221–230 of 544 posts
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.
> There are no common ethics codes to determine how lethal autonomous weapons and systems that are developed for the military should be used once they end up in the hands of civilians. It's interesting to me that this just presumes developing these autonomous weapons systems in the first place is ethical. I understand there is a difference of opinion on this ethical point, but it immediately frames the discussion pre…
The way its asked looks like an attempt to shift the Overton window until autonomous weapons of all kinds are treated as a mundane inevitability not worth worrying about, with just the niggling details subject to ethical questioning.
But big shifts like that are exactly the sort of thing serious ethical codes should be used to watch out for. Not the niggling details afterwards.
Doctors no longer take the Hippocratic Oath (because it is incompatible with a lot of difficult situations doctors are placed in). But more to the point: Why are we trying to shift focus from the wrongs large multi-nationals do to individual software engineers? Plus what would the result be if this "oath" conflicts with a manager's instructions? Maybe we should start with Microsoft, Google, Comcast, Oracle, and simil…
> Why are we trying to shift focus from the wrongs large multi-nationals do to individual software engineers? Because software engineers are the ones doing the actual work. By imposing an ethical standard on the people doing the real work the multinational executives then either accept that limitation or knowingly accept risks from intentionally violating the spirit of that limitation.
I mean, don't get me wrong, there are clear scenarios where I think many of us would choose to lose the job. For instance, I'll go unemployed vs directly causing someone to die. But those slightly more ambiguous scenarios are where we need to be enforcing it on a legislative level and the onus should be on ALL levels of the company (engineering and management).
When Bezos fires every single warehouse employee, what happens if the job they start retraining for also gets automated away before they can even start? And the next one, and the next one. If nobody is making a salary anymore, then it doesn't matter how much lower the prices are on Amazon (due to being produced in automated factories and shipped from automated warehouses) unless Jeff decides to reduce those prices all the way down to 'free'. At that point the assumptions underlying the world's economy would break down in a way that makes a corona shutdown look like a mild hiccup.
No software engineer is going to be able to do anything to help alleviate this. If you want to do something about this, you need to go into politics, not tech.
I could get behind that, dont think you will though.
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…
Organizations that went through true iterative process to reduce failure rate like NASA figured out that they needed to allow true authority to specific domain experts to blow the whistle and not face reprisal or suffer for it. Oaths fix nothing, you need organizational change, and if someone is going to do that, its the management in charge.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I wasn't implying engineers should be entirely blameless. Everyone has a limited understanding of legal systems too complex for one person to fully grasp. And workers far below the level of decision makers should be judged according to evidence of their knowledge and responsibility. Likewise those who give orders should bear more responsibly. All these "companies take on a life of their own" arguments sound a lot…
It may be fine in some countries, but saying that you’ll make some organization sizes and structures illegal, barring other criminal activity, smells like a violation of the freedom of association.
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?
Pls excuse the caps, but too many people seem to ignore this very important part of his argument here.