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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

#101

Post by dragonwriter »

The Hippocratic Oath is mostly irrelevant, so, no, we don't need it.

If he means we need a professional code of ethics, and the organized professional discipline that makes such a code meaningful, sure, maybe.

But it's odd for a software executive to make that case, since the only reason such a code would be necessary in software would be to provide a countervailing force so that developers resist unethical demands from their employers. IOW, if it weren't for the lack of ethics by Smith’s peer group, their subordinates wouldn’t need new constraints.

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

#102

Post by peterkelly »

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…

> Software engineers are accountable to their bosses before their users, no matter how high minded we like to pretend to be

I've quit jobs in the past because of ethical concerns about the way in which those above me have been acting. In one case this involved bribery of senior government officials to push through a project that put at risk the privacy of hundreds of thousands of people.

If you go along with shit like that, you're an accomplice and share partial responsibility. As professionals we have a responsibility to stand up for what is right. It's not good enough to fall back to the lazy excuse of "just doing my job".

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

#103

Post by paulryanrogers »

tfehring wrote: post #41
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…

In sufficiently complex systems, you can always blame someone else if you're motivated to do so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IssR_J0QWr4 But ultimately there's always a software engineer involved in the creation of software - and that's not true of any of the other roles you mentioned. Since software engineers are necessary and sufficient to produce software, they should always be held responsible, and any oath s…

So management bears no blame for requiring illegal work be done, on pain of termination? Said another way, engineers now need to be technical and legal experts in the business domain?

(Remember employees in the US depend on the company for health insurance. Saying 'no' could cost a lot more than just ones position.)

Most software engineers are not like doctors. We have little autonomy over what is created. Our responsibility is primarily the how. And with devops sometimes the actual deployment and maintenance itself.

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

#104

Post by justinclift »

wolco wrote: post #85
tfehring wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In sufficiently complex systems, you can always blame someone else if you're motivated to do so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IssR_J0QWr4 But ultimately there's always a software engineer involved in the creation of software - and that's not true of any of the other roles you mentioned. Since software engineers are necessary and sufficient to produce software, they should always be held responsible, and any oath s…

Not sure hou understand how software is made. A programmer doesn't decide what to write, when to write it and they are lucky to be included in how it's made. Programmers get specs and write programs to match those. At no point is it the programmers responsibility to talk about the moral compass of the project and where it fits into society. An oath to do no harm? You first need to give programmers the power to decide…

It's probably not an "either/or" thing.

Although it would be optimal for the management/leadership to not be pursuing unethical developments, a software engineer having the fallback of "I can't implement this in good faith" is another layer of defence (to society).

It would probably also allow for legal push back against being terminated for refusing to implementing the unethical thing.

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

#105

Post by Aerroon »

trimbo wrote: post #49
SllX wrote: post #16

Translation: we need to increase barriers of entry to working in this field by spreading the social cancer that is vocational licensing to software engineering.

How do you hire an architect to design your house? Pick a doctor? Pick a lawyer?

Pay a huge amount of money. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, we have an incredibly expensive healthcare system, a legal system where deeper pockets have a large advantage, and a housing crisis.

All I need to make a website is to know how to do it. To build a house I need to comply with an endless list of regulations that are essentially intended to make me unable to do so. To buy an asthma inhaler (insert medicine here) I must pay a doctor to write me a prescription. It doesn't matter whether I know what I need and how much. I must pay for it. Lawyering I can do on my own for myself though.

Edit: I'm not saying that all of this is necessarily bad, but I just couldn't resist when you mentioned those 3. They're not great examples, because the ethics there are about protecting the person receiving the service. In software development you rarely build something for a specific human individual.

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

#106

Post by creato »

I think a lot of the recent focus on "AI ethics" is just self-aggrandizement.

I also think a lot of people here are overestimating how broad the agreement is on what is ethical and what is not (and thus what would be prevented from happening under such a "Hippocratic Oath").

Examples being: Microsoft/GitHub's work with ICE, Google's China search engine, use of AI in military applications

I personally have a strong opinion on some of those, but I'm not delusional enough to think that there are no competent software engineers that disagree with me.

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

#108

Post by dragonwriter »

z_ wrote: post #96

There is one. https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics

That's an ACM Code of Ethics. Software Engineers aren't required to be in the ACM, so it's not, in any meaningful sense, a general code of ethics for software engineers.

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

#109

Post by andrewfong »

I'm not against the idea, but analogizing to medicine isn't great. There are a number of challenged that need sorting before an oath is feasible:

* Medicine is thousands of years old. Software is decades old. There's still a lot we don't know.

* Medicine involves a lot of repeat situations, do you can set precedent and learn over time. Software isn't always new, but there are more novel applications than in medicine.

* The patient is, generally speaking, at the center of a doctor's ethical universe. It's not clear who the "patient" is for engineers. Users are often malicious. You can just say engineers must consider "society as a whole" but that's kind of a cop out, and not useful for trickier situations.

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

#110

Post by justinclift »

ipsum2 wrote: post #99
rjp0008 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, “don’t be evil”.

Depends how you define evil. Is advertising evil? Then Facebook and Google engineers are committing evil. Is working with repressive governments evil? Then Apple and Microsoft engineers are committing evil. That's a sizeable chunk of engineers right there.

Well, it would be interesting to see MS seriously attempt to implement such an Oath in their own organisation.

Personally, I hope they do try. :)

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