Google is (reportedly) planning to assist China with censorship — so scientist Jack Poulson quit — few other employees had the spine

© 2018 Peter Free

 

21 September 2018

 

 

Decent ethics are noticeable — because so few people live them

 

Given the choice between:

 

 

(a) profiting from evil

 

and

 

(b) not profiting at all,

 

 

— those who choose not to do wrong stand out:

 

 

A senior Google research scientist has quit the company in protest over its plan [see here] to launch a censored version of its search engine in China.

 

[Jack Poulson] told The Intercept in an interview that he believes he is one of about five of the company’s employees to resign over Dragonfly. He felt it was his “ethical responsibility to resign in protest of the forfeiture of our public human rights commitments,” he said.

 

Poulson. . . said he believed that the China plan had violated Google’s artificial intelligence principles, which state that the company will not design or deploy technologies “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”

 

Earlier this month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai refused to appear at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing . . . .

 

The company has ignored dozens of questions from journalists about the plan and it has stonewalled leading human rights groups . . . . (Google also did not respond to an inquiry for this story.)

 

[Poulson] is surprised more of the company’s employees have not quit over Dragonfly.

 

“It’s incredible how little solidarity there is on this,” he said.

 

“It is my understanding that when you have a serious ethical disagreement with an issue, your proper course of action is to resign.”

 

© 2018 Ryan Gallagher, Senior Google scientist resigns over "forfeiture of our values" in China, The Intercept (13 September 2018)

 

 

The moral? — Capitalism's unregulated greed buys everything

 

Including the supermajority of souls.

 

Think about it. Then tell me that Hannah Arendt's comment (about the connection between human banality and mindlessly doing evil) is not an accurate one. As she had earlier indicated:

 

 

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.

 

© 1951 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) (at unknown page)

 

 

This is what theologian Paul Tillich meant when he allegedly said, "Every institution is inherently demonic."

 

The act of organization is not inherently evil, but institutions automatically:

 

 

magnify the lusts that we bring to them

 

and

 

they distribute our responsibility for wrongdoing so widely, that we persuade ourselves to ignore our contributions to it.

 

 

Ergo, the implicit society-chastisement within the Google-leavers' moral stands.