“Irresponsible Companies Can Be Made of Responsible Employees” by VojtaKovarik
Description
tl;dr:
- In terms of financial interests of an AI company, bankruptcy and the world ending are both equally bad. If a company acted in line with its financial interests[1], it would happily accept significant extinction risk for increased revenue.
- There are plausible mechanisms which would allow a company to act like this even if virtually every employee would prefer the opposite. (For example, selectively hiring people with biased beliefs or exploiting collective action problems.)
- In particular, you can hold that an AI company is completely untrustworthy even if you believe that all of its employees are fine people.
Epistemic status & disclaimers: The mechanisms I describe definitely play some role in real AI companies. But in practice, there are more things going on simultaneously and this post is not trying to give a full picture.[2][3]Also, none of this is meant to be novel, but rather just putting [...]
---
Outline:
(01:12 ) From financial point of view, bankruptcy is no worse than destroying the world
(02:53 ) How to Not Act in Line with Employee Preferences
(07:29 ) Well... and why does this matter?
The original text contained 9 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
---
First published:
October 8th, 2025
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
---
Images from the article:
Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.
United States
