thedailybell28d ago
Originally published via Armageddon Prose: Silicon Valley has long existed in an intractable paradox, in that it grew out of a hippie-influenced counterculture in Northern California that ostensibly committed to idealistic notions of peace on Earth or whatever while simultaneously developing the tools of state for global mass surveillance, social credit scores, computer-generated new pathogens, killer drone robots, etc. — in other words, the critical infrastructure for the Beast system. Related: LAPD Gets $278,000 Robot Dog, Dallas School District Adopts Pre-Crime Surveillance Technology The most infamous case in point illustrating this intrinsic, schizophrenic contradiction was Google’s longstanding motto “Don’t Be Evil,” aggressively marketed as the core tenet of the company — its moral North Star — for a decade and a half. Fifteen years after its adoption, however, the company quietly removed “Don’t Be Evil” from its Code of Conduct overnight in 2018, like a scene ripped from the pages of Animal Farm. The catchphrase hasn’t been heard of since — down the Memory Hole, as it were. In a more recent example of square peg in round hole, Mrinank Sharma, former “Head of the Safeguards Research Team,” announced his resignation from juggernaut Anthropic, citing “constant pressures to set aside” safety concerns in favor of maintaining a competitive edge in the rapidly developing industry: “The world is in peril. The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment. We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world...