Look up the evidence on the effectiveness of boycotts. My understanding is that they don’t work. In particular, it seems unlikely to me that the alignment community (which is small) will have a meaningful impact on OpenAI’s actual or perceived success.
I have a general principle of not contributing to harm. For instance, I do not eat meat, and tend to disregard arguments about impact. For animal rights issues, it is important to have people who refuse to participate, regardless of whether my decades of abstinence have impacted the supply chain.
For this issue however, I am less worried about the principle of it, because after all, a moral stance means nothing in a world where we lose. Reducing the probability of X-risk is a cold calculation, while vegetarianism is is an Aristotelian one.
With that in mind, a boycott is one reason not to pay. The other is a simple calculation: is my extra $60 a quarter going to make any tiny miniscule increase in X-risk? Could my $60 push the quarterly numbers just high enough so that they round up to the next 10s place, and then some member of the team works slightly harder on capabilities because they are motivated by that number? If that risk is 0.00000001%, well when you multiply by all the people who might ever exist… ya know?
Are you doing anything alignment related? The benefits to you (either in productivity or in keeping you informed) might massively outweigh the marginal benefits to OpenAI’s bottom line.
Look up the evidence on the effectiveness of boycotts. My understanding is that they don’t work. In particular, it seems unlikely to me that the alignment community (which is small) will have a meaningful impact on OpenAI’s actual or perceived success.
I have a general principle of not contributing to harm. For instance, I do not eat meat, and tend to disregard arguments about impact. For animal rights issues, it is important to have people who refuse to participate, regardless of whether my decades of abstinence have impacted the supply chain.
For this issue however, I am less worried about the principle of it, because after all, a moral stance means nothing in a world where we lose. Reducing the probability of X-risk is a cold calculation, while vegetarianism is is an Aristotelian one.
With that in mind, a boycott is one reason not to pay. The other is a simple calculation: is my extra $60 a quarter going to make any tiny miniscule increase in X-risk? Could my $60 push the quarterly numbers just high enough so that they round up to the next 10s place, and then some member of the team works slightly harder on capabilities because they are motivated by that number? If that risk is 0.00000001%, well when you multiply by all the people who might ever exist… ya know?
Are you doing anything alignment related? The benefits to you (either in productivity or in keeping you informed) might massively outweigh the marginal benefits to OpenAI’s bottom line.
Yes but you throw away your benefits. Using tools like this effectively might increase the chance you keep your job 50 percent or more.