Comment by D_Alex
3 hours ago
I'm a bit underwhelmed tbh. Here is Anthropic's motto:
"At Anthropic, we build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being."
Why does Anthropic even deal with the Department of @#$%ing WAR?
And what does Amodei mean by "defeat" in his first paragraph?
There was a time (1943?) when dealing with the US department of war meant serving for humanity's long-term well being.
Look I'm not going to disagree, obviously - but even in those times, you could argue that helping the department of war in some ways will contribute to deaths you might not necessarily want to be a part of. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is still widely discussed today for a myriad of reasons, as is conventional bombing of cities in both Nazi Germany and Japan. We can both agree that fighting nazis is a good thing while at the same time having moral objection to participating in the war effort.
And I think the stakes have changed today - it's one thing to be making bombs which might or might not hit civilians, it's another to be making an AI system that gives humans a "score" that is then used by the military to decide if they live or die, as some systems already do("Lavender" used by the IDF is exactly this).
Even with the best intentions in mind, you don't know how the systems you built will be used by the governments of tomorrow.
DoD and American exceptionalists also believe American foreign policy is in service of humanity’s long term well being
It is all for the benefit of man. We even get to see the man himself daily on television.
Yeah, I don't think so any more. The sort of lofty Cold War rhetoric about leading the world, if it was ever legitimately believed by the people spouting it, is gone. A very different attitude has taken hold, which puts a zero sum ethnonationalism at the core.
One of the hallmarks of fascist thinking is the dehumanizing of opponents and minorities, so within their own messed up framework, they might even mean it.