Comment by 27183
4 hours ago
100%. I don't think "AI" has changed anything wrt to the responsibility of the tech industry in general. Tech has always been pretty much devoid of ethics or a sense of responsibility at the executive level (and therefore "management" more broadly). But before LLMs it was easier for ethical engineers to surreptitiously steer things towards responsible implementations. I suspect also competence correlates pretty strongly with intellectual honesty--narcissists and other personality defectives generally aren't terribly capable of the kind of introspection necessary to learn deeply. With the deluge of LLM slop, it's much harder for even a responsible manager to differentiate the competent from the incompetent, and now the dishonest, unethical folks have more leverage.
So now the problem is highly visible. There's only one solution I can think of, and that's to hold individuals (not corporations) responsible for professional malfeasance.
But as you've made clear, the root of the problem is not with the engineer.
Personally I think a corporate death penalty strikes a nice balance of holding companies and individuals responsible. If a company exercises sufficient malfeasance, it gets nationalized with no compensation for shareholders. Watch the incentives align real fast.
Yeah that sounds great! A company guillotine is absolutely something I could get behind. Problem is I don't think there's any way it could possibly happen politically. Whereas we have a really strong existence proof for e.g. the Professional Engineer certification and other professional coherence mechanisms. That seems to work, albeit not without its own inefficiencies. I doubt anyone, though, would advocate for some kind of laissez-faire situation where the profit incentive aligns with the regulatory one. Historically that hasn't gone well. A lot of people died.