Not only shouldn't we support someone like Elon Musk but also don't you find it hypcritic to respond with 'just read a damn book' and suggesting starlink?
I am a terrible person to ask. My employers get their money's worth from me: I genuinely like my work and regularly work more than 8hrs a day. I also work in a field with others who, with some exception, do the same, so its strange for me to see "normal people" clock out on the dot.
Their stock is up something like 1500% since IPO. I can't imagine most employees there feeling like they're undervalued with that sort of equity valuation.
I'll never forget this spot on NPR where they interviewed a machine learning engineer working on AI videos. The engineer was purely focused on how cool the technology is, how real it looks, etc.
The interviewer asked, "aren't you worried about this getting into the hands of the wrong people, and creating deepfakes for extortion and things like that?"
The engineer paused for a few seconds, and then said, "gosh I never even considered that." She created this monster and all she could think about was how neat it was technologically.
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in university, we used to have at least one engineering ethics class in undergrad. Have they stopped those? It sure seems like it, given how many engineers are out there who only seem to care about how technically cool and interesting their projects are.
I took one back in 2018 or so, and I assume it's still a degree requirement. If most are like the one I took, however, very few people seriously engaged with the class, and it's just viewed as a filler class.
It didn't help that the workload was a joke. I believe the entirety of our assignments were 5 single page "essay" responses to some ethical scenarios, and the professor seemed to hand out As just for writing enough. It probably took me less than 2 hours of total writing. I imagine most of the students these days are just having ChatGPT write it for them. We absolutely need to take ethics more seriously though, even if it involves adding more/more rigorous courses to the curriculum.
They exist for the "college of engineering" majors such as mechanical, chemical, civil etc. Computer science is considered a natural science in many universities (and is in the corresponding college) and thus does not have an ethics course mandated like other engineering disciplines.
Yeah engineering as a discipline tends to be pretty naïve to the consequences of what they build, and sociopaths take advantage of it. Norbert Wiener [1] observed this about the engineers working on nukes in the 1940s-1950s:
“Push-button warfare... possible for a limited group of people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions, without any immediate risk to themselves.... Behind all this I sensed the desires of the gadgeteer to see the wheels go round.”
> can someone explain the difference between what alex jones said about sandy hook and what other people say about 9/11 being an inside job, hologram planes, fake this fake that etc
Alex Jones makes dozens of patently false claims per episode. Yet every once in a while, he will accidentally say something that can be associated with reality. People will latch onto those once-in-ten-thousand statements and say, "look! Alex Jones was actually right about x all along," while completely ignoring the veritable sea of misinformation he spouted along the way.
Make what you wish of that information.
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