doing bad things together serves two useful purposes for criminal and quasi-criminal enterprises. First - it enables you to identify and screen out the people who have real moral qualms before you have to rely on them to cooperate in whatever quasi-legal thing it is that you want them to do. Second, it gives you and them a stake in mutually assured silence. There is a third thing too: it plausibly corrupts people, rewiring their moral codes so that things that they might once have identified as wrong come to seem like ordinary practice.

Providing “unclaimed” or unidentified individuals for valid medical purposes has a long, if twisted, history and is a necessary component of teaching medicine and anatomy. It needs to be done ethically, however, or the central tenets of human rights and medicine are violated in the process of attempting to do good

The first chapter of the AI snake oil book is now available online. It is 30 pages long and summarizes the book’s main arguments. If you start reading now, you won't have to wait long for the rest of the book — it will be published on the 24th of September. If you haven't pre-ordered it yet, we hope that reading the introductory chapter will convince you to get yourself a copy.