The irony detectors at this newsletter are malfunctioning.
In a story about Hinton leaving Google:
"There are only so many tech ethicists, privacy, security, and social impact watchdogs. The best harm reduction approach is to have those resources focused on the most impactful bad outcomes. Google and Microsoft (less so, Twitter) have teams dedicated to safeguarding launches and watching how the landings are going. They’ve got some coverage! It's not perfect! But bad actors have far less safety coverage right now. Am I suggesting Microsoft, Google, and other big corporations are all good? No. But there are far worse actors out there with the opposite of ‘privacy by design’ and ‘do not hoard/do no harm’ principles."
Literally the next paragraph of the newsletter:
"FTC Takes a Veiled Warning Shot at Microsoft
The FTC Business blog is turning into one of the juiciest tech reads these days. Michael Atleson took a warning shot at Microsoft, which laid off its ethics and society team in the first quarter of 2023, roughly the same time as it released Sydney, its ChatGPT-fueled bot that has already been retired after trying to convince New York Times reporter Kevin Roose he wasn’t in love with his wife."
The editor's reply when I pointed this out:
I knew someone would pick up on the complexity.
The argument in the first paragraph is that there are actors out there deliberately trying to do bad things (e.g. Russian actors trying to spread misinformation to weaken democracy in the US). That is likely to be worse than what will happen when large, well-established tech companies who do have teams dedicated to reviewing launches, try to do non-bad things. It is debatable exactly what tech companies are trying to do, but I don't think anyone is arguing that they are deliberately trying to spread misinformation.
Google's layoff of Timnit and Margaret Mitchell (and later, Alex Hanna's resignation), did not shutter that team. There are other people still working in those roles, dedicated to thinking about the impact of AI. There are also teams of privacy reviewers, which is a little different, in all those companies.
This type of gotcha - 'see! Big tech companies are terrible' - is more or less what I was trying to ask about. The big tech companies get a fair amount of coverage for their every move. They have led to harms. But there are other actors out there that are also creating harms - potentially much worse harms. There's far less coverage of those. There are several beat reporters assigned to cover Alphabet, Microsoft, and other big tech companies. There's nobody assigned to cover the data brokers, the unknown bad actors, etc. (Nicole Perlroth does a great job on cybersecurity, but she has to cover an entire field, not just one company.)
I am glad you raised the point.