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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

#51

Post by p1necone »

batiudrami wrote: post #19
madrox wrote: post #8

I’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.

I think the point is that we can't just rely on individual ethics to enact change. People have bills to pay and kids to feed, if it's all on the man at the bottom to say no then a lot of bad software is still going to be created.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#52

Post by didip »

I hate to be a debby downer but this is nothing but virtue signaling.

How can we enforce this? Strong individual ethics without ability to do anything about it will simply make engineers feel helpless. And that’s just going to hurt happiness at the workplace.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#53

Post by sjwright »

madrox wrote: post #8

I’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…

Corporate strategists blaming software engineers for the consequences of corporate strategy is a fairly brazen kind of blame-shifting.

A system of ethics within the health system are necessary for customers to retain trust in the health industry. It's also strongly aligned with the selfish interests of workers who must enact that system of ethics. These properties do not neatly translate to software engineering—mostly because the most difficult ethical dilemmas in technology are rarely obvious when looking at source code. The problems with Facebook (for example) are not always inherent in code; many are only revealed after being deployed at scale and external groups begin exploiting the system.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#54

Post by FractalParadigm »

tehabe wrote: post #25

I think we also should finally abandon the idea that companies are only here to make a profit and should ignore all other factors when doing business. That doesn't mean they should make no profit at all but it means that they also should consider external costs as if they were internal ones. This is true for the environment, privacy, data protection, employees, and many other things.

I think something like this would be more easily 'enforced' if the current punishments weren't so low they got factored into the "cost of doing business."

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#55

Post by juanbyrge »

We need to go far beyond that -- we need an actual profession. It always strikes me as odd that someone can go through a 4 week bootcamp and call themselves a software engineer. Robert Martin has been advocating this for point for years -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17vTLSkXTOo

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#56

Post by Legogris »

p1necone wrote: post #51
batiudrami wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the point is that we can't just rely on individual ethics to enact change. People have bills to pay and kids to feed, if it's all on the man at the bottom to say no then a lot of bad software is still going to be created.

The argument made is that it's necessary, not that it's sufficient.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#57

Post by natch »

Perhaps Brad Smith can let us know when we live in a time when it's not true that all three branches of the US government, to pick on just one country, are daily disrespecting their oaths to uphold the constitution. And then we can talk about the efficacy of oaths.

In other words, oaths aren't worth much in the real world, apparently, as much as we might like to think they should be.

It would be troubling if Brad Smith isn't aware of this. He wouldn't be the first once-respected person to go off the deep end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins.

I have to give Brad the benefit of the doubt and assume something was lost in translation; possibly he is being misquoted or quoted out of context.

But even assuming we could agree on a shared, always-in-sync definition of harm, and even assuming oaths worked all the time, there are plenty of competent people, whatever label we give them, who will design and implement systems without having sworn any such oath, and countries and organizations (including DAOs) that will employ those people. And the first two assumptions are already a bridge too far.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#58

Post by alexbanks »

Replace Software Engineers with "Anyone involved in the creation of software", and then it goes from a "Definitely not" to a "Eh, maybe."

Until the people pointing the software engineering departments are held accountable for their immoral behavior and goals, I don't think the engineers beneath them can really be assessed fairly.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#60

Post by brobdingnagians »

spunker540 wrote: post #35
batiudrami wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is behaving ethically not a part of being a designer or a PM or a director/boss?

And, what's more, isn't behaving ethically not part of being human?

Aristotle and a while host of philosophers certainly thought so.

Extending this, why don't we expect everyone in society to behave ethically? But then we get into arguments about what is ethical, because people disagree on that, and people naturally will disagree on what is ethical in software development, which isn't always a problem. The is a diversity of opinion, though since are clearly extreme.

One of the issues with a "Hippocratic oath" for software developers is that software spans the while spectrum of human activity and thought.

Constraining software is nearly equivalent to constraining human thought in more ways than one.

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