The ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct has been around for a while and surely is a good start. But if you read through it, you'll quickly come to the conclusion that unless leadership buys into it your only real option is to quit your job if asked to do something you shouldn't.
Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
11–20 of 544 posts
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#12"Don't be evil" [until it's inconvenient not to be]
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#13I'm guessing Brad Smith hasn't seen the Tethics episode of Silicon Valley.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#14I am little worried this will sound glib, but how about we have an oath/pledge ( w/e you want to call it ) for decision makers at the company. Otherwise putting onus on engineers is, at best, silly.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#15Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#16Translation: we need to increase barriers of entry to working in this field by spreading the social cancer that is vocational licensing to software engineering.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#17Software engineering isn't medicine. It isn't that difficult to learn and you can wield many of the advantages without much training. If software folks refuse to assist with morally questionable tasks, those tasks will be compartmentalized and the unethical components will be handed off to people willing to do the job.
Sadly, just about everyone in ML/AI is contributing to an easily weaponized technology. Every time you make it easier to train a network, every time you make it faster to train a network, every time you improve an image recognition algorithm, every time you improve the latency/jitter of inference... you're contributing to the pile of knowledge which will be leveraged to control populations or enable military action. Most people stay unaware of it and just focus on the benefits. Some of us just grow to accept it.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#18The ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct has been around for a while and surely is a good start. But if you read through it, you'll quickly come to the conclusion that unless leadership buys into it your only real option is to quit your job if asked to do something you shouldn't. https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
The ACM itself also won't put its code on the right side of the kind of wrongs being perpetrated in China.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#19I’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 the…
Being expected to behave ethically is part of being an Engineer regardless of what your boss expects. Now we increasingly see real world negative consequences of the work of software engineers I don't see why they should be any different.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#20I think we need to go well beyond a Hippocratic oath.
Most Software Engineering Degrees require an ethics course. Yet - we still have the issues we have today.
Asking for good intentions isn't going to change outcomes, because Software Engineers already have good intentions. Nothing will change.
How about Software Engineering Licensure? You have been found to contribute glaring security issues in widespread code? Lose your license and employment. Use dark patterns to defraud people? Lose your license and employment. Leave "debugging" endpoints open or collect unminimized telemetry? Lose your license and employment.
This seems stronger, and much more likely that outcomes will change.
But good luck getting the industry to move.