stardreamer

I may be biased (PhD student here) but I don't fault them for being as such. Ethics is something that 1) requires formal training 2) requires oversight 3) contains to are different to every person. Quite frankly, it's not part of their training, never been emphasized as part of their training, and subjective based on cultural experiences.

What is considered unreasonable risk of harm is going to be different to everybody. To me, if the entire design runs locally and does not collect data for Google's use then it's perfectly ethical. That being said, this does not prevent someone else from adding the data collection features. I think the original design of such a system should put in a reasonable amount of effort in stopping that. But if that is done then there's nothing else to blame them about. The moral responsibility lies with the one who pulled the trigger.

Should the original designer have anticipated this issue thus never took the first step? Maybe. But that depends on a lot of circumstance that we don't know so it's hard to predict anything meaningful.

As for the more "harm than good" analysis, I absolutely detest that sort of reasoning since it attempts to quantify social utility in a pure mathematical sense. If this reasoning holds, an extreme example would be justifying harm to any minority group as long as it maximizes benefit for society. Basically Omelas. I believe a good quantitative reasoning would be checking if harm is introduced to ANY group of people, as long as that's the case the whole is considered unethical.

This is common for companies that like to hire PhDs.

PhDs like to work on interesting and challenging projects.

With nobody to reign them in, they do all kinds of cool stuff that makes no money (e.g. Intel Optane and transactional memory).

Designing a realtime scam analysis tool with resource constraints is interesting enough to be greenlit but makes no money.

Once released, they'll move on to the next big challenge, and when nobody is there to maintain their work, it will be silently dropped by Google.

I'm willing to bet more than 70% of the Google graveyard comes from projects like these.

There's also changing from circuit to packet switching, which also drastically changes how the handover process works.

tl;Dr - handover in 5G is buggy and barely works. The whole thing of switching from one service area to another in the middle of a call is held together by hopes and dreams.

Somehow I disagree with both the premise and the conclusion here.

I dislike a direct answer to things as it discourages understanding. What is the default memory allocation mechanism in glibc malloc? I could get the answer sbrk() and mmap() and call it a day, but I find understanding when it uses mmap instead of sbrk (since sbrk isn't numa aware but mmap is) way more useful for future questions.

Meanwhile, Google adding a tab for AI search is helpful for people who want to use just AI search. It doesn't take much away from people doing traditional web searches. Why be mad about this instead of the other true questionable decisions Google is doing?

Nope. Plenty of people want this.

In the last few years I've seen plenty of cases where CS undergrad students get stumped if ChatGPT is unable to debug/explain a question to them. I've literally heard "idk because ChatGPT can't explain this lisp code" as an excuse during office hours.

Before LLMs, there were also a significant amount of people who used GitHub issues/discord to ask simple application usage questions instead of Googling. There seems to be a significant decrease of people's willingness to search for an answer regardless of AI tools existing.

I wonder if it has to do with weaker reading comprehension skills?