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I have a lot of bones to pick with Google's morality, but "democratizing the transformer and LLMs" is at the bottom of my list.
So far, 100% of things "democratized" by big tech have been bad for people.
Oh, that's true. I just remembered that I hate Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Android, Gemma, Google Docs and free CalDAV syncing.
Woe is me, victim of the 21st century separated from my true calling of paying for software.
Edit (rate limited):
Yes, and Tensorflow too.
Does Gemma belong to this list? Not that impactful
There's no free lunch. You're paying one way or another.
Welcome to the capitalism 101. Everything has price. So far, I would say, humanity done quite well under this _oppressive_ regime when compared with others.
No, sometimes someone else is paying for it. A classic example would be GPS - paid for by US taxpayers but benefiting the world. Yes now there are, for national security reasons, several other GNSSes but still huge swathes of the world ride free.
I for one would prefer to pay for services, than be psychologically manipulated into paying (more, on average) to other companies who are paying to make those services worse.
Anytime you use absolutes you paint yourself in a corner. Definitely not 100% of things that big tech "democratized", as you put it, has been bad for people.
Presenting it as such does disservice to any serious conversation.
Very little "AI discovered cure for cancer" articles these days, more "10,000 workers let go, to be replaced with chat bots"
Interesting thing to write in a forum provided for free by big tech. Probably using a browser that big tech offers for free. On a phone or laptop purchased from big tech. Connected using networking gear and software made by big tech.
All bad?
Is it consuming too much science fiction that has people thinking like this?
Is it consuming too little science fiction that has people thinking like this?
I’m convinced it has something to do with science fiction.
I think the scepticism and gaslighting of people sounding the alarm over the trajectory of AI is concerning. This feels like a case of "knowing better" than the actual people involved in the projects.
You might be right. You might be wrong. But being overly confident on a topic you're a spectator to is possibly not the right choice.
IMO it's really not hard to extrapolate where this all ends up if you've read e.g. Das Kapital, and even if you haven't...
Yep. In fact you just have to look at the people running these AI companies and listen to their own words, they are not painting a positive outcome for their own businesses.
The guy was an insider for years but you call him a noob who just read a fantasy book?
Blake Lemoine was an insider...
The religion part or the AI criticism part?
Congratulations and commiserations.
Perhaps a good thing to come out of these big companies over-indexing on "AI" is the liberation of creative minds. So many fantastic open source contributors have disappeared into corporate black holes...
I for one cannot be convinced that these companies saying they want to slow down AI progress is for the safety of mankind (or any other altruistic reason). However, I respect someone willing to give up a very comfortable career for his convictions.
I’d wait and see what happens next in their professional life. It’d be ironic if they founded a new AI startup or something like that.
I don't get these comments. If he got paid way above his needs for a while he can easily retire already if he continues to keep his expenses in check, and take on a position in his church. Pays with happiness, not money, though if he has enough of the latter he can focus on maximize the former.
That would be ironic! But there's no chance I'll work on anything that accelerates AI. If I was OK with that, I would not have left Google.
I do expect to use AI in my work, as I indicated in my blog post. I haven't (yet?) reached the point where I consider that anathema...
That most people are sincere in their beliefs (in AI doom), as the author says and I think too, doesn't mean there aren't cult leader-types exploiting these beliefs. And their private beliefs may be quite different from their stated ones.
Isn't AI just the next step in the history of evolution?
I have the feeling it is inevitable that a new species will take over Earth. Just as humans took over a hundred thousand years ago. Now a species even more capable of thinking is coming up.
Thinking a million times faster. Knowing a million times more. Able to wrap its head around a million times more aspects at the same time.
A strong effort to slow it down might slow it down a bit. But does that really make a difference? It's not like we can "brace" ourselves from what is coming. Would the apes have been able to prepare for the arrival of humans if they had had 5 more years?
Well, if Robert O'Callahan reads your post, I am pretty positive he will think he made the right choice.
conceivably you could say humans took over 6000 years ago.
At any rate it can't be a new step in the history of evolution, as AI did not evolve in the same way as other species did and AI is not a species nor alive.
Wow. You should touch grass if you have this opinion.
There's no new species being created here. A tool has been made. Either humanity will wipe itself out using said tool, destroy the tool, or learn to live with the tool.
Why do you object to the term "species"?
It seems pretty capable of producing variations of itself. If these variations improve over time and roam earth - what is in your definition of "species" that is not met?
Would make me too uncomfortable to work with and for people with such opinions.
respect for choosing your faith over your work man! I'm trying to find the intersection of my faith and the new tech too. Feel free to email if you ever wanna chat it out.
I would rather have killer robots then religious fanatics.
All in AI people are like religious fanatics...
Not everyone who's religious is a fanatic.
The reverse also holds, btw.
This one clearly is if you just read the linked article
You might get both instead.
You'd think AI doomerism is a new breed, but it's just the latest revision—and a lower IQ one at that—of Ted Kaczynski.
I think this take is extremely cynical and made in bad faith. Lots of dangers that are due to AI acceleration are raised by a very wide mix of experts, scientists, engineers and researchers.
It is clearly incorrect to call it a conspiracy theory. You can be skeptical, as there is no clear consensus even among experts, but outright dismissal is simply an unscientific position.
I did not call it a conspiracy theory; not here at least. Have you even read what Ted Kaczynski has written? Perhaps you'd like some of it if you do. I bet he's also smarter than your average Anthropic employee.
Even his writing is derivative of the Slandered Luddites
As an aside, this was the most eloquent, professional, polite and concise disagreement on HN I've seen in decades. I genuinely aspire to have this level of class and character in public discourse. Bookmarking this comment as reference for the future :)
Yet another "AI must be stopped" post... If you're burned out, just say so. Don't philosophise. No, we're not buying that your latest model can almost replace all software engineers. It's us working with the harnesses, adding guardrails etc that make this agentic world possible for everyone.
If you think humans are a net positive to be around, you wouldn't be spending trillions trying to build a machine to replace them; not just their work, but all aspects of their lives.
Not full of himself at all
As much as I cannot disagree more with the author's fundamental premise (religion), it is refreshing to see someone claim to have a belief and then follow through, change their behaviour to match their belief, at no small cost to themselves, and in pursuit of doing the right thing.
Thanks for living your values. I might not fully agree but I appreciate people whose convictions are genuine and altruistic.
Sometimes people use the "Yet you participate in society" meme as a shield for blatant hypocrisy, like a Marxist-Leninist Twitch streamer who lives in a multi-million Hollywood mansion, drives a Porsche and wears thousand dollar pants.
There's no arguing with someone who claims God forced them to do something, but I do wish this person good luck in whatever they do next.
God, your conscience, it’s all the same.
It definitely is not. You’ll find that people that call it God never put it into question as one would their conscience.
Few things are as indicative of mental instability than someone believing God is speaking to them directly. The schizophrenic ward is full of these.
Christians believe that God has called them to live with concern for others. When they fail to do so, (everyone does!) on reflection they feel pangs on their conscience. So, on occasion they examine how they are impacting others and if they believe they are doing harm, they change their mind, resolving to avoid the error in the future. They often credit God with the inspiration (the language you keyed in on) because reflection and changes of mind are all his design. You can argue with them: that’s just “doing theology”.
The more people leaving 'because AI' just makes me sad that there have been so few leaving 'because advertising'.
Advertising is an irritation. AI is a threat.
Advertising is surveillance, and surveillance is a threat.
Are you inferring that AI is not a surveillance tool?
I don’t think that’s what he meant. They both are surveillance tools. He’s just upset only one of those is making people advertise their leave in protest.
fair
Correct, but advertising was a better disguise for surveillance. AI goes well beyond surveillance and many evil use cases are now obvious to more people.
Advertising has the appearance of representing an on-going revenue source for an increasing number of devices used in our daily lives by way of surveillance and creation of a picture of an individuals habits and psychology in order to manipulate said psychology to induce the individual to spend more money on literally worthless shit.
That is a threat to the fundamental stability of society.
I think it's worse than that. Or at least, the products that have been built because of advertising are worse than that. Instagram/TikTok/Facebook are all ultimately just surfaces to serve ads, but they've wormed their way into their users' consciousness in fairly insidious ways
Advertising turned brains of entire generation (or maybe a few) into mush.
All intellectual, psych and social scores are in free fall since introduction of ad-supported attention grabbing internet.
AI is theorethical threat. Advertising is a constant detriment to our brains, societies and culture.
If AI can mitigate a fraction of the damage that ads do it will have massive positive impact.
We live in times where everyone can pick their own flavor of apocalypse to be scared of. Ads are leading us into Idiocracy since ~2004 and made huge progress towards it.
Google and Meta's wealth came at the cost of civilization getting sucked dry of its attention and mental capacity.
It’s funny how the [very real] thing that normalizes the exploitation of user data, enables “reel casinos,” suffocates creators and replaces them with “influencers,” etc. is compared with the [still very abstract] danger of AI.
Even before big money was on the table, people didn’t blink an eye at starting to work for Google/Facebook, “solving fun tasks.”
(OP here) FWIW I despise the addictiveness, er engagement optimization that Google and others do. I have said so inside and outside the company many, many times. I would never have agreed to work on that stuff myself. One of the hobby projects I would like to work on is exploring how to use personal AI to beat those algorithms.
I respect the argument for not working for a company that does addictiveness work anywhere, even if you don't work on it yourself. But that's not where I drew the line.
Also FWIW I disagree the danger of AI is abstract. A lot is happening right now, in education for example.
+1000
The dire state most western democracies have found themselves in is a direct consequence of the work big tech did over the last 15+ years.
AI is concerning in some aspects, yes, but the loss of a shared reality has nothing to do with that, and is even more scary.
AI is a threat if you're a messy codebase, an unsolved math problem, or cancer. Otherwise you only have an improved quality of living to look forward to IMO.
Spot on. Or because of addictiveness. Or impact on democracy. Or ruining people's ability to focus on anything. Those attention grabbing algos havent been designed by non-technical people.
He's not even leaving "because AI". He's literally leaving to focus more on AI stuff.
and addresses the anti-AI view:
The main reason then is the concern of the velocity of the rollout and the increased pervasiveness of AI. Too fast, too much.
I could have explained that better, but it was already getting too long.
Personally if I could Thanos-snap AI out of existence I would, but as long as it exists, it seems better on balance to make good use of it where possible than just try to ignore it.
"Focusing more on AI stuff" ... not really? Of course I was using AI a lot in my work at Google, as well as contributing to AI acceleration. Now I won't be contributing to acceleration and I can be as cautious as I want to be about using it.
When the both ends of your platform continue buying and selling you tend to not stand in the way. I personally can't believe these stupid ads sell anything at all. Since they call it a 'business model' software people don't think about it too much.
While I get the spirit of your message, advertising has been around for over a century, and I don’t believe it has done near the damage to society over that timespan that AI will likely do in a decade (if we’re not careful and responsible).
I also don’t believe addiction and other psychological exploits are used for the sole purpose of ad revenue. There are other more direct forms of monetization involved, such as microtransactions and subscriptions.
If you really want to blame something, it really all comes down to one word:
Greed.
It's a shame so many people only resigned for ethical reasons once their employer's threat level progressed from exploitative to existential. Better late than never, but that does not excuse their tardiness.
Agree that greed is the core reason.
Advertising has become 'active', very recently in the overall lifespan of advertising. For most of it's lifespan it was passive, it blared out at you from the TV or radio or bus stop. Now, however, it's reaching out and taking pieces of you back for analysis and reconstruction, and on-selling to any other entity interested in doing the same.
The reason is greed, yes.
We can't regulate human greed, but we can regulate the manifestation of its symptoms.
We can also choose not to work towards expanding the capacity of said symptoms.
Instagram? Tiktok? Facebook?
Social media feeds off addiction to generate ad revenue.
And how much damage has social media done to political and social institutions and to collective mental health?
Ads on other web properties are not weaponised in the same way.
says a lot about them if you really think about it. These are dinosaurs who refuse/unable to adapt, and is being pushed out and/or felt too useless to get out by themselves while finding the perfect excuse: I have principles; ai bad.
But they never did quit saying we are harming children, exploiting people with addiction, getting people addicted to social media, earning money from distributing scam/virus thru ads. These people are highest to the highest hypocrites.
Why is uncertainty about the motives of one form of superintelligence terrifying, whilst, at the same time, uncertainty about the motives of another, omnipotent supernatural intelligence comforting? i.e. the “I don’t know God’s plan, but I sleep well knowing He has one” line of reasoning.
One of them is pretend and the other one probably won't be?
God’s been around for thousands of years and we are still here and flourishing, so obviously God is in some way “aligned”; the same cannot be said for AGI.
edit: Guys, I said “in some way”, not “perfectly”.
Tell that to all the heretics burned at the stake.
If god would allow the creation of an unaligned superintelligence, how aligned is he really?
Survivorship bias. Ask all the humans that have died in horrific screaming agony, and saw everything they worked for turned to dust how well that was aligned with their interests.
I have never heard survivorship bias applied to perspective on the goodness of God. Even as an agnostic, I'm enjoying the thought.
related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil
This little blue marble of Earth is an as-yet undiscovered anti-entropic bug in an otherwise accurately functioning entropy-respectingly beautiful wasteland of a universe.
There's that, but also that if God exists, there's not anything we can do about it. About AI, we can. That gives us the responsibility to figure out the right direction.
The lands and seas have been around before us, and will continue to flourish after us and everything we hold dear, like God.
There's no alignment except the arrow of entropy.
Yeah, his stance is deeply inconsistent in at least few places. I think he's just losing it.
Christians believe that God is inherently good. “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you: that God is light and in him is no darkness at all.”
You have to differentiate between the old and the new testament in Bible. God is good and caring derived from the new testament where Jesus God's son ultimately died for all our sins.
In the old testament God was hard and judging heartless, killing his creation through flood, wanting sacrifices, killed 1st borns, leveled two whole cities Sodom and Ghomora, and was in general an hardhearted God that you should fear.
This is incorrect and very puerile (it’s theological slop) and even in a Christian frame this is known as Marcionism which is a heresy.
That's what has been told me when I did the church courses as teen :)
But it was not meant as two gods, it's meant as the hard god father changed his mind seeing the son die for the humans. I always also think of Trinity - but I'm a bad Christian anyway. So thanks for pointing to Marcionism.
Even aside from how aligned the plan is with us, what about how aligned we are with the plan?
I’m always intrigued by the duality and conflict of “I have free will and must choose to act the right way” and “God has a plan so everything will be alright”.
Either free will allows us to deviate from the plan, or the plan will always be carried out and free will doesn’t really matter in the end. Arguing for God’s plan as the thing that will save us is eerily similar to nihilism, because they’re really arguing none of our actions truly matter.
Yeah, it's an age-old question. My high-level answer is, God's plan will be done regardless of what I do, but my actions determine (at least from my point of view) whether I'm aligned with the plan or not. And I want to be aligned with the plan.
It's doubly funny because in AI accelerationist circles "Trust God's plan", or "Trust the plan" is also a thing: by definition God can't be surprised by anything that happens, thus the replacement of humans by AI is part of God's plan.
It’s not uncertainty about the motives; those and the end state are clear. It’s just the details of how we get there (“God’s plan”) that aren’t clear.
They’re related psychological phenomena (also highly related is going to be your perception of and relationship with your own father). This is why an understanding of the goodness of G-d is important to cultivate.
It should also be noted that it says in Genesis that G-d promises not to destroy the world ever again like He did with the flood. This is important psychologically because it prevents this type of apocalyptic millenarianist thinking.
There is a solution to this problem of "AI going to kill everyone".
- Create powerful AI but don't release it and keep it secret.
- Ask this AI to create some sort of virus that can be delivered to every human in the world without them knowing it and this virus does a fundamental change to the human brain such that humans never ever could even think of hurting other humans.
- Release this powerful AI to everyone.
Will that work?
I do believe this is possible for a virus to achieve, I just don't think it's possible without killing the human.
Well, killing someone is an effective way to prevent them from harming others.
You're assuming that the AI created solution (virus, cold fusion, etc) won't have unknown effects either due to incompetence or malice.
Are you describing the plot to Pluribus?
This is not an airport.
Sorry, you’re saying people shouldn’t be allowed to write about their career changes on (checks notes) their own blog?
oh no, AI too powerful too quick. let me quit to work on tools to make AI better at debugging code.
excellent logic, m'lord.
We had people departing from OpenAI, Anthropic and now Google. The pace the frontier open letter was signed by over 1,000 experts. At which point do we believe the message?
Never, because it's not true. Multiple people saying the same thing doesn't cause it to become more true.
For me? When I see it. And not a moment sooner.
There are trillions of dollars at stake here, do you think getting 1000 people on board is that difficult with this level of money? lol
When Astra and Fable stop making absolutely brain dead mistakes on simple tasks and not a moment sooner because I’m grounded in reality. Are you aware tech bros have been saying this same thing about every AI advancement since the 1950s? The reason being every AI researcher deep down wants to believe they’re God. This happens to also be why they’re some of the most insufferable people.
Trope circa 1950 not true, because of trope circa even earlier...
Surely AI can be dangerous before the point it becomes completely perfect. Very imperfect people manage to do a ton of damage already.
Whatever AI people have been saying for the last 70 years, AI capabilities have improved stupendously in the last 10 years and there is no sign of the rate of improvement slowing down. I would like to deny it, but I can't.
It’s completely meaningless their opinions on what the moral and sociological implications of AI are, if anything being an ML researcher sitting at Google is extremely anticorrelated with the type of sophistication and erudition needed to consider these things. At most what is valuable is their insight into the various scenarios possible in terms of capabilities or use cases.
Someone says that they believe there is a 0.1 probability of their worsening human life in a decade
Then they say they are going to keep doing it...
Forgive me for alerting you: they are liars
keep in mind he doesn't work in AI but in creating tools for hardware design.
FWIW I was in the GDM GenAI unit. Not exactly working on AI directly, or I would have quit earlier, but in the middle of it.
Makes some important and objectively correct points and then completely blows any chance of looking sane or being taken seriously in the last paragraph. What exactly is your God forcing you to do, and how? Is the coming collapse not also part of his plan from your framework or is it only relevant when it's comforting?
You are missing the point of religion.
It is not about objectivity or belief.
It is about being.
For a resignation letter that is unusually detailed w.r.t. "what comes next?" It may not be uncommon to write why you leave, but the rest of that text does not read like what you send to HR to quit but what you send to your (soon to be ex-)coworkers afterwards.
Indeed, that message was for my coworkers. HR gets a form.
Unrelated to the thread of discussion, but thank you for posting it on your personal site, and not on Twitter/X.
I'd also be interested in how much your opinion on the existential threat of AI changes during your ten day backpacking trip, assuming it'll be a pretty offline experience.
Whilst I am involved in technology in my work and some of my hobbies, I do enough things 'away from the desk' that it feels to me that a lot of the doomerism is from people who have too much of their own personality and self-worth tangled up with the internet; the serially-online. I don't know where you naturally exist on that scale, but you already said you're outside the bubble and aren't the typical AI-rationalist-tech-bro (and surely the natural beauty of New Zealand is impossible to ignore).
I personally think that the old analogue world is big enough that some kind of AI-pocalypose wouldn't be anywhere near a civilisationally existential threat.
At risk of coming across an arrogant prick in telling you to do something: Consider your opinion now, and record it somehow. Then revisit it when you get back from your trip and see how far you've strayed from that as a baseline.
Are fears of AI anti-intellectualism 2.0 ?
Why do people automatically associate intellectual capability with evil?
Does American anti-intellectualism explain the difference in perception of AI by Americans and Chinese?
No intellectual capability, but non-human, inherently amoral intellectual capability that has already been proven act in hard-to-predict, illegal, and unethical ways. I think that's a very rational thing to be afraid of.
I don't think many associate intellectual capability with evil. What many do, however, is associate serious risk with living alongside vastly more intelligent entities. Especially if those entities are not aligned with us.
There are two major categories of AI doomerism.
The first is that AI will actuallly the world Skynet-style. I actually consider this unlikely. People are unlikely to completely remove people from the decisions to launch nuclear missiles, for example. Look at the Soviet/Russian design for Dead Hand [1], as one example.
The second is that AI destroys so many jobs that society falls apart. This is the far more problematic and likely scenario (IMHO). To put this in context, I see two general outcomes for AI:
1. AI will be used for further widen the inequality gap as the already ultra-wealthy will get, well, more wealthy, for literally no reason. This is the outcome where you still need a job to survive but a whole bunch of them disappear and aren't replaced. The world of The Expanse was kind of like this (on Earth); or
2. AI makes everyone's lives easier so less work needs to be done. Crappy jobs get automated. People in general get more leisure time and quality of life.
I believe (1) is far more likely at this stage and it's not going to be pretty. But this is an issue of economics not technology. Put another way: our society isn't structured to handle this change. Put yet another way: no amount of guardrails or slowdowns on AI will solve the fundamental issue of wealth distribution. And put even yet another way: this is capitalism vs socialism.
We have a preview of what this looks like when you compare the US to China.
The US has crumbling infrastructure, has lost the ability to manufacture everything but weapons and about 1000 people are insanely wealthy while everyone else are struggling to survive while AI systems drive up the cost of everything necessary to live like food and housing through demand pricing. We now spend over $1 trillion a year on a military to essentially siphon money to those 1000 from everyone else.
And what's China done? It's invested in infrastructure and its people. China's vision for AI isn't to maximize shareholder value at all costs. It will be strictly regulated so society as a whole gets to benefit.
So while I can respect people such as this author leaving on principle, I think they're still focusing on the wrong problem.
[1]: https://www.military.com/history/russias-dead-hand-soviet-bu...
China is not in an ideal place right now, youth unemployment is way up, lots of dead end jobs, a 35 age employment limit that isn't just a meme. China has disparate visions for AI but maximizing owner (erm, sort of like shareholder) value is definitely one of them. Don’t get me wrong, China could get this right in the end, but it’s not a forgone conclusion right now.
China at least has a demonstrable capacity that serve anything else than bottom line of shareholders. It is not perfect, but it at least has capacity for improvement.
This! China is full of problems. But at the very least, it manages to serve its people over capital (as flawed as that service is). America can’t seem to do anything to hold capital to account, which is why people are terrified of AI taking their shitty jobs.
This should be at the top. I’ve been arguing this for months, that the issue of AI acceleration is an economic problem, not a tech one. That’s why the Chinese aren’t so afraid of it, compared to Americans who have zero faith their government will do anything to redistribute wealth from the future AI trillionaires.
"The most important thing I’m confident about is that the Jesus of the Bible is real and therefore God has a plan that’s good for us"
The post resonates with me and the author shows the way.
Wasn't God's plan to basically end humanity at some point while sentencing a good portion of us to eternal torture?
Is that all that different from what people fear AI might do?
Why the one makes people feel elation and the other dread?
How's he so sure he's not already in both of these groups? His post about the AGI boogeyman sounds like it to me. Why is he bothering working on both of his projects if AGI is right around the corner anyways?
He's already psychotically devoted to another form of cognitive surrender.
oddly these are the same issues I have with religion.
Well It seems like you may join us in our goal: Find a way to stop the progress or further development of it. Not that we are afraid, but we are fully aware of the progress escalation.
Stay away from the lucrative then? Why did you ever think it was a good idea to start at Google? I don't think Jesus would have approved.
I recall when Google was the exciting bleeding edge frontier
Then came so much money, and by being chaotic evil even more money..
Still makes me sad. I was so sweetly naive
roc used to work for Mozilla though, and witnessed Google canabalizing us for Chrome in order to feed its ad business. Between then and now there has not been a time when it wasn't all about the money.
Uhhh have you tried having a better browser? Chrome won because Chrome is faster, and I write this on Firefox.
I didn't, and still don't, think Google was unambiguously good or evil. They did dirty stuff with Chrome, they do addiction optimization, but they also provide great free services, fight endless wars against spammers, and provide reliable secure infrastructure to a lot of other people, and lots of other good things. I would never have joined the Chrome team, or worked on addictiveness, but I felt fine about working on optimization projects to make Google more efficient, which is basically what I did for my first few years there.
It's pretty hard to live in the world and be completely disconnected from anything unethical. Jesus doesn't seem to demand that (e.g. he didn't tell centurions to leave the Roman army).
I'm so bothered that we seem to have moved on from the ATTRIBUTION problem with LLMs. It just isn't on people's minds anymore, even tho it STILL is a big deal.
Sort of struggling to see an actual reason other than he doesn't like the pace of AI advancement? Also that his current job is very indirectly related to AI? Then somehow ties religion into it.
The only new thing (to me) was the observation that some of our societal timeframes (e.g picking a 4yr university degree) hinge on assuming a specific rate of societal change. If the rate of disruption exceedes that assumption, the timeframes become inadequate.
Whether you agree or not with his decision, you gotta respect his integrity.
I believe he is acting with integrity but I can't respect it as I think it's not well grounded. It seems based in fear of AI tied in with some beliefs about the supernatural. I really can't see the solid concrete reason to quit his job making tools for helping create better hardware chips that somehow seems rational.
What's the most ideal form of a company, in the eyes of it's board? Low cost due to cheap workforce or replacing of humans by automation, higher revenues due to faster deliveries and increased market footprint. Those directions remain as the strategic focus with or without AI.
However, let's imagine the most "ideal" situation where it's possible to replace 90% of the workforce with AI automation. Then the remaining 10% workforce will enjoy 10 times more income, assuming revenues didn't go down (or increased). Now comes an interesting situation. Where are the revenues coming from? Who can afford buy the products/service of this company when 90% of the workforce is out of job?
Case-1: Since there is a flood of products and services - all automated and bot-based - the prices would fall to rock bottom and to there is no longer a need for humans to work hard hard to afford the material affluence.
Case-2: This results in an extreme concentration of delivery capacity for products and services. A few companies are now capable of serving the needs of entire humanity. Everyone should work for these companies for pennies and still can be happy, because things cost pennies, thanks to automations.
Case-3: Humans revolt. They break their shackles - their needs. Rediscover what they really need for living. They go for minimal living. Abandon cities and expensive living, go country side and do farming just enough to feed their families. No college, no office, no car, no highways. They realize what their basic needs are as humans. Sort of Amish.
Case-4: There is still some work left that can't be automated. But there are very less number of jobs and they require hard work. The current generation can't handle it. They were schooled and grown up in cities, expecting a milder office work. They fall out of employment. But they were not built to deal with hard reality. They lost their survival instincts a few generations ago. The genes are gone. The job of rebuilding the survival instincts is delegetaed to future generations. Meanwhile the so-called developed nations undergo generational cycles of poverty and richness.
That's good, I guess, but hasn't Google already long given everyone including the author many reasons to both quit the company as an employee, and delete your Google account as a user?
Just as a user, deleting my Google account 10-11 years ago (don't even remember precisely when) was a great feeling that was received as "insane" by friends and acquaintances. While I think the author is a bit late in quitting (assuming he is genuine in his motives) given this is practically a trend right now, a lot of people should more often say "no" to things that are as ubiquitous as Google.