Ethics in the way of scale

For NYT Opinion, Paul Ford on the challenges for AI companies to build ethical systems:

All the while, money keeps gushing in. You start out transparent, sharing your journey, but then before an initial public offering of shares, you must honor the S.E.C.-mandated quiet period and restrict promotional communications. After that, the transparency never quite returns. The market demands a rising stock price. Your company still makes a lot of software, but a huge amount of time goes to tax strategy and compliance.

At that scale, people start to blur together, and human users can become aggregate pools of statistics and growth vectors that go up and down — a mulch into which you plant your products.

Cue the Harvey Dent scene about living long enough to become the villain.