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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

#131

Post by wolco »

andrewfong wrote: post #109

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 the company.

So the oath would be to do no harm to the company.

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

#132

Post by tfehring »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #103
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…

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 respon…

> So management bears no blame for requiring illegal work be done, on pain of termination?

No, I wouldn't say that. In many cases, management and engineering share the blame jointly and severally since they both have an opportunity to stop it.

> Said another way, engineers now need to be technical and legal experts in the business domain?

Engineers should know enough about their business domains to understand the ethical impacts of their work. Ethics and law are orthogonal, so thankfully this is generally much easier than being a legal expert.

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

Thankfully, the healthcare safety net in much of the US is far better than it gets credit for, and the pay and availability of opportunities for software engineers in the US has generally been quite good. I'm sympathetic to this argument in general, which is one reason I don't think there should be an oath for, like, Amazon warehouse workers, but I'm far less sympathetic for anyone making 5+ times the median US income.

> 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.

Your responsibility as framed to you by the business is the how, but upstream of the how is the question of whether or not to do it at all. If you contribute to a piece of software, you've tacitly answered yes to that question.

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

#133

Post by MattGaiser »

skissane wrote: post #118
paulryanrogers wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 respon…

> Said another way, engineers now need to be technical and legal experts in the business domain? Consider something like the 737 MAX debacle – did the programmers writing the MCAS code actually have enough aviation domain knowledge and understanding of where the component fit in the overall system to realise it was a threat to people's lives? I don't know, but my guess is the most likely answer is "No".

I can’t imagine software engineers staying in a company long enough to acquire it.

For this to work, software engineer compensation would need to change radically.

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

#134

Post by booleandilemma »

juanbyrge wrote: post #55

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

Tech companies are actively against there being a “profession”. They want engineers to be plentiful, cheap, and replaceable.

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

#136

Post by tlb »

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…

The Hippocratic oath is similarly local in scope. Individual doctors try hard not to cause harm to individual patients, but the medical establishment causes massive amounts of harm, by:

- developing treatments for chronic symptoms instead of curing diseases

- being unprepared for pandemics

- making health care unaffordable except through employer plans

- promoting wrong nutrition guidelines for decades after the evidence was in

and more.

To have good outcomes you need ethics at both individual and system-wide levels.

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

#137

Post by Ygg2 »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #60
spunker540 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 diver…

Ethic is subjective. Across time and space.

Want to see an example - Ask Aristotle are women same or lower than men?

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

#138

Post by walrus01 »

peteradio wrote: post #126
walrus01 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software engineers are accountable to their bosses before their users, no matter how high minded we like to pretend to be. I agree to a very limited extent about the hierarchical nature of a typical corporation, but I also disagree. Software engineers at a certain level of their career and with relatively uncommon skills can pick and choose what companies they want to work at. In my opinion people of good moral cha…

Would you accept any job under penalty of imprisonment for violating grey ethical rules?

Under which nation-state's legal system are we basing this theoretical scenario?

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

#139

Post by euske »

I think what we should focus on, instead of ethics or humanity, is things like transparency, open discussion and clear feedback, etc. We can't really tell what's exactly ethical or human when the situation is changing this quickly. What we can ensure, though, is that a process exists that can spot and fix issues at hand in a timely manner, publicly. It's a bit like OODA for ethics. I think a similar system would be needed for the US police system too. Be it a company or police, when its secrecy is of its utmost importance, ethics cannot be expected.
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