Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
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Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
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Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#2[deleted]
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#3Software Engineers: but your ethics aren’t my ethics, and/or ethics get in the way of my paycheck.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#4[dead]
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#5What about the C-suite?
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#6Sounds like hiring competition with FB and Google is hotting up then
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#7When average salaries of software engineers become the same as average salaries of doctors, sure.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#8I’m not a fan of comparisons to the Hippocratic oath. The greatest risk to AI ethics is not the ethics of software engineers but the ethics of the software engineering process. By the time tasks are handed to engineers, most of the ethical decisions have been made by product managers, designers, and business stakeholders who are focused on their own goals. Software engineers are accountable to their bosses before their users, no matter how high minded we like to pretend to be. To say it’s on the engineer to do no harm puts them in the tenuous position of doing the job or being replaced by someone who will. That isn’t setting us up for success.
The Hippocratic oath sounds more altruistic than the alternatives, but good legislation, including business audits and incentives, will have far more impact than a software engineer swearing they won’t be evil.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#9Well, it sure is tough to know the outcomes of what you create, however many oaths you take. Long ago, someone invented a pencil; people have written a lot of terrible things with pencils. More recently, people invented neural networks to recognize handwritten digits; now people are using networks like that to do terrible things. An oath won't solve the problem; we need laws and governance and more to ensure society uses technology safely and for good.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#10> There are no common ethics codes to determine how lethal autonomous weapons and systems that are developed for the military should be used once they end up in the hands of civilians.
It's interesting to me that this just presumes developing these autonomous weapons systems in the first place is ethical. I understand there is a difference of opinion on this ethical point, but it immediately frames the discussion pretty far away from the Hippocratic oath's requirement to abstain from causing harm.