The more I read about Zuckerberg's thoughts on the future of AI, and the more it's unveiled about the shady practices the company has been engaging in for more than a decade, the more I can't find an answer to a simple question:
how can so many brilliant, probably ethically sound people, still work for such a company?
I'm focusing on Meta, but the same goes for Palantir and such ilk of companies whose clear and only output is a net negative for society.
Is it really just money? Or do you actually believe these companies are not the societal wrecking balls they are? Would you argue that their toxicity itself is not as evident as I claim? You just don't give a damn?
I understand this is a provocative question, but bear with me and possibly change my mind. I'm genuinely curious.
Some other common reasons that I disagree with, but are quite defensible:
"Well-targeted advertising is a net positive, or at least not hugely negative, for the world. Better targeting has helped many small businesses succeed where they would otherwise not been able to get customers"
"I am working on account security/React/ML/etc which is a good thing. I don't endorse all the bad things"
"It is more complicated than it seems, and most people at Meta try to do the right thing"
"I might as well work at the company and try to make it better from the inside" (while making lots of money)
What makes you buy chocolate from giant corps that have slave/child labour in their supply chain?
But there are different kinds of harm.
That's wildly false.
Prove me wrong.
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“If I don’t take that job (and that fat paycheque) then someone else will. Whatever Meta is set to accomplish, irrespective of whether it’s actually evil or not, will most likely be achieved. So might as well take the job and the money. As a bonus, you get to work on interesting stuff rather than the usual CRUD webapp.”
And the sad truth is, they were right.
Not only that, marketing yourself as an ex-FAANG afterwards (whether the faang is meta or whatever) will likely yield better positions or salary anyway. And the experience you get working on larger scale systems (along with much higher quality standards) improves you a lot as an engineer.
So long story short, it’s mostly upsides.
It's all a slippery slope anyway. If you were to work for yourself and publish your research, people might do bad things with it anyway. Consider YOLO [1] as an example of where things might have gone wrong. Another fine example is Fritz Haber [2], who intended some of his inventions for good, some for bad, but eventually society found a way to reverse his intentions.
Given that most computer scientists are pretty good at putting things in perspective, they might come to the conclusion that working for Meta isn't so bad in the grander scheme of things. Slaving away in academia and having your work ignored isn't a very tempting alternative.
Instead of considering how we can make smart people stop working for idiots, it might be more fruitful to spread the idea that we should stop worshipping idiots altogether. If there is one thing I miss from the days when religion was still a thing, it is this suggestion [3].
[1] https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/code-no-evil/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber
[3] Exodus 20:3-5
This is a terrible argument and is defeatist in the same was as 'what does anything matter at all if the sun is going to explode'.
If you choose to do work for bad leaders, you are going bad in the same way that 'just following orders' for bad things is also bad. You are responsible for the outcomes in those cases. If you are ok with the resulting bad outcomes because the science was interesting and the pay is good, that's your decision. But there is no absolution just because you can suppose that someone else would have done it so it might as well have been you.
It would not surprise me if this is the exact reasoning that underpins decisions made by leaders of these big companies.
It's terribly hard to convince some people that this is not a sound argument.
In fact, I think it's mostly an evolutionary trait that most of us have, but looking at other species, I don't think it's universal to help others.
There's a whole world of difference between someone using your work in a way that you find objectionable and volunteering to accept a paycheck doing work for a company that you know will be using the work they're paying for in a way that you find objectionable.
This is why I have to assume that anybody working for a company is fine with what that company does.
Those who worked for IBM voluntarily and serviced the Third Reich if they suspected what was happening and did nothing were collaborators in mass murder. Engineering and all professional disciplines must be restrained by honesty and ethics.