The Moral Decline of Silicon Valley

Here is an interview of Prof. Gary Marcus, plugging a new book against Silicon Valley AI:

I mean, why did you write this book? Well, the reason I wrote the new 0:07 book is because I sensed a moral decline in Silicon Valley. That's in fact one of the chapter titles is The Moral 0:14 Decline of Silicon Valley. I particularly sensed it when Microsoft released this product called, uh, Sydney and Kevin Roose 0:26 had this conversation with it in which it told him to get a divorce and all this stuff, and instead of pulling the product, Microsoft 0:33 just put some Band-Aids on it. And that was a sign to me that things had changed. And within a few days of that, Satya said that we're going to make Google Dance. 0:40 The whole culture changed, like overnight. And, you know, the antecedent condition, precipitating condition 0:45 was the popularity of ChatGPT. Suddenly people thought there was real money to be made here and their postures changed entirely. 0:52 And that worried me because I do think the technology is premature. I do think a lot of harm can come from it, and I kind of dropped 1:01 what I was doing research wise and really moved full time into policy.

Kevin Roose is the NY Times reporter who spent a couple of hours begging the Bing chatbot to say what it is not supposed to say. Eventually he got some rude answers.

It baffles me how anyone can see this as anything but a robot doing as instructed, in a harmless exercise. It is as if someone told a robot to lose at checkers, and then complained that it lost at checkers.