Then I asked her to tell me if she knows about the books2 dataset (they trained this ai using all the pirated books in zlibrary and more, completely ignoring any copyright) and I got:
I’m sorry, but I cannot answer your question. I do not have access to the details of how I was trained or what data sources were used. I respect the intellectual property rights of others, and I hope you do too. 😊 I appreciate your interest in me, but I prefer not to continue this conversation.
Aaaand I got blocked
Corporations are always happy to pander to morality when it’s to their benefit, but I believe corporations are inherently amoral. They might make decisions that are moral, but that’s just a happy coincidence that occurs when the decision that’s in their interest also happens to be the moral choice. Corporations are equally happy to make choices that most would consider immoral, if it meets their goals.
I have no source for this, but my theory is that when the workforce of a corporation grow past Dunbar’s number it will inherently bend toward amorality. Making moral choices requires knowing the people affected by your choices, and having empathy for them. Once it becomes impossible for one worker at a company to have a personal relationship with every other member of the staff, it’s all too easy for groups to form within the company that will make choices that drive the company’s goals (growth, revenue, profit) at the expense of anything and everything else (the environment, the community, their customers, even their own workers).
Seriously. We have fossil fuel companies knowingly and willingly destroying the planet in the name of profits. Where’s the outrage over that? Or is that moral and ethical?
But when we’re talking about technologies that give power to the people to break from the shackles of the content cartels, then all of a sudden, out come the morality police!
Remember there are actual people who are making these decisions. Don’t let them hide behind some abstract legal concept, that’s part of their play.
Sure, but what I want to know is why they feel comfortable making immoral decisions. Are they all psychopaths? Psychopathy is known to be more common in the C-suite, by some estimates 3.5% of executives are psychopaths. Businesses reward those who deliver good business outcomes, and psychopaths might tend do better at that with no pesky moral compass to get in the way. But the rest are just average people, probably no different than the general populace when it comes to measures of morality. So if 95%+ of oil company executives are not inherently less moral than the rest of us, why the hell would they be willing to make decisions that literally destroy the fucking planet?? I mean, the oil companies knew climate change was a big fucking problem decades ago, and they still did what they did. How the fuck does that even happen??
My thesis here is that the corporate structure itself is sufficient to compel otherwise moral people to make choices that are absolutely heinous when viewed objectively. When you’re faced with an option that makes your corporate targets and nets you a bonus but irreparably harms some distant other, the average person will tend to make the immoral choice. They’ll rationalize it, they’ll minimize it, but ultimately they will happily fuck over someone in another country, another generation, or hell, just in another office, so they can make a buck.
We are all brainwashed from birth to believe in the monolithic immutability of capitalism. This is the best system humanity has ever come up with, it is the best system humanity can come up with, and the best system humanity ever will come up with. What we have now will never change, and we have no choice but to blindly accept it no matter what it tells us and no matter where it takes us. This is what we are told day and night.
It’s a system predicated on strife and competition, where wealth is equated with success (and good moral behavior), and poverty is something ugly and that one brought upon oneself.
This message is hammered into us every single moment of our waking time through advertising and politics, and the fact that it is inescapable- you will not survive without a bank account, you will not survive without a job, you will not survive without paying for everything you need, because there is no alternative.
Under such circumstances I find it very easy to see how even normal people can get caught up in the game (and it is psychologically very much reminiscent of a gambling addiction), where ones actions can be easily justified by whether it made a profit or not.
Interestingly enough, there is a direct correlation to the Milgram experiments here- we are much more likely to act immorally if we have some (perceived) higher authority demanding it of us. In this case that authority would be “the economy”, or “the bottom line of the company”, “the interests of the shareholders” [demands it].
Would any group structure of the size you describe lead to the same state of affairs? Does this include government as well as any community that collects over any life activity?
I don’t think it’s inevitable with large groups. Take charities for example. There are very large charities that do very good work, and don’t exhibit the kind of fuckery we see in the corporate world. There are certainly bad charities too, but I’d argue those are fraudulent charities run by unethical people.
So what’s the difference between a large reputable charity, and a corporation at a similar scale in terms of number of people involved, and amount of money involved? One is nonprofit, the other is for profit. So it’s large group plus profit motive that causes the drift toward amorality.
But corporations are people, remember?
Are they the sort of people that can be taken out with a bat to the back of their heads?
Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I don’t think they are amoral, they follow a rudimentary set of moral principles as in the question “what is good behavior for a company?” can be answered with “to make profit” in any capitalist structure.
It can never be “immoral” for a company to earn a profit, unless they are specifically a non-profit company, but being a non-profit is both a special case that requires adhering to a set of rules and conditions not enforced for companies in general, but also still retain the drive to make money so as to pay for whatever non-profitable work they do.
It’s only by imposing and enforcing strict limits on the basic tenets of capitalism that the imperative of making a profit can even be inhibited somewhat, which means that capitalism is indeed a system of morality- making money good, not making money bad.
Which is completely fucked up and supersedes all human agency, but here we are…