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embedding-shapeyesterday at 3:46 PM4 repliesview on HN

Wouldn't that be probably one of the most important places to have an ethics team?

I'd be much more worried if my local water treatment plant or local bar had an ethics team, and people working there probably would feel slightly more useless than Raytheon's ethics team, which I'm sure feel like they're doing something important and worthwhile.


Replies

throwway120385yesterday at 11:30 PM

You build internal teams to outsource certain kinds of work to. So when a company has an "ethics" team what it's really saying is that everyone who works at the company is expected to behave unethically, and that team has been brought in to provide an ethical framework and to control how unethical everyone is expected to be. Try it with things like program management, product management, and so on. These groups get added when the company outgrows the "everyone does a little bit of everything" phase and the company executives no longer want everyone in the company to wear those hats.

danarisyesterday at 5:36 PM

Water treatment plant? That sounds like an excellent place for an ethics team—though it would, in practice, be nearly synonymous with an environmental impact team.

A bar? Too small an organization; if they had an ethics team I'd just think they were a money laundering front.

Frankly, most organizations above the size of an average mom & pop operation like a local bar should have at least some formal consideration of ethics, and most larger than (say) 50 employees should have at least one dedicated ethicist on staff. With veto power over operations.

Our society has treated ethics like the exclusive domain of ivory tower eggheads and philosophers for far too long, and look at what it has led to. If nearly everyone knew an ethicist in their daily lives, maybe people would actually have some understanding of ethics, even if they only did it grudgingly.

aprilthird2021yesterday at 4:06 PM

Come on, what do you think the ethics team at Raytheon is going to say "Hmm, our elected leaders are relying heavily on dangerously inaccurate AI to choose bombing targets and our weapons hit a girl's school as a result, let's withhold weapons from our own govt till that's resolved"?

Obviously not. The ethics team at Raytheon is not going to ever be allowed to overrule the leadership or more importantly the political leadership of this country whose support of Raytheon is fundamental to their survival

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