Jason Antic

Its wise and should be encouraged to employ ethical norms to guide your work and the design of your products. But I have to disagree with the habit of academics giving sermons on which ethics we should all believe in and who we should or shouldn't work for.

I have to disagree with your disagreement then. It’s called (moral) leadership and we need it now just like we’ve always needed it. He’s in the position to do so and quite frankly taking a stand like this is brave considering his audience.

Yes, but moral leadership comes from people with relevant qualifications. Yoshua Bengio is an expert in computer science, but not ethics. A proper approach to determining ethical career projects should come from people or groups with more ethical knowledge, such as @80000 Hours.

Are you seriously suggesting the effective moral leaders in history got their PhD in ethics first before they set about changing the world....? I really don't see the problem with Yoshua going out on a limb and saying "hey....I don't want to work on killer drones and that's ok"