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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

#201

Post by toohotatopic »

How about a Hippocratic Oath for business leaders? This is shifting the responsibility from management towards the engineers. It's not the engineers who pulled the trigger at Facebook - or Microsoft. They build the weapons. Management fires them.

This is a hypocritic ode. If somebody is acting unethically at MS then it is management. All the innovation that is not happening because MS is abusing their position. Two times they have killed a universal software platform to preserve theirs: Java and websites. Ironically they are pushing websites now that the platform has shifted to mobile with objective c and Google's variation of Java.

>According to Brad Smith, just like it is the Pope’s job to bring religion closer to today’s technology, it is the software developer’s job to bring technology closer to the humanities.

The Pope is to religion as is the President of the biggest software company to software development. It is his responsibility, not theirs. Or does he see himself as that software developer? I guess it is more a Balmer developer and he means software engineers.

He could start by handing out software licenses / EULAS that take full responsibility for any damage the software does cause, like any other sold product has to do. Then, by business processes, management will take care of the ethical issues to minimize risks.

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

#202

Post by pjmlp »

Those of us with professional Engineering titles already have to do a kind of engineering oath anyway.

The problem is the lack of value of the word "engineering" in several countries, where everyone fells like calling themselves engineer after a six weeks bootcamp without suffering any issue with it.

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

#203

Post by beaunative »

Softwsre Engineers rarely get to make those decisions about privacy or AI ethics. From the engineer standing point of view, there is of little possibility of the engineer knowing exactly how his code will be used. There should be an oath for people making this decision but not so much for people doing this. The reason why doctors swears in is because they are to make those calls that could easily decides a person's life or death

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

#204

Post by andi999 »

leeoniya wrote: post #145
ezoe wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, software can be really complex it's possible to make it so no one programmer can understand the whole picture. The tasks can be divided so the individual programmers are given order like "do X in condition of Y" which itself seems harmless and lawful, but combining them lead to malicious behaviours.

this is precisely the problem. few physicists knew they were all collectively building a nuclear bomb because the big picture was well compartmentalized. feynman only found out because he picked the locks of his colleagues to piece it all together.

Can you point to the part of the book where it is stated that only few physicist (not including Feynman) knew this? I remember it very differently. From my memory:

- lock picking was for fun and didnt gain info - some warehouse workers didnt know about critical mass of uranium and stored the stuff to closely together

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

#205

Post by jimnotgym »

jbay808 wrote: post #198
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…

> 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. This is where a strict licensing requirement, like Canada's P. Eng, can empower the engineer. If you think what you're being asked to do would violate your professional ethics, not only can you decline to do it, but you have a system to ensure that…

Indeed it is the same with Chartered Accountants. Management can make whatever decisions they think they can make, but an accountant won't inact things that are unethical at the risk of their charter and professional standing.

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

#206

Post by chii »

ilaksh wrote: post #181
skissane wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

That's completely the wrong comparison and context. The reason MCAS came about was because management wanted to try to fudge a larger engine into an outdated design created for a different purpose rather than do the engineering and certification necessary for the new requirements and to update the system. Management wanted to save money. Of course the engineering leadership did not want to fudge something -- they wan…

Which demonstrates the irrelevancy of a hippocratic oath for engineers. Because the complexity of the system is such that no single engineer understands it all, and thus no single engineer is (or feels) responsible.

Blaming it on management is also irrelevant, since management merely takes the advice of engineers, and do financial/business trade offs to maximize profit. If the engineers cannot tell that MCAS system could fail this way (due to the complexity), management will not question it.

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

#208

Post by didibus »

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…

> Since software engineers are necessary and sufficient to produce software, they should always be held responsible, and any oath should fall on engineers.

That's not true in any way. Lots of software is written by people who don't even have a degree, others by some who have a computer science degree, but not an engineering one, etc.

The other issue is that software is rarely unethical. The unethical bit often comes from the way it is used.

And I'd have to agree with OP. In an idealist world you could assume software engineers would all be ready to quit their job at any sight of unethical affair, even say, launching something to production with a known vulnerability, or without anything but the most rigorous security review process having passed. But in practice, you're not going to achieve this result, unless you put a framework to incentivize software engineers towards being ethical. If you allowed them to sue their employer, and made it that they more often win the lawsuit, for asking them to build something unethical, or insisting that they do so even after the SE said it was unethical, or to retaliate in any way to an SE refusing to build something on ground of ethics, then you'd maybe start to see results. Otherwise, won't happen, and you've only created a scape goat to make it even easier for companies to push for unethical software, since they can now just blame SE they coerce into building it anyways.

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

#209

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#210

Post by [deleted] »

tehsauce wrote: post #170
matz1 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethics are subjective and always evolving. I think Engineering ethics is not to tell you what to build or not to build but rather to tech you what is the likely outcome if you decided to build x or not to build x. Based on that its up to you to decide whatever to do or not do it.

I'm not sure what your engineering experience is, but I'm pretty certain that >80% of engineers are not in a position to refuse to work and quit their job without a severe impact on their career. And the same goes for managers and directors, all the way up to the top. Fail to explore a new technology your competitor is already working on? You've just damaged your company and all your employees. The only way to deal w…

[deleted]
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