some of the same blackbox function copying/imitation learning/distillation stuff, reinforcement learning with reward hacking concerns, and superintelligence as genie/monkey's paw.
I would read the three in reverse order of publication.
He also foresaw another big area of potential existential danger, Wiener filter for guidance and control of missiles (later superceded with Kalman filter bringing the nuclear hard targets era with 15min retaliation windows) and refused to work on it or share prior work, and he also had bioweapons delivery concerns before the bioweapons treaties, publishing this open letter in The Atlantic in 1947:
I am hoping the Pope has a cleaner view of AI quietly automating the drudgery in the back offices and not just robot dogs with machine guns. And with that view, should we build it?
If a technology existed that reduced the cost of producing a critical thing (think food, housing, medical care) down to near zero, however, it made the humans currently building the thing redundant, should we build it? Would it be okay to use the hyper-optimization power of Capitalism to build such a technology faster?