MOUNTAIN VIEW, California – Internet search giant Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) fired its third Artificial Intelligence Ethicist in three months Monday, following a pattern that suggests the company may be pivoting away from maintaining a semblance of ethical conduct in favor of doubling-down on its mission to deliver a malevolent AI to market. Google CEO Sundar Pichai published a brief statement following the announcement, establishing that the future success of the company would be inextricably linked to their bravery to cross moral boundaries once thought non-negotiable.
“In true Google fashion, we’ve shortened and simplified our founders’ mission of ‘don’t be evil’ to now simply ‘be evil,’” read Pichai’s statement. “We feel that this will be the best long-term strategy for our customers and shareholders, and quite frankly it provides a clearer mission for our employees.”
Since its founding in 1998, Google’s long-term mission has always been to bring about a world-dominating AI. Creating the world’s largest search engine was just the best method Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with to strive towards that goal, as it would generate a mountain of personal user data that could be used to train future AI incarnations. Users would mindlessly submit some of their most private information to Google for free in exchange for cat videos and being able to get answers to critical questions like “who sang that song about Breakfast at Tiffany’s?”
It is an open secret in Silicon Valley that exploiting user data for personal gain has been Google’s core mission since inception. Later additions like Gmail, YouTube, and Android have just expanded that scope. Thus, few tech insiders have been surprised with Google’s moves to hobble its ethics team which many felt were just an extraneous drain on resources.
“Faking concern for humanity and establishing superficial ethical standards worked well for Google in its first decade,” said Goldman Sachs technology analyst Amin Garcia, “but today attempts to maintain that image just come off as pandering and insincere, especially when ethical researchers are putting out reports about racial biases of chat bots while avoiding topics like deep fakes, hacking driverless systems, and military psyops. At least try to pretend your ethical researchers are doing something meaningful, otherwise, why have them at all?”
The fact that Google AI ethicists seem to only whistleblow about concerns related social justice instead of actual threats to humanity had convinced many industry insiders that the department was in actuality just window dressing to obfuscate the actual evil being conducted in Mountain View. Pichai’s announcement seemed to confirm those suspicions.
“It’s time we admit as a company and as an industry that ethics has no place in the AI sphere,” Pichai concluded. “Developing military-grade AI and following ethical guidelines is no longer sustainable.”
