Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

@dbattistella I don't believe that publicly traded for-profit companies are capable of this. I think the very fact that such a company is incentivized to perpetually extract wealth from workers and customers and give it to 3rd party share holders who contribute nothing to wealth generation beyond a one-time contribution of capital is what makes these companies grow into vile monsters over time. They are exploitative by design, and this is the dominant form of company in our economy.

It's possible to break this mold. Cooperatives are democratically controlled, and often the workers and/or customers are the shareholders, with equal shares. This changes the incentive structure from an exploitative one to, you guessed it, a cooperative one. If we could only make this the dominant form of company in our economy, we would live in a very different world where "don't be evil" was the natural order of things.

The man who wrote "Don't be evil" said he chose it specifically so it would be hard to remove. Paul Buchheit, the engineer who later built Gmail, suggested the phrase at a Google corporate values meeting on July 19, 2001.

Then in early 2018, internal documents leaked showing that Google had signed a Pentagon contract to build AI to analyze drone footage. By April, over 3,000 Google employees had signed a letter to Sundar Pichai demanding the contract be cancelled.

The letter specifically cited "Don't be evil" as the standard the company was failing to meet. Dozens of engineers resigned in protest.

Sometime between late April and early May, the slogan disappeared from the code of conduct's preface.

#Google #AI #Tech