271–280 of 544 posts
Funny how same topic comes up every time some new issue pops up but we've had the answer nailed in the 90s.
If you want software you can trust no amount of oaths, certificates and overseer bodies will ever be enough. It's only possible to trust fully transparent software.
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…
Isn't that what a hipppocratic oath would solve. They'd be accountable to the oath before their bosses, and that would give them reasonable grounds to refuse unethical work.
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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…
The programmer still decides whether that code gets written, since they’re the one writing it! If you write or review a piece of software, even if the spec was written by the PM/business, you’re endorsing whatever that spec says and all of its ethical implications. “Just following orders” is a famously poor defense at this point.
Btw I have tried this, and I was just replaced by someone who would just follow orders. Then I get to come in after and clean up the mess ..
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In the current state of things, that is factually true. However the same argument could be applied to labor abuses in the textile/garment and shoe manufacturing industry. Most people who follow news are probably aware that about 20 years ago Nike, Adidas and other brands went through a period of terrible public relations disasters, after the working conditions in some of their shoe factories in developing nations wer…
The more abstract the problem the less people care. Police suffocating someone to death > 1,000,000 people being subtly spied on. "I got nothing to hide" after all.
But that's a thoroughly discredited argument.
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> 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'm sure when someone gives you the choice between continued employment and following the ethical standard you'll choose to follow the ethical standard. 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 leg…
It wasn't about whether or not I got to keep my job; upper management was effectively disenfranchising other employees with their policy. Who cares about my job if it must come at the expense of my team's jobs?
Moreover, managers aren't somehow better people than engineers. They don't get to be less moral just because they have less to do.
Is there evidence that doctors and lawyers are, by virtue of their oaths, codes of conduct, and background study of ethics, more ethical, moral, and upright than members of the general population? Also, whose ethics would such a Hippocratic Oath advance? For every privacy-conscious person saying that encryption-everywhere is good, there is a law enforcement officer speaking of reduced abilities to solve crimes. Imagi…
I imagine such an engineer just gets a development plan and doesn't get to see the bigger picture, implying the backdoor. It might only get enabled on integration into a larger codebase, and nobody out of the loop will be able to extrapolate its existence from what they get to know for sure.
Hence I completely agree with the argument of shifting responsibility to the developers. Seems like MS is selling more of that eyewash again.
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Wow, I’m realizing what an unpopular opinion this is on HN! Yes, as a software developer you should absolutely be accountable for the ethical concerns around what that protobuf you’re moving around from one API layer to the other is used for. You’re not a code monkey. Ask, and refuse if it’s unacceptable. I have quit jobs where the ultimate purpose of what I was building was evil. EDIT: Forum the original OP: > Softw…
So the people that wrote java.util.List are liable for all unethical software that makes use of java.util.List?