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Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

nytimes.com

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Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#11

Post by armagon »

jammygit wrote: post #5
mfoy_ wrote: post #3

I've long thought that tech needs like.. a guild or trade union, or a professional association of some kind. The problem though, is that it's so easy to get into, so there's no easy way to "police" ourselves, because tech has been democratized so well-- Anyone can do a code boot-camp and be up and running within weeks. Not that that's a bad thing, it just makes it harder to hold developers to a code of ethics or anyt…

Canada has a professional software engineering organization, at least in some provinces. That said, they talk a lot about ethics but then award first place at a local engineering competition to a team that tracks people's position and movements without them knowing using their cell signals (for use in airports), so maybe it doesn't do any good. Great technical work by them mind you.

I'm a Canadian coder ... and my first thought, reading your comment, was, "We do?"

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#12

Post by msla »

mfoy_ wrote: post #3

I've long thought that tech needs like.. a guild or trade union, or a professional association of some kind. The problem though, is that it's so easy to get into, so there's no easy way to "police" ourselves, because tech has been democratized so well-- Anyone can do a code boot-camp and be up and running within weeks. Not that that's a bad thing, it just makes it harder to hold developers to a code of ethics or anyt…

> The problem though, is that it's so easy to get into, so there's no easy way to "police" ourselves, because tech has been democratized so well-- Anyone can do a code boot-camp and be up and running within weeks. Not that that's a bad thing, it just makes it harder to hold developers to a code of ethics or anything like that...

Moreover, "coding" is a cross-cutting concern in that a lot of people who aren't formally programmers have been sold on the idea of being able to automate parts of their job by writing code, and I'm not sure how you'd yoke all of those disparate fields (especially academics outside of industry) into a single labor organization.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#13

Post by ETHisso2017 »

It's worth remembering that most of the directly attributable harm we associate with tech was created by small entities like the NSO Group and Cambridge Analytica. Instead of conscientious objectors applying pressure to large companies, it might be better for tech employees who come across small companies doing shady activities to report them. Many times, these smaller firms are more susceptible to pressure anyways, so this is a double benefit.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#14

Post by PhasmaFelis »

armagon wrote: post #11
jammygit wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada has a professional software engineering organization, at least in some provinces. That said, they talk a lot about ethics but then award first place at a local engineering competition to a team that tracks people's position and movements without them knowing using their cell signals (for use in airports), so maybe it doesn't do any good. Great technical work by them mind you.

I'm a Canadian coder ... and my first thought, reading your comment, was, "We do?"

I think Canada has had a professional, and pretty serious, association of engineers (in the traditional sense) for a long, long time. Maybe the software thing is a spin-off of that.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#15

Post by dekhn »

0815test wrote: post #7
carom wrote: post #6

I am honestly surprised that Dragon Fly is the last straw for people at Google. The company is the embodiment of surveillance capitalism. Why is there no talk about changing that model? It just seems the activists there are piling on the "China Scary" bandwagon (see: Huawei and ZTE losing hella business due to US pressure) rather than changing the revenue source in order to improve privacy and reduce data collection.

Do people actually care about privacy or data collection these days, though? It's not clear that most do - see the amount of people who freely interact on Facebook, even though they surely must be aware that everything on that site will ultimately be something that Facebook knows about. Google just doesn't seem very different by that standard.

There is a small and very vocal privacy contingent that speaks so loudly that many people think it's representative, but it's not. Internally, with the exception of some product managers focused on growth, most googlers are very protective of privacy, probably more so than their users.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#16

Post by mc32 »

I think this is s bit naive. Americans and EU citizens could conceivably follow some protocol such that what they produce will not go against certain principles (if we even presume no such thing as dual use tech), but that would do little to stifle and control developers outside this sphere. Vladimir, Jinping, Jeong-Un, Narendra, etc., aren’t about to handicap themselves and have some realization, oh, you know what guys, we should be respecting human rights, we gotta stop.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#17

Post by nrb »

Aunche wrote: post #10

Tech needs fewer conscientious objectors, not more. These people rarely know anything about what they're protesting, and resort fearmongering and populism to get what they want without even attempting to resolve things civilly. The most recent example is Google's AI ethics council debacle. Activist employees were so stubborn that they can't won't even let people have a discussion about AI ethics because one of them h…

...and all it took was 200 years of rancor & malice and one of the bloodiest wars in the history of our country to begin to resolve. That’s a pretty extreme reduction of the founding of America with regard to those deep disagreements among the founding fathers.

Those who “disagree with” the Heritage Foundation probably take offense by their propensity to outright lie and manipulate to achieve their objectives, most of which run contrary to the values of those working on Google’s AI teams. In light of that, I highly doubt they see Heritage as good-faith actors.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#19

Post by hnruss »

While I agree that individuals should consider the ethics of the projects that they work on, I think it's unfair to place the entire burden on them. Those in management who make the product requirements in order to sell the software are in the best position to evaluate the ethics of how software will be used. Why haven't I read a story about management conscientiously objecting to something?

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#20

Post by mfoy_ »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #14
armagon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a Canadian coder ... and my first thought, reading your comment, was, "We do?"

I think Canada has had a professional, and pretty serious, association of engineers (in the traditional sense) for a long, long time. Maybe the software thing is a spin-off of that.

In Ontario, at least, "engineer" is a protected designation.

http://www.peo.on.ca/

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