The head of ethics at OpenAI, Chloé Bakalar, just quit, along with the head of revenue, which is sort of a bad look?
I’ve been wondering about the scope and remit of these roles, which always seem intentionally narrow and focused on designing how the tech works, much more than the wider consequences: “Bakalar had been primarily tasked with coming up with ethical approaches to AI model development and studying how AI interacts with humans.” Those are dealt with via a lot of rhetoric about self-regulating, most of which is implausible. I would love to read more on these roles, if anyone has good examples to share. There was a great Data and Society study on Ethics Owners in tech but this was back in 2019.
In this article from Futurism, Bakalar is quoted as saying at a recent conference, “Ethics is actually everyone’s responsibility.” This is one of those comments that is undeniably true, and also basically meaningless. I think I would have rather heard her say it is the responsibility of the C Suite, who are in turn responsible for the entire direction of the company.
Here’s my former colleague Lindsey Andersen, with more insight:
“I generally think it's important not to read too much into what a singular departure means for an entire company absent other information. There are a few reasons for this--one is that OpenAI, along with the other big labs and most big tech companies in general, has a well established and growing array of teams whose entire job it to think about and figure out how to implement practices on responsible development and deployment, identify safeguards, etc. They stem from public policy/external facing to trust and safey to model development to research. Companies often hire SMEs in certain areas to bring in that expertise (e.g. applied ethics, human rights, application domains like healthcare, natsec, finance, etc), but they are hardly the only voice / perspective and they generally don't own broader processes themselves. So a departure of one such person may mean losing an important voice, but does not mean all attempts at ethics or mitigating risk are going out the window. Second is that it's an incredibly intense and competitive industry and people are poached constantly and burn out quickly, so there are a wide variety of reasons people leave.”
This week, I had a brilliant conversation with my dear friend Lisa Sachs, the Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment. In this conversation, we explore on decarbonization and why the current approach of having countries and companies focus on entity-level net zero is the opposite of systems thinking. She tries out a new analogy for how we might think about climate risks. Her metaphor is giving a dying medical patient actually useful advice and NOT “trying everything” as a last resort. We also talked about what sustainability teams can and should be doing about all this.
I love this paper from CCSI, which helps disentangle the difference between the physical impact of climate change and its effect on the financial system. Really useful in the classroom.
Derric Pennington listened to the conversation, and resurfaced this cartoon he had drawn in 2022. He’s always on point!
I am sure you know by now that I love Beth Kowitt’s writing. Her piece this week is about new content creation efforts by CEOs, who are now, “posting…podcasting, blogging and vlogging, conference headlining and LinkedIn influencing.”
This is not what actual transparency looks like, needless to say.
It makes perfect sense that actual disclosures are heading in the opposite direction. As Kowitt puts it, the CEOs are telling selective stories, so this is even a distraction from quarterly reporting and other required transparency. To top it all off, all these disclosures are aimed at AI rather than at reaching humans.
This paragraph sums it up:
“There’s a strange paradox to all this. CEOs are trying harder than ever to appear authentic and human. But increasingly, they’re doing it for AI rather than people. That may be the future of corporate communications. But it has raised, not lowered the stakes, for the standardized disclosures — the one space that is still relatively free of noise, narrative and CEO spin.”
This interview in WIRED with a cyber-ethnographer, Ruby Thelot, is fascinating. Topics range from online virality’s misleading elements, male bonding and gambling, the myth of heteropessimism, and of course, AI. Well worth reading. These paragraphs nails so much:
Most of our issues in the world are not bottlenecked by intelligence, but by the promise of cooperation, coordination, and essentially alignment of large groups of people toward a common shared goal. That’s the first part. The second thing is, when you start to quantify specific things, once again, the metric becomes the goal in and of itself.
The belief that intelligence is the most powerful thing comes from the assumption that there’s a group of people on this planet who are the most intelligent. Sir Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, also believed this. With AI, they are just projecting what they value about themselves onto the superintelligence. It’s philosophically unsound and actually quite dangerous.
I personally am here for more of what Thelot identifies as emotional intelligence, artistic intelligence, bodily intelligence — who’s with me?
August! Time to reflect, recover, and plan.
My beloved cat Munkus died suddenly of a heart attack, aged just 7, in 2023. Life chaos and disruption mean that I have had his ashes in a little bag ever since, but not been able to celebrate his life. Last weekend, on International Cat Day, I buried him in the garden, with a bunch of my dearest cat-loving friends. We had pink champagne and talked of all the kitties we have loved and lost. It was beautiful!
Now I am in the middle of a visit from my niece and nephew (and, thankfully, their parents), which is every kind of beautiful chaos. We have been to the lighthouse, the woods, swimming, a farm, to the unicorn garden next door, and eaten a lot of ice cream. I have set up a nature cam for my nephew so we can track the wildlife at night.
Here they are, incoming:
Terrifying stuff, I think we can all agree.
Next week I am going to a rural executive training center to teach on the first week of the Stern Executive MBA. Which will be very relaxing, in comparison!
I hope your summer is equally glorious.
Have a fantastic weekend!
Alison XX
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