I agree it was more of a marketing phrase. The code of conduct is more likely something like "Only do evil if it makes good money and don't get caught."
Early on, a lot of Google engineers (peering in from the outside, through news and correspondence) seemed to take it to heart. And to be heartened by it. Individually, and in groups.
That it's now called "marketing", speaks to fundamental changes at Google.
Yes, and if you read the article you'll notice the significant difference.
Anyone that was with google from the beginning knows the significance, and to try to play off "hey they used it in a sentence" as some sort of passivity, doesn't really grasp the depth of the change. (IMHO)
> Yes, and if you read the article you'll notice the significant difference.
Yes, but neither the headline, nor the text of the article, nor any of the commentary here so far mentions the significant difference in the excerpts shown, which is only tangentially connected to removing gratuitous repetition of the phrase “don't be evil.”
The signficant change is removing the value statement connected to the old motto in the first paragraph of the excerpt from the older Code of Conduct: “Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect.”
(Now, it's possible that those value statements were redundant with other parts of the CoC or that the revision moved them to someplace other than the place preceding the rest of the excerpt and that they retain equal prominence in the new CoC, in which case the selection of the excerpt boundaries would be another misleading aspect of the article. And you can even make the case that they were largely redundant with the last sentence of the second paragraph of then old—first of the new—excerpt, so that, while it's more significant than dropping a few repetitions of “don’t be evil”, it's not all that significant.)
I'm guessing they're not happy about the whole drone assassination debate going on internally. It's so disadvantageous that their staff can call the leadership outright hypocrites based on their own professed values. This makes everything so much easier for everyone.
I think it's pretty obvious: when there's an obvious military threat that would have implications for civilians (e.g. invasion, blockade, etc), the software is tailored to that need, and the military is not currently engaged in multiple offensive bloody wars based on lies with a long history of doing so.
What about non-obvious threats? Generally speaking, nations that fall behind technologically fare poorly against more advanced nations.
What about software that is adapted by the military for new use cases instead of tailored use cases? Should Microsoft be responsible for damage caused operations planned in Word and PowerPoint? What about iPhone with sniper windage apps? How many layers removed before a company is considered ethical?
You're right that you can get into morally gray areas, but if the military is using applications that are available to ordinary consumers, businesses, and governments worldwide, it's not really giving them an edge now is it?
We should focus our criticism on people that are doing bad things and know it. We don't need to dive into the most murky territory in order to achieve worthy effects when there's so much low hanging fruit.
With regards to novel threats, it'd be nice if the military could justify these investments without resorting to propaganda, and outright lies. There should be a clear explanation that most people would understand the necessity of and how it works in their interest.
While I support a lower military budget and less interventionist foreign policy, the reality is that it's impossible to publicly justify some investments without revealing classified information that would put intelligence sources at risk. If we're going to have a military at all then people have to be willing to delegate those investment decisions to their elected officials and operate on a need-to-know basis.
It's not at all obvious. Politicians, philosophers, ethicists, religious leaders, and military officers have ceaselessly debated this issue since the dawn of civilization and there is still no clear consensus.
How nice for you that you have the privilege and luxury to take that moral high ground. You would think differently if you had a friend or family member in the military.
If we're going to have a military at all then our warfighters deserve the best killing technology we can provide to help keep the enemy from killing them. While the military does do some research in house, since we live in a capitalist society much of the work will always have to be done by private contractors.
Don't be evil is a pompous statement that suggests more power than they have. Any civilized society with functioning rule of law makes this kind of corporate statement meaningless and delusional.
Unless you are a corporatocracy and the inability of civil society to rein in the surveillance state betrays a fundamental breakdown.
The irony is if this was a Chinese company cooperating with the military on their drone program that is in active service and is killing people in far off lands as we speak there would be a global hue and cry and a frenzy of sanctions and global demonization, often by the same people defending Google now. This kind of brazen hypocrisy is what's wrong with the world today.
So the article ends by confirming that the "don't be evil" phrase is still in the code of conduct, admittedly just at the end after a rewording. Its title is entirely misleading, despite reflecting the original article.
Can this submission's title be changed to something like: "Google Deemphasizes "Don't Be Evil" Motto in Its Code of Conduct"? That'd at least frame this change accurately for discussion.
I agree. That's why I'm not calling for the submission to be killed, just changing the title to be more accurate. My suggested verb of "deemphasizes" is consistent with what you're saying.
The CoC is not a news article, and the dynamics are different there. And burying the lede is when you mislead by putting a key point that shifts, rather than summarizes, the understanding conveyed by rest of the article late in a news article.
Humans have a right to know whether they are talking to a human or a machine. Even the benign example of restaurant hours -- maybe the guy was willing to tell the restaurants holiday hours to someone who is wondering, but DOES NOT want it posted to Google bringing in more customers and forcing him to stay longer on the holidays. I don't know, it's a contrived example but it's not the right approach to say "why should they have a problem?". The right approach is just to tell them and let them decide whether they have a problem with it or not. Anyway this is kind of a moot argument because Google has said that they will tell people the call is coming from Duplex, so Google itself has conceded that people have the right to know they are talking to a machine. It is somewhat unfortunate that people care about this from a software perspective though, because it probably is beneficial from a "learning" standpoint to have people just speaking as they would to a real human.
Yeah, that would certainly be exciting but we're a long way off from that. The Google Duplex stuff we saw only covered a very narrow domain (taking reservations, etc). And that's not even released yet, and there's no telling when it really will be ready. Nobody even really knows how you would structure an artificial general intelligence at this point... last I heard.
It's the start of a post scarcity society. I'll take the not having to work and having a cure for every disease route of history, even if it's bumpy.
There are real threats to the transition though. My honest fear is that the people who discover it make themselves immortal gods and subjugate or kill everyone else.
IHMO post-scarcity could have started long ago. The problem will be that the people out of a jobs can't think of something new to do, at least not as fast as the machines (or the people with the machines).
Subjugation already happens. When it's easier to keep the population poor and just raid the natural ressources of a country, that's the way it often goes.
You can't just declare that humans have a right to know if they are talking to another human or a machine. That's just restating what you already said. You have to justify why humans should have that right.
We don't really have any "rights" at all, a right is just a concept that refers to the expectations humans have of each other and what is and is not okay to do. For example you may have a right to life to but you could still be murdered. Conceptually your rights have always been more than just what the law currently says. The US Declaration of Independence famously declared that all men are simply born with certain inalienable rights. That's just one way of looking at things, but it's an idea that kind of caught on.
Nobody declares our rights, we feel them in our guts. And the public feels this one in their gut without me having to explain it, which is why I call it a right: If something is generally accepted by the public, it is a de facto right. For example you could repeal the 1st amendment tomorrow but that wouldn't change anyones mind about whether freedom of speech is their right. But if you want me to stop being pedantic and actually defend my position, I would argue that people should have this right so that spammy AIs don't just ruin human interaction all together. Imagine a world where you never know if you're talking to a real person or some kind of AI trying to sell you something subtly... Not knowing explicitly whether you're talking to an AI or a real human could have a chilling effect on human-to-human relations.
It shifts the balance. Even if my hotline gets bombarded by mechanical turks the costs are the same on both sides.
Now google duplex can go and phone up every businessowner asking for the current store hours (or whatever), thus dumping the work of updating google's information on the store owners at essentially no own cost.
And the store owner does not even have a chance to find out whether it is a customer that will in some probability show up, or if he's just being used.
I always thought the slogan was odd. In my mind evil is the absolute negative end of the spectrum of good vs evil. Why not something more positive sounding like "Do good"?
Source title is misleading clickbait [0]: as the text of the article makes clear, Google rewrote one section of its Code of Conduct in a way which, among other things, removed the phrase “don’t be evil”, but retained that phrase in another (more prominent [1]) place.
[0] which is necessary to pretend there is anything even worth having as a story here at all. “Google updates Code of Conduct; reduces number of repetitions of phrase ‘don’t be evil’” is an obvious nothingburger.
[1] the final line; in any long document, the very beginning and very end are the most prominent.
Removing the company's unofficial motto, and mixing it in with a random sentence at the very end is 'more prominent'.
Hmm.. I'll believe Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, before I believe that.
Also using "nothingburger", a prominent phrase used by Trump supporters to lampoon the Muller investigation is an interesting choice of words.. but fits very well.
> Removing the company's unofficial motto, and mixing it in with a random sentence at the very end is 'more prominent'.
It wasn't mixed in (the article itself notes it was retained unchanged) and the final sentence isn't a random placement but, along with the first, one of the two most significant places in a long document of this type—the beginning is where you put meant you want to shape the reading of the rest, the end is where you put the most important high-level key takeaway.
> Also using "nothingburger", a prominent phrase used by Trump supporters to lampoon the Muller investigation
I've actually never noticed in that context, apparently it's a big thing on Twitter in that context, but I'm quite selective of my consumption in that channel.
I have no idea what your agenda is, but trying to say that removing all references of the companies former official motto and mixing it in at the very end of a sentence of their core of conduct somehow makes it "more prominent" is literal nonsense.
Does anyone think that ‘don’t be evil’ is enough? Evil is basically the worst someone can be. You can be bad, wrong, repugnant, reprehensible, vicious, and malignant and still not be evil. Honestly, why is there so much credit given to a company for saying ‘don’t be as bad as you can possibly imagine’ which is a pretty reasonable translation of ‘don’t be evil’.
Agreed. I like the idea of cultivating "the resolve to resolve" conflicts by transforming them into positive sum games wherein the tribe commits to finding a way to meet everyone's needs and unifying behind of mission of contribution rather than allowing conflicts to devolve into zero sum games which suck the soul out of a once great company and pave the way for its corruption.
Isn't that why Alphabet adopted "do the right thing" instead? Though that simply led to a lot of headlines about Google dropping "don't be evil" (with articles explaining that they actually didn't, if you read that far).
Imagine if it had said "Don't be immoral." Think of the discussion there, whose morals? Googles? The employees? The country where the employee lives?
In my mind, it is largely aspirational because it takes a back seat to 'make Google money.' Or perhaps making money is by definition not evil, so if you're making money by what you are doing it is transitively not evil.
When I worked at Google, management explained it to be "Would you be embarrassed to be a Googler if what you were doing showed up on an article on the New York Times? If so then chances are its evil, don't do that." But then came Project Maven, a sort of real world test, and well that is still going on now isn't it?
The old joke that “it’s a command to the users, not the employees!” still applies, and I guess fits their increasing meddling with people’s behavior.
Alternatively, “Do the right thing” could easily mean “correct” thing, as in the sentence, “If Dr. No did things the right way, he would have immediately killed Bond when he had the chance”
Do you, really? When do you ever search for just "string"? You're going to add some context, like "split string C++".
Now maybe you'll say Google should know you're programming in C++ all the time, so having learned that, Google should be able to infer that when you type in "split string", the results should all be for C++.
Except then somehow Javascript comes into your requirements and now you need to retrain your Google to give weight to that.
I'd much rather be able to use the Google, not my Google, so that I get more predictable results. It's already annoying that I can't tell people to google something and be sure whatever I'm talking about is in the top ten results of their Google.
> That sentence was stupid right from the beginning.
Nothing about that sentence was stupid and it's frightening that you don't seem to understand the ideal of being "unbiased" (as in "unbiased reporting"). We're going to be heading in the direction where's there's "liberal" and "conservative" search engines, causing even more polarization of our collective world views.
Or more mundanely, wants to "personalise" search results and de-emphasise more obscure (but very valuable to the right people) information.
It used to be that Google would show you lots of very diverse, interesting, and sometimes quite surprising results which would mean learning new things became almost "accidentally" easy. Now it seems more interested in finding things people already (mostly) knew about.
I always thought the "Don't Be Evil" phrase was more like a don't be comically evil. Don't wear black suit, boring logo and more imaginary related to an evil person. Instead be fun, use kindergarten colors, use the fun noogler hat and offices that look like playground. Evil seems like a cartoon-ish word for me and feels like this was more of a reminder to the whole company that they are doing some sketchy things with users' data so let's be sure to not be 'evil' about it. If you think about it from this perspective a lot of the Google-way of being makes sense.
"everything we do in connection with our work at Google will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical business conduct."
Clearly they're trying to guide internal ethics. "Don't be evil." suggests that it is forbidden to be evil in all circumstances. How to read the new guideline: "Do the right thing, even if sometimes it requires evil." Some big event inside must have triggered this change in stance. Like a letter requesting they capitulate on some requirement to protect or give up user data, reveal whereabouts, key escrow, or something like that.
I guess what is confusing is how subjective "the right thing" can be. If an employee were to cite this new slogan and try to address a problem with it, is the right thing to capitulate or to defend. Who is to say really.
It almost seems like it is reworded to be more vague so higher ups can just wave their hands and say these aren't the droids you're looking for. But, are they waving their hands at employees protesting the mistreatment of customer data and privacy? Or, are they waving their hands at the powers that be who want unfettered access? I guess time will tell.
They changed to "Do the right thing" from "Don't be evil" back in 2015 long before the 3000+ employee protest against the Pentagon drone project. I doubt this is the event that triggered the change in stance.
"I guess what is confusing is how subjective "the right thing" can be."
Oussama Ammar of TheFamily, a successful accelerator in Paris, agrees with you and claims that an effective motto must be one that can be disagreed with. It must in some way take a stand.
"Don't be evil" wouldn't work at Goldman Sachs, for example, where people might argue that little evils must be done in the service of the greater good, or that "the market" is the one who decides what is right or wrong. "Don't be evil" seems to imply that the ends should not be used to justify the means.
"Do the right thing" could probably be more acceptable at Goldman, because as you note it's more subjective and allows for small evils that work in the service of greater goods -- it seems to allow for the ends to justify the means.
Who at Goldman Sachs professes to be evil? They are doing "price discovery" and "optimizing finance". To a libertarian capitalist, "Evil" simply does not exist in commercial transactions.
> "Don't be evil." suggests that it is forbidden to be evil in all circumstances. How to read the new guideline: "Do the right thing, even if sometimes it requires evil."
The new code of conduct still contains a direct admonishment of “don't be evil”, as the article states.
So, no, I think your reading is unsupported by the source.
Open instant messaging interconnectivity with third parties was canned.
Play Services won't install on unapproved devices anymore.
Sideloading apps doesn't work the same way on Daydream as it does for the main Android system (can't launch non-Google Play store apps inside Daydream).
BS software patents on applying arithmetic coding to video compression.
Many webpages that only work on their webbrowser.
Long-con bait and switch as they morph into Microsoft of the 90s?
No, it means you either die commiting a heroic act, or you're not killed as a hero and end up becoming a villain. Basically saying you'll either die doing a heroic act, or if you die a more natural way of old age or something you may be seeing yourself as a villain.
The quote has mostly to do with risk taking and comfortability that age makes us inclined to adjust. Basically, our habits and creature comforts have a way of making us too complacent and out of touch. Even the best of us can turn into miserable old pricks if we don't take risks and go outside our comfort zones. Even heroes. Heroes die young. So do villains. But an old hero is mighty suspect. Old age isn't due to skill always - sometimes it is due to lack of risk taking - which is a heroes job..
Microsoft let the hardware go open-source and generic. And that was an incredible win.
Conversely, Apple and Google ruined handheld computers (which we now call smartphones) forever. So far, anyway. They're fundamentally unsecurable. It's at least nontrivial, and perhaps impossible, to prevent surveillance and tracking.
I disagree. If Windows were a lot better, the open source revolution might not have gained quite so much momentum. If IE was a lot better—or rather if they didn't let it stagnate—the very concept of installing alternative browsers might never have entered the mainstream zeitgeist.
Or having enough money to make unprofitable problems profitable for them (e.g. Step 1 invest in Monsanto; Step 2 push Monsanto in developing companies through 'philanthropy').
(And there's lots of articles attacking from a more purely anti-GMO stance, which I don't find particularly helpful, as it's largely the politics/economics behind Monsanto that are the most disturbing.)
Having read these articles, it seems to me he's trying to follow the logic he knows. Hunger? Let's make a partnership with crop-related companies. Diseases? Let's talk to the big pharma. He's following the ways he understands. Not everybody has as much courage as the Indian government in that respect.
Right - and that's the scary thing. We see what he did in the realm of computing --- now imagine the parallels in the agricultural infrastructure of countries across the world.
He's a hero to some people. I still hate his guts.
And I give him almost no credit for giving some money now. He's giving away stolen money while living in the lap of luxury. Gates acted completely amorally for most of his life and now is simply buying his way into respect. I'm not a Christian, but I'm reminded of Luke 20:45-21:4.
But his Foundation is well-run and effective. Maybe he was a net good for humanity. Probably not, though.
I see your point, but the guy seems to have a different set of values. When he was asking his marketing department to prepare a series of smear campaigns against Linux and Open Source, for example, I don't think he realized he was doing a wrong thing. In his mind, he was probably saving his company from competition, as he always did.
Also, I think a great momentum of Linux in the late 90s was precisely because people hated Microsoft wholeheartedly, and that was one of the main reasons it didn't die as another toy project. So I'd say yes, a net good for humanity - not because but in spite of what he's done so far.
There's plenty of criticism on his Foundation as well. Even if everything it does is good (on which, see above), there would certainly be questions about whether the money is being spent in the best way possible. Setting all of this aside, I think Gates would have to eradicate several horrible diseases just to break even karmically.
It's happened before. Andrew Carnegie gave away most of his fortune which was in its time as substantial as Gates' wealth.
Also, Bill Gates' mom was into public service in big way, so there's some family history. [0] This sort of thing used to be fairly common in the American upper class.
Don't let Nietzsche ride on Hollywoods' coattails. Harvey Dent penned that quip, I saw it on the silver screen. Now please excuse me while I research the themes of crappy sci fi novels to top-post on the next political thread.
It is a drop in entropy encoder replacing Huffman. Just because the patent is covering dropping it into AV1 doesn't make it ok. It just restricts the scope of the absurdity.
They were significantly lower during the no-poach agreement. After it ended, Google immediately raised all its engineers' salaries by ~15%, and salaries quickly increased from there.
Look at self driving car engineer salaries today. Those wouldn't have happened under a no-poach agreement. Compare to the mobile OS race, with tens of billions of dollars (at least) on the line. The no-poach agreement between Apple and Google prevented them from beating each other with engineers, so the money poured into lawyers' pockets through litigation instead.
Ever tried adwords?
I think my first bug report of it not really working with other browsers was about 6 years ago, that time it was with Opera. My reports usually get verified but commented with "use Chrome instead".
It seems to me, as a news.google.com junkie who recently switched to Firefox (on mobile), that the site has some won't-always-refresh-when-loading issues. It might be Firefox's fault though.
Outside of Google-owned sites, many sites simply don't work properly in Firefox and require Chrome. Could it be the additional privacy features? It might be the web developers' fault, though.
Exactly. I keep reminding people that other than Android, which was just a follow on to Apple's pioneering, they havn't really done anything truly innovative on their own COMPLETELY in house other than maybe Google Glass, which you could argue was a response to apple watch and the whole wearable craze (which sorta died out). They really should have stuck with Glass and not chickened out to pressure, hopefully it will be resurrected. All the AI stuff is a result of acquisitions of smaller companies like DeepMind. Waymo is a result of picking of the guys already doing DARPA self driving competitions, arguably one of their best moves but still not really an in house breakthrough. Nowadays, Google constantly plays the "me too" game in every realm. Alexa vs OK Google is a great example. All their X projects sound "feel goody" but ultimately lack luster. They abandon Boston Dynamics which I still think has great potential.
This is a completely absurd claim - if you’ve ever taken a class on modern day systems, you’d know Google is the source of many significant papers that inspired several huge open source projects that power almost every company that needs to scale.
“All the AI stuff is a result of acquisitions” - woefully misguided. Google is hiring academia leaders left, right, and center and growing a collaborative environment that’s innovating. They’re discovering a lot of stuff in-house on this team. They’re building an incredible open-source library with almost 100K Github stars for machine learning.
@self driving, they hired people building projects and are making it into a production self driving car. The latter is a far less constrained problem.
@assistants, The Google Assistant can do way more than Alexa. Not seeing how this is a me too game
> Open instant messaging interconnectivity with third parties was canned
True, but I'd say that has been more Facebook's, Apple's and Microsoft's (Skype's) fault. Google offered it for a couple of years, but no big player started to use federation. So I wouldn't blame Google for pulling the plug on something not being used.
However, your list of evil-doing can be extendend, e.g.
Would you rather Google created a non-standards-compliant system for preloading articles like Apple and Facebook did? I have yet to hear a cogent argument for why AMP, built on existing web standards and supported by Microsoft, Baidu, Twitter, Pinterest, and Cloudflare (among others), is bad.
Read the article, it gives the history on this. (Basically the motto was replaced by "Do the right thing" when Alphabet was formed in 2016 and this article points out that the language was recently removed from the code of code, although in reality it was just deemphasized.)
Also, from yesterday: Google’s Selfish Ledger is an unsettling vision of Silicon Valley social engineering
>The video was made in late 2016 by Nick Foster, the head of design at X (formerly Google X) and a co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. The video, shared internally within Google, imagines a future of total data collection, where Google helps nudge users into alignment with their goals, custom-prints personalized devices to collect more data, and even guides the behavior of entire populations to solve global problems like poverty and disease.
>When reached for comment on the video, an X spokesperson provided the following statement to The Verge:
>“We understand if this is disturbing -- it is designed to be.
> This is a thought-experiment by the Design team from years ago that uses a technique known as ‘speculative design’ to explore uncomfortable ideas and concepts in order to provoke discussion and debate. It’s not related to any current or future products."
> Google prompts users to select a life goal and then guides them toward it in every interaction they have with their phone.
I liked the old google of the 2000s, focused on search and being scrappy and quirky. Now it’s super corporate without any real identity as far as I can see.
My guess is that they realized it fits into the "corporations are evil" narrative that has become popular with many angry people on twitter recently, and then decided they didn't want to feed into it.
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[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadThat it's now called "marketing", speaks to fundamental changes at Google.
The only question I have is.. why? One generally hopes that everyone is out to do no evil, including those that do so unintentionally.
So why remove something that's been so closely associated with the company for so long? Did some executive find it "tacky"?
At any rate, this is truly a loss for the internet.
Its a symbol. It has as much meaning as you ascribe to it.
Its a publicly traded company, not a crusader for internet goodness
investors often enjoy investing in companies that they can relate to.
one hopes that most people ascribe to do no evil.
a+b+c is not a bad combination
in the end, i agree it's a symbol.. but also scrapping that symbol reflects on the company that no longer wants to be associated with said symbol.
They didn't, per the body of the article (contrary to the headline.)
Anyone that was with google from the beginning knows the significance, and to try to play off "hey they used it in a sentence" as some sort of passivity, doesn't really grasp the depth of the change. (IMHO)
Yes, but neither the headline, nor the text of the article, nor any of the commentary here so far mentions the significant difference in the excerpts shown, which is only tangentially connected to removing gratuitous repetition of the phrase “don't be evil.”
The signficant change is removing the value statement connected to the old motto in the first paragraph of the excerpt from the older Code of Conduct: “Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect.”
(Now, it's possible that those value statements were redundant with other parts of the CoC or that the revision moved them to someplace other than the place preceding the rest of the excerpt and that they retain equal prominence in the new CoC, in which case the selection of the excerpt boundaries would be another misleading aspect of the article. And you can even make the case that they were largely redundant with the last sentence of the second paragraph of then old—first of the new—excerpt, so that, while it's more significant than dropping a few repetitions of “don’t be evil”, it's not all that significant.)
When they filed their IPO, it was one of the very first things they included in the IPO
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504...
.. now it's been reduced to a footnote at the end of a sentence.
If you don't get the significance of this, you're either, very young, very naïve, or astroturfing.
Information on the drone program: https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/
Google's complicity in Project Maven: https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1254719/project...
Google's Internal Debate: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/inside-go...
Very remnicient of IBM's involvement in the Holocaust.
What about software that is adapted by the military for new use cases instead of tailored use cases? Should Microsoft be responsible for damage caused operations planned in Word and PowerPoint? What about iPhone with sniper windage apps? How many layers removed before a company is considered ethical?
We should focus our criticism on people that are doing bad things and know it. We don't need to dive into the most murky territory in order to achieve worthy effects when there's so much low hanging fruit.
With regards to novel threats, it'd be nice if the military could justify these investments without resorting to propaganda, and outright lies. There should be a clear explanation that most people would understand the necessity of and how it works in their interest.
If the military wants to use technology to enhance their killing techniques, then they should do it themselves with in-house development.
If they can't that's just too bad.
If we're going to have a military at all then our warfighters deserve the best killing technology we can provide to help keep the enemy from killing them. While the military does do some research in house, since we live in a capitalist society much of the work will always have to be done by private contractors.
Like biological and chemical weapons? Or more like Napalm buring through children? Or metal-free landmines that are even harder to remove after war?
Unless you are a corporatocracy and the inability of civil society to rein in the surveillance state betrays a fundamental breakdown.
The irony is if this was a Chinese company cooperating with the military on their drone program that is in active service and is killing people in far off lands as we speak there would be a global hue and cry and a frenzy of sanctions and global demonization, often by the same people defending Google now. This kind of brazen hypocrisy is what's wrong with the world today.
Can this submission's title be changed to something like: "Google Deemphasizes "Don't Be Evil" Motto in Its Code of Conduct"? That'd at least frame this change accurately for discussion.
[Edit: I see the change was made. Thanks!]
“Randomly”? The very end is where you put whatever you want to be the most important key summation and takeaway message of a document like this.
The CoC is not a news article, and the dynamics are different there. And burying the lede is when you mislead by putting a key point that shifts, rather than summarizes, the understanding conveyed by rest of the article late in a news article.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial-position_effect
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak–end_rule
“You’re right Johnson. Take that don’t be evil line out”
'Dear turing test candidate, how would a program to do this and that look like.'
Or 'business strategy'.
There are real threats to the transition though. My honest fear is that the people who discover it make themselves immortal gods and subjugate or kill everyone else.
Subjugation already happens. When it's easier to keep the population poor and just raid the natural ressources of a country, that's the way it often goes.
Nobody declares our rights, we feel them in our guts. And the public feels this one in their gut without me having to explain it, which is why I call it a right: If something is generally accepted by the public, it is a de facto right. For example you could repeal the 1st amendment tomorrow but that wouldn't change anyones mind about whether freedom of speech is their right. But if you want me to stop being pedantic and actually defend my position, I would argue that people should have this right so that spammy AIs don't just ruin human interaction all together. Imagine a world where you never know if you're talking to a real person or some kind of AI trying to sell you something subtly... Not knowing explicitly whether you're talking to an AI or a real human could have a chilling effect on human-to-human relations.
Now google duplex can go and phone up every businessowner asking for the current store hours (or whatever), thus dumping the work of updating google's information on the store owners at essentially no own cost.
And the store owner does not even have a chance to find out whether it is a customer that will in some probability show up, or if he's just being used.
[0] which is necessary to pretend there is anything even worth having as a story here at all. “Google updates Code of Conduct; reduces number of repetitions of phrase ‘don’t be evil’” is an obvious nothingburger.
[1] the final line; in any long document, the very beginning and very end are the most prominent.
Hmm.. I'll believe Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, before I believe that.
Also using "nothingburger", a prominent phrase used by Trump supporters to lampoon the Muller investigation is an interesting choice of words.. but fits very well.
You have a strange agenda, friend.
It wasn't mixed in (the article itself notes it was retained unchanged) and the final sentence isn't a random placement but, along with the first, one of the two most significant places in a long document of this type—the beginning is where you put meant you want to shape the reading of the rest, the end is where you put the most important high-level key takeaway.
> Also using "nothingburger", a prominent phrase used by Trump supporters to lampoon the Muller investigation
I've actually never noticed in that context, apparently it's a big thing on Twitter in that context, but I'm quite selective of my consumption in that channel.
But the terms been in use for 60+ years.
> You have a strange agenda, friend.
What agenda is that, then?
One hopes you have an agenda.
In my mind, it is largely aspirational because it takes a back seat to 'make Google money.' Or perhaps making money is by definition not evil, so if you're making money by what you are doing it is transitively not evil.
When I worked at Google, management explained it to be "Would you be embarrassed to be a Googler if what you were doing showed up on an article on the New York Times? If so then chances are its evil, don't do that." But then came Project Maven, a sort of real world test, and well that is still going on now isn't it?
Alternatively, “Do the right thing” could easily mean “correct” thing, as in the sentence, “If Dr. No did things the right way, he would have immediately killed Bond when he had the chance”
They really can’t win either way.
More interestingly, they removed another sentence from that paragraph:
"[...] providing our users unbiased access to information."
In other words, Google wants to crack down on wrongthink without violating their own code of conduct.
That sentence was stupid right from the beginning.
Now maybe you'll say Google should know you're programming in C++ all the time, so having learned that, Google should be able to infer that when you type in "split string", the results should all be for C++.
Except then somehow Javascript comes into your requirements and now you need to retrain your Google to give weight to that.
I'd much rather be able to use the Google, not my Google, so that I get more predictable results. It's already annoying that I can't tell people to google something and be sure whatever I'm talking about is in the top ten results of their Google.
> That sentence was stupid right from the beginning.
Nothing about that sentence was stupid and it's frightening that you don't seem to understand the ideal of being "unbiased" (as in "unbiased reporting"). We're going to be heading in the direction where's there's "liberal" and "conservative" search engines, causing even more polarization of our collective world views.
It used to be that Google would show you lots of very diverse, interesting, and sometimes quite surprising results which would mean learning new things became almost "accidentally" easy. Now it seems more interested in finding things people already (mostly) knew about.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16153840
As measured against Goldman-Sachs.
I guess what is confusing is how subjective "the right thing" can be. If an employee were to cite this new slogan and try to address a problem with it, is the right thing to capitulate or to defend. Who is to say really.
It almost seems like it is reworded to be more vague so higher ups can just wave their hands and say these aren't the droids you're looking for. But, are they waving their hands at employees protesting the mistreatment of customer data and privacy? Or, are they waving their hands at the powers that be who want unfettered access? I guess time will tell.
I don't know what triggered the change in stance but this may have triggered the removal.
Citing 'Don't Be Evil' Motto, 3,000+ Google Employees Demand Company End Work on Pentagon Drone Project [0]
[0]https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/04/04/citing-dont-be-...
Oussama Ammar of TheFamily, a successful accelerator in Paris, agrees with you and claims that an effective motto must be one that can be disagreed with. It must in some way take a stand.
"Don't be evil" wouldn't work at Goldman Sachs, for example, where people might argue that little evils must be done in the service of the greater good, or that "the market" is the one who decides what is right or wrong. "Don't be evil" seems to imply that the ends should not be used to justify the means.
"Do the right thing" could probably be more acceptable at Goldman, because as you note it's more subjective and allows for small evils that work in the service of greater goods -- it seems to allow for the ends to justify the means.
The new code of conduct still contains a direct admonishment of “don't be evil”, as the article states.
So, no, I think your reading is unsupported by the source.
Play Services won't install on unapproved devices anymore.
Sideloading apps doesn't work the same way on Daydream as it does for the main Android system (can't launch non-Google Play store apps inside Daydream).
BS software patents on applying arithmetic coding to video compression.
Many webpages that only work on their webbrowser.
Long-con bait and switch as they morph into Microsoft of the 90s?
-- Harvey Dent , in The Dark Knight
Microsoft let the hardware go open-source and generic. And that was an incredible win.
Conversely, Apple and Google ruined handheld computers (which we now call smartphones) forever. So far, anyway. They're fundamentally unsecurable. It's at least nontrivial, and perhaps impossible, to prevent surveillance and tracking.
Are Gates and Rockefeller using their influence to set agenda in poor states? - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/15/b...
Monsanto, US, & Gates Foundation pressure Kenya to reverse GMO ban - https://www.rt.com/news/328014-kenya-gmo-us-gates-monsanto/
Gates Foundation is spearheading the neoliberal plunder of African agriculture - https://theecologist.org/2016/jan/21/gates-foundation-spearh...
(And there's lots of articles attacking from a more purely anti-GMO stance, which I don't find particularly helpful, as it's largely the politics/economics behind Monsanto that are the most disturbing.)
Right - and that's the scary thing. We see what he did in the realm of computing --- now imagine the parallels in the agricultural infrastructure of countries across the world.
And I give him almost no credit for giving some money now. He's giving away stolen money while living in the lap of luxury. Gates acted completely amorally for most of his life and now is simply buying his way into respect. I'm not a Christian, but I'm reminded of Luke 20:45-21:4.
But his Foundation is well-run and effective. Maybe he was a net good for humanity. Probably not, though.
Also, I think a great momentum of Linux in the late 90s was precisely because people hated Microsoft wholeheartedly, and that was one of the main reasons it didn't die as another toy project. So I'd say yes, a net good for humanity - not because but in spite of what he's done so far.
Also, Bill Gates' mom was into public service in big way, so there's some family history. [0] This sort of thing used to be fairly common in the American upper class.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates
Edit: punctuation
> BS software patents on applying arithmetic coding to video compression.
https://xiphmont.dreamwidth.org/84214.html
Also, you missed the biggest one: joining Steve Jobs's anti-poaching agreement, depressing Bay Area software engineer wages for years.
Look at self driving car engineer salaries today. Those wouldn't have happened under a no-poach agreement. Compare to the mobile OS race, with tens of billions of dollars (at least) on the line. The no-poach agreement between Apple and Google prevented them from beating each other with engineers, so the money poured into lawyers' pockets through litigation instead.
I wonder how many relic Intranet apps force the use of old IE in Corporate world because they were built with the 'extended' dialect of JScript.
Outside of Google-owned sites, many sites simply don't work properly in Firefox and require Chrome. Could it be the additional privacy features? It might be the web developers' fault, though.
“All the AI stuff is a result of acquisitions” - woefully misguided. Google is hiring academia leaders left, right, and center and growing a collaborative environment that’s innovating. They’re discovering a lot of stuff in-house on this team. They’re building an incredible open-source library with almost 100K Github stars for machine learning.
@self driving, they hired people building projects and are making it into a production self driving car. The latter is a far less constrained problem.
@assistants, The Google Assistant can do way more than Alexa. Not seeing how this is a me too game
Very arguable, considering how Apple Watch was announced in 2014, while Google Glass was first shown off in 2013.
True, but I'd say that has been more Facebook's, Apple's and Microsoft's (Skype's) fault. Google offered it for a couple of years, but no big player started to use federation. So I wouldn't blame Google for pulling the plug on something not being used.
However, your list of evil-doing can be extendend, e.g.
- AMP https://hn.algolia.com/?query=amp&sort=byPopularity&prefix&p...
>The video was made in late 2016 by Nick Foster, the head of design at X (formerly Google X) and a co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory. The video, shared internally within Google, imagines a future of total data collection, where Google helps nudge users into alignment with their goals, custom-prints personalized devices to collect more data, and even guides the behavior of entire populations to solve global problems like poverty and disease.
>When reached for comment on the video, an X spokesperson provided the following statement to The Verge:
>“We understand if this is disturbing -- it is designed to be.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish...
> Google prompts users to select a life goal and then guides them toward it in every interaction they have with their phone.
That still seems way better than the alternative.
I'm fairly certain that narrative, and it's popularity, precedes Twitter by at least a few years.
Here's an Atlantic article that details a bit of the history:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/evil-co...