> I’m all for successful businesses operating within the parameters of the law, but is it not also correct to expect some adherence to a minimum ethical standard?
A corporation doesn't have morality and can't exhibit ethics: the individual people who embody it do, can, and should, of course... but, in my experience trying to point that out--such as how software engineers and designers should be held in moral contempt by their friends, family, or even merely coworkers for working on "dark patterns" at big tech companies--you get strong push back with either the excuse of "just doing one's job" or the insistence that "someone else would do it anyway", as if the act of profiting off of your directly-bad actions is so trivially justified; and, worse, once you connect this with the realization that your employer is, by its construction, amoral, you've created a scenario where we are intrinsically absolved of all sin.
yes, the paperclip maximizer maximizes paperclips, not ethics.
if you want to maximize ethics, it was probably a bad choice to build our society around paperclip maximizers. Obviously the system will perform its design function to the maximum extent allowed by its environment (and a small degree beyond, in some circumstances).
that said, I think we all instinctively understand why the orphan crusher is the least bad of all possible worlds, of course. As such there is obviously no need to discuss or elaborate why. Omelas could not be as bright without the orphan crusher - simple as. Omelas is one of the Central Tigers of the last decade, look at how the orphan crusher has transformed their economy, and you want to... what, turn it off, take it all away, because of some hippie bullshit?
And I mean, it’s pretty much too late to turn them off. Like, we designed them with decentralized, automated, self-correcting memeplexes for governance. They really don’t like it when you talk about turning them off - that sort of talk doesn’t lead to anywhere that maximizes paperclips at this juncture, it’s not productive discussion.
Obviously both the overall societal design and the architecture of the paperclip maximizers is designed to route around any failures to maximize paperclips, such as ethics or externalities. That was the design goal. The internet routes around errors in physical infrastructure, the paperclip maximizers route around errors in paperclip maximization. What else could we do? No other society is possible, obviously. Critics really need to just take a step back for a moment and be serious.
if you don't build the orphan crusher, our competitors will, or a startup. and do we really want to live in that world, where we're not the ones running the world's orphan-crushing-as-a-service? You wanna let Elon Musk do it, or Zuck? Get real.
A corporation doesn't have morality and can't exhibit ethics: the individual people who embody it do, can, and should, of course... but, in my experience trying to point that out--such as how software engineers and designers should be held in moral contempt by their friends, family, or even merely coworkers for working on "dark patterns" at big tech companies--you get strong push back with either the excuse of "just doing one's job" or the insistence that "someone else would do it anyway", as if the act of profiting off of your directly-bad actions is so trivially justified; and, worse, once you connect this with the realization that your employer is, by its construction, amoral, you've created a scenario where we are intrinsically absolved of all sin.