In recent years this has been a justification for why it’s entirely ethical to invest in AI and to expect AI companies to be unassailable and to argue you should not cultivate public support for an AI pause, because these things are big and you are small and you could not possibly hope to challenge market incentives.
This is a longer conversation, but this is not, on it’s own sufficient as a moral justification for investing in AI companies. That the marginal effect of your actions is small doesn’t mean give you carte blanche. You have to weigh the marginal costs against the marginal benefits.
If an action has a small, bad, effect on the margin, then perhaps it doesn’t matter much, but it’s still bad.
Then they use the self-trust argument to imply that them getting power is good for the world. Similar to why it was okay to work on getting SBF a legally enforced monopoly or for the Amodeis to start an omnicide org.
That’s a different argument (which might be bad on it’s own terms).
According to me (and perhaps I need to write down the ethical theory, in full, here), “this action is net-harmful, but it’s only a small effect on the margin, so its ok”, doesn’t hold water. It only means you’re doing a small bad thing. (Though in practice people confuse “small in absolute terms” with “small compared to the scope of the situation”.)
If one’s argument is instead “this produces a small amount of harm on the margin, but it empowers me, and the moral benefit empowerment effect outweighs the small marginal harm” then to the extent that you’re making a moral error, it’s not the error of marginalism.
It could be the case that the benefit of your empowerment outweighs the harms that are incurred. You have to either argue that 1) that’s not actually true, and you’re deluding yourself about how good it is for you, personally, to have more power or 2) there is and ought to be a deontological principle against the specific harmful-action that they’re taking.
This is a longer conversation, but this is not, on it’s own sufficient as a moral justification for investing in AI companies. That the marginal effect of your actions is small doesn’t mean give you carte blanche. You have to weigh the marginal costs against the marginal benefits.
If an action has a small, bad, effect on the margin, then perhaps it doesn’t matter much, but it’s still bad.
Then they use the self-trust argument to imply that them getting power is good for the world. Similar to why it was okay to work on getting SBF a legally enforced monopoly or for the Amodeis to start an omnicide org.
That’s a different argument (which might be bad on it’s own terms).
According to me (and perhaps I need to write down the ethical theory, in full, here), “this action is net-harmful, but it’s only a small effect on the margin, so its ok”, doesn’t hold water. It only means you’re doing a small bad thing. (Though in practice people confuse “small in absolute terms” with “small compared to the scope of the situation”.)
If one’s argument is instead “this produces a small amount of harm on the margin, but it empowers me, and the moral benefit empowerment effect outweighs the small marginal harm” then to the extent that you’re making a moral error, it’s not the error of marginalism.
It could be the case that the benefit of your empowerment outweighs the harms that are incurred. You have to either argue that 1) that’s not actually true, and you’re deluding yourself about how good it is for you, personally, to have more power or 2) there is and ought to be a deontological principle against the specific harmful-action that they’re taking.