This just reads to me like "won't someone please stop me from grinding up all these babies? If only someone would pass a law preventing me from doing these horrible things I keep doing..."
Like, you know you can just stop doing bad things, right? You shouldn't need a government telling you that maybe you shouldn't do bad things. Its as if he's saying he has no free will or executive action being the CEO of Flock, he has no way of having the company not be evil until the government gives him a rulebook.
This is in fact what is being said. Executives really don’t have free will. They are slaves to capital all the same. Every move is in light of furthering the interests of capital and not actual people or humanity. Hence no meaningful efforts on things like global emissions or wealth inequality. Capital’s incentives are in opposition to that.
> Executives really don’t have free will.
This is pure bullshit, an accountability dodge. Executives don't have to accept the job. Executives don't have to stay in the job when they find out they have to compromise their ethics. These are not people who are forced to steal bread to eat, they're highly compensated elites who have been given everything by society and they choose to do evil in exchange for the high compensation.
Capital doesn't force management to do a single thing they don't wish in their hearts to do.
If they don’t, capital will put in an executive that will. You will notice profit has strong alignment. No one gives a shit about you or me or this green earth. All those execs give a shit about the next quarter.
And? Other people's immorality does not excuse one's own. Other people kill and steal, that doesn't mean that I should do it anyway because other people are going to whether I do or not. That just makes the world, and me, worse.
"They'll find someone else to do it, so it's okay for me to do it" is a classic example of flawed and immoral ethical thinking. We could go for broke and add in "I was just following orders" and "But I didn't know people would die"
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I agree with you of course, people should be ethical. But if every human exists on a spectrum of evil <-> good, and we can't change this, then regulation/law serves a critical function. Proper legislation should at least create an effective floor for what's possible to profit off of. Otherwise we're pretty much at the mercy of the least scrupulous capitalist - and let me tell you, they will always exist.
For AI the argument is: if we regulate ownership back to the creators then China will eat our lunch. This is a morally bankrupt position pretty much by definition.
I agree, we do need regulations on this. We do need to also hold our elected representatives accountable. They're literally asleep (or in the alzheimer's ward) while on the job. And we also need to hold our police and other organizations who are actively abusing these tools that are already deployed. But we should also be holding the groups building these tools accountable for what their tools are doing, especially since its pretty obvious these kinds of abuses and failures would be extremely common.
The thing is, bank robbers and murders aren't the ones going on podcasts suggesting "gosh you know maybe I wouldn't be doing these things if there was some kind of regulation preventing me from robbing banks and stabbing people"
Its like a gun store owner acting all sad about how he sold a gun to an obviously deranged person who ended up murdering some people. You know you could have just not sold him the gun, right?
> They're literally asleep (or in the alzheimer's ward) while on the job
No. They're being bought off.
That too, I agree!
I'm just also pointing out situations like Kay Granger.
It's hard when people are paying for the cameras. This is capitalism. Money is always the #1 priority & we have little relative to those pushing for the surveillance state.
For Flock and similar cameras, it's often city councils without asking the public to vote on it first. I suppose the parking lot cameras are commercial, so customers would need to complain loudly enough or boycott businesses. However majority of customers might prefer having a sophisticated camera system making sure nobody breaks into their car while shopping. Those things seem to run after business hours, so presumably they're there to prevent anyone from using the parking lot who doesn't work or shop there.
More of the if you're living out of your car, we don't want to give you a place to park for the night because not having a home is a terrible sin in society. So is just hanging out I guess. The stores themselves should have adequate security already.