not_wyoming

The cynical (wizened) part of me has to wonder how much of Feinstein's support for surveillance maps back to how many of her constituents see the intelligence community as an addressable market.

I expect Anthropic's status as a public benefit corporation to matter exactly as much as OpenAI's status as a nonprofit did

Even better!

My original comment was more about the quality of discourse in this thread being...somewhat lacking. I'd hope that an ethics course would at least equip CS grads to have a more substantive debate about these sorts of topics. I agree that many students would dial it in for an ethics course (just like they do for many required courses), but I also think there's likely some value in exposure, and it's difficult to argue that ethics are irrelevant to software engineering given the frequency of discussions like this one.

(And, to be fair, it's a discussion board on the Internet, so maybe my expectations are just out of whack.)

Interesting. I don't know. Do you have specific sources you're thinking of?

> My university had over 4 for the cyber students

What program? Or if you'd rather stay anonymous, can you share the curriculum somehow? I'm very curious about what a CS program of study looks like with that many ethics courses.

In the US, many undergrad programs award a minor with 15-18 hours of study in the subject (or 5-6 standard courses). Four ethics courses would basically get you to a philosophy minor.

This entire thread is such a strong case for why all undergrad CS programs should have a core requirement of at least one ethics course.

I actually did this - I plugged The Verge article into Claude and got the following critique of what biases are there:

> The article accurately cites real Gallup data but selectively omits findings that complicate its "backlash" narrative — most notably that curiosity is Gen Z's single most common emotion toward AI, and that daily users remain substantially more hopeful and excited than the aggregate figures suggest. The 79% "laziness" concern and declining hope figures are presented as evidence of generational rejection, when the researchers themselves describe what they found as "deep ambivalence." *In short, the article uses real numbers to tell a cleaner, more oppositional story than the underlying polling actually supports.*

Then I then put that Claude critique back into Claude and asked it to analyze the critique for bias and agendas and got this:

> The critique accurately catches real flaws in The Verge article — particularly the omission of "curiosity" as Gen Z's top emotion and the failure to distinguish between heavy users (who are more positive) and non-users (who drive most of the negativity). However, *the critique has its own directional bias, consistently framing every correction in ways that soften the negative trend, while ignoring data that cuts the other way — like the sharp positivity decline even among daily users, and the near-majority of Gen Z workers who see AI as a net negative in the workplace. *Both pieces are selectively using the same real data to tell opposite stories; the Gallup findings themselves are more nuanced and more negative than the critique allows.*

So according to Claude, Claude is biased in how it describes The Verge as biased.

LLMs are breakthrough technologies. The AI products we have today are SaaS products built by companies doing everything they can to find people who will pay for them. Very, very different things.

To my mind, "if we don't say this is dangerously powerful, we will not be able to hire the talent we need to build this product" is the supply-side version of "if we do say this is dangerously powerful, it will make people want to buy our product".

That would mean poaching lol