Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#81

Post by equalunique » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

pytester wrote: post #45

Barrin92 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is always repeated within the first ten minutes of these discussions, but I don't really understand why anyone assumes that competition is somehow the panacea to every problem on the planet. I don't want ten unregulated facebooks who all leak my data, I want one facebook that plays by reasonable rules. The dynamics of social networks which don't deliver value if they're fragmented has made the competiti…

This oversimplified "regulation is bad" idea is pushed by a lot of think tanks (e.g. CATO, americans for prosperity, freedomworks, heritage foundation) set up by the Koch brothers. They have close links with the media, which is why these weirdly specific views get parroted a lot. If you've ever read a story about the evils of hairdresser licensing (for instance), it's from them. They have been on a crusade against re…

It's also pushed by genuine people. Read Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal by Joel Salatin.

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#82

Post by tempsolution » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 3:33 PM UTC

Big tech is a threat to democracy? What a backwards, self-serving hunk of junk. Big tech might be the only way to sustain democracy. Technology gives governments the power to instill a lasting total dictatorship, something completely unprecedented in the history of mankind. Of course they are afraid that big tech takes away from their pie by becoming too powerful and preventing them from setting us up for an eternal dictatorship.

Wake up people. China is the canary in the coal mine. If big tech doesn't step up and provide some sort of a shadow government, pressuring our real government, we are actually really screwed. Going forward, the government NEEDs to be undermined by the private sector, this is the only way to provide a power balance.

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#83

Post by jhall1468 » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 3:35 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #70

GreaterFool wrote: post #52

> that governments need to put some "guardrails" around engineers and the tech titans they serve The evil engineers! Not the managers, CEOs and so on, but engineers. The true root of evil. Finally someone recognizes who's really at fault

Stop pushing the blame upstairs. If you knowingly build software that hurts people, you share the blame. The job market for programmers has never been better. "My boss told me to do it" is not an excuse. I, for one, hope more engineers involved in fraud (eg VW), privacy breaches (eg Facebook) etc get tried and punished. It might help make programmers realize that yes, your work actually affects real humans and yes, y…

The moment you open that door you have created the ultimate scapegoat in every corporate decision. Now every engineer is personally responsible for corporate decisions. It's easy when you look at VW and Facebook, but the more nuanced these things get, the more that what your advocating for is that programmers have to be lawyers as well.

This horrible precedent and pushes the blame for everything downstairs. Meanwhile, corporate execs have the very corporate shielding you're advocating that engineers don't. Maybe you think they too shouldn't have such protections, but how you can advocate for personal liability for programmers without first implementing personal liability for executives is beyond me.

This so incredibly short-sighted.

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#84

Post by PorterDuff » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 3:35 PM UTC

Fricken wrote: post #72

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #13

Once upon a time public opinion was manipulated by TV and the big newspapers; now it is manipulated by new media companies. My stupid question is: where is the big difference?

We had something like a consensus reality when big newspapers framed the terms of debate. Now we're retribalizing. Different groups are working not only with different beliefs, but also different sets of facts to cement their beliefs. By the time that a society recognizes that a new medium has changed them, it's too late.

"We had something like a consensus reality when big newspapers framed the terms of debate. Now we're retribalizing."

Looking at newspapers prior to (let's say) WWII and that statement might be worth reconsidering.

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#85

Post by jhall1468 » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 3:37 PM UTC

Santosh83 wrote: post #71

GreaterFool wrote: post #52

> that governments need to put some "guardrails" around engineers and the tech titans they serve The evil engineers! Not the managers, CEOs and so on, but engineers. The true root of evil. Finally someone recognizes who's really at fault

The 'tech titans they serve' bit presumably refers to higher management, so he's not leaving them out...

I would say it refers to the corporations, encompasses all of the company. Only engineers were called out by title.

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#86

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 3:38 PM UTC

jhall1468 wrote: post #83

skrebbel wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop pushing the blame upstairs. If you knowingly build software that hurts people, you share the blame. The job market for programmers has never been better. "My boss told me to do it" is not an excuse. I, for one, hope more engineers involved in fraud (eg VW), privacy breaches (eg Facebook) etc get tried and punished. It might help make programmers realize that yes, your work actually affects real humans and yes, y…

The moment you open that door you have created the ultimate scapegoat in every corporate decision. Now every engineer is personally responsible for corporate decisions. It's easy when you look at VW and Facebook, but the more nuanced these things get, the more that what your advocating for is that programmers have to be lawyers as well. This horrible precedent and pushes the blame for everything downstairs. Meanwhile…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#87

Post by skrebbel » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

jhall1468 wrote: post #83

skrebbel wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop pushing the blame upstairs. If you knowingly build software that hurts people, you share the blame. The job market for programmers has never been better. "My boss told me to do it" is not an excuse. I, for one, hope more engineers involved in fraud (eg VW), privacy breaches (eg Facebook) etc get tried and punished. It might help make programmers realize that yes, your work actually affects real humans and yes, y…

The moment you open that door you have created the ultimate scapegoat in every corporate decision. Now every engineer is personally responsible for corporate decisions. It's easy when you look at VW and Facebook, but the more nuanced these things get, the more that what your advocating for is that programmers have to be lawyers as well. This horrible precedent and pushes the blame for everything downstairs. Meanwhile…

I don't advocate that corporate execs have shielding and the engineers don't. Where did you read that?

It sounds to me that you're misreading my comment on purpose, to make an us-vs-them argument that I fundamentally disagree with. This isn't about engineers vs bosses, it's about doing the right thing no matter what's on your business card.

The argument "if we can't shift the blame up, it'll automatically go down" simply doesn't make sense to me. You, and you alone, can choose to stop building evil shit.

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#88

Post by Faark » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 3:41 PM UTC

treebeard901 wrote: post #46

The claim that big tech itself is a threat to democracy needs to be debated. While they do manipulate their customers and sell their personal information for profit, the companies themselves have also been manipulated by the various groups in the world that are the actual threat to democracy. The political polarization might not be caused by technology but instead only amplifies it. One example where the tech compani…

> The political polarization might not be caused by technology but instead only amplifies it. [..] What we seem to forget is that we all lived in confirmation bias bubbles before the internet.

Yes, and doing the same as always just more efficiently can be reason enough for regulation.

Consider fishing. Mankind pretty much always did it. Over time we got more efficient, but the core mechanism of extracting fish from the sea always stayed the same. Along the same line of reasoning there should not have been any need for fishing limits. But if we look at all systems and mechanisms interacting, just pushing this one variable at some arbitrary point can make the system collapse.

Afaik fishing is a lot better understood than filter bubbles. But the history examples of strong political polarization I can remember usually heave lead to bad outcomes (as in bloody), thus we probably want to stay on the safer side for now.

Kind of sad that the Chinese way of dealing with this might actually produce better outcomes, if our western "free societies" won't find a way to deal with it.

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#89

Post by kerng » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

GreaterFool wrote: post #52

> that governments need to put some "guardrails" around engineers and the tech titans they serve The evil engineers! Not the managers, CEOs and so on, but engineers. The true root of evil. Finally someone recognizes who's really at fault

This is interesting, I think engineers often take the naive approach and stance when it comes to morals and ethics, like this comment here highlights.

Many engineers are not at all familiar with privacy and security laws. When there are hackathons for instance I always wonder about the amount of legal oversight in organizations.

Engineers want to build cool things. The Internet made it possible that anyone's small app can have worldwide reach and impact.

That impact however also has consequences and responsibilities that the builders can't hide from or transfer to someone else either.

Re: Microsoft President: Democracy Is At Stake. Regulate Big Tech

#90

Post by ausbah » Sat, Sep 14, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

tempsolution wrote: post #82

Big tech is a threat to democracy? What a backwards, self-serving hunk of junk. Big tech might be the only way to sustain democracy. Technology gives governments the power to instill a lasting total dictatorship, something completely unprecedented in the history of mankind. Of course they are afraid that big tech takes away from their pie by becoming too powerful and preventing them from setting us up for an eternal…

Corporations aren't accountable to everyday people, democratic governments are. Both big tech and big government should be kept in check, but governments accountable to their populace I think are the only realistic way to keep technology companies in chexk.