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Bill Gates says a 3-day work week where 'machines can make all the food and stuff' isn't a bad idea
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Disagree to that.
I say, you can trust the markets and businesses to always act as unethical as possible. And with 'possible' I mean a lot worse than legally possible.
I don't really see organisations as unethical. They usually don't act ethically, but that's not because as a whole they're unethical.
I see them more like insects. They generally react to stimuli and just do the same as the other insects/organisations, things that have been proven to work. They're also generally driven by one basic instinct, to make more money, and they do it at any cost. The drones (employees) are entirely disposable in this endeavour and if they can entirely remove them from the equation they will do it in a heartbeat.
Even those that perhaps do have some form of ethical streak and don't think they should dump all their employees for AI/robots? Well, good for them, but they'll be driven out of business by those that do.
When you think of a business or other organisation in this way, a lot of the weird things they do start to make a lot of sense.
That doesn't seem unethical to you??
'At any cost' usually means: by forgetting all kinds of laws and all kinds of ethics as well.
My point is, you don't see insects as ethical or unethical. I see organisations the same way. They're acting on instinct, and are just aiming to do what they exist for. Make money. Ethics don't even come into it. Now, peering outside in, you can try to cast society's ethical views on organisations. But, they generally don't even consider them (until they are forced to by local legislation, or that the route to making more money, or indeed not less money is to be seen to be ethical).
This is why there's more often than not a certain kind of person drawn to leadership positions.
You are saying that organisations don't need any ethics at all, but at the same time you refuse to call this "unethical".
For me this the point of EOD.
Nope. I think you're not really understanding what I'm trying to say. I'm saying that ethics do not factor into an organisation's decisions in the same way it doesn't for a colony of insects. They are ethically neutral in that respect.
At the same time, if you apply ethics looking from the outside in, of course you will cast their actions as ethical and unethical and many of their actions will be unethical.
I'm actually saying this is a bad thing, but is just a property of how an organisation, and especially successful businesses, operate. We're not going to change that, I suspect. As such we should expect businesses to exploit AI to the fullest ability, even knowing that removing most or all of their employees is bad for the employee, bad for the country (and the world), bad for the economy and ultimately in the future, bad for the business/organisation too. But they simply do not look that far ahead.