It’s a good time to be a highly in-demand AI engineer. To lure leading researchers away from OpenAI and other competitors, Meta has reportedly offered pay packages totalling more than $100 million. Top AI engineers are now being compensated like football superstars.

Few people will ever have to grapple with the question of whether to go work for Mark Zuckerberg’s “superintelligence” venture in exchange for enough money to never have to work again (Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine recently pointed out that this is kind of Zuckerberg’s fundamental challenge: If you pay someone enough to retire after a single month, they might well just quit after a single month, right? You need some kind of elaborate compensation structure to make sure they can get unfathomably rich without simply retiring.)

Most of us can only dream of having that problem. But many of us have occasionally had to navigate the question of whether to take on an ethically dubious job (Denying insurance claims? Shilling cryptocurrency? Making mobile games more habit-forming?) to pay the bills.

For those working in AI, that ethical dilemma is supercharged to the point of absurdity. AI is a ludicrously high-stakes technology — both for good and for ill — with leaders in the field warning that it might kill us all. A small number of people talented enough to bring about superintelligent AI can dramatically alter the technology’s trajectory. Is it even possible for them to do so ethically?

AI is going to be a really big deal

On the one hand, leading AI companies offer workers the potential to earn unfathomable riches and also contribute to very meaningful social good — including productivity-increasing tools that can accelerate medical breakthroughs and technological discovery, and make it possible for more people to code, design, and do any other work that can be done on a........

© Vox