161–170 of 225 posts
This article is premised on the idea that basically everything the Chinese government does is unethical, which is debatable. For one, the Chinese government is largely supported by its population. There might actually be engineers working on Dragonfly who do not believe the project is unethical. It's not that black and white...
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How would one know if the Chinese government was supported by the population or not, given that anyone expressing a contrary opinion is likely to be a thorn in the eye that is China's surveillance state?
It's quite apparent to anyone who has lived there for a while and talked to people. Some large scale anonymous surveys done by not particularly sympathetic outsiders also confirm it (e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/0... ).
I wrote an article on why this kind of thinking is naive a while back. I still think it is naive. https://ctsp.berkeley.edu/ethical-pledges-for-individuals-an...
I believe that it is dangerous to conflate job choice with conscientious objection.
Everyone should be held accountable for what they spend their day contributing to - this shouldn't be a special case.
Comparing this to a situation in which someone doesn't want to participate in compulsory murder, and in some cases risks being killed themselves, is not helpful.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientious_objector#cite_no...
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I feel that many MBA's treat immoral behavior as just PR debt.
It's not like programmers are some different moral class. "Many of X are immoral" applies to almost all X.
Disheartening to see so many apathetic or downright hostile responses on here. I applaud this article for taking a stand.
Good money is hard to turn down, for any reason.
Compensation, including perks, is usually very good in tech in comparison to many other industries. Most people rationalize and convince themselves that they're not really doing bad things, and that it's someone else who's the problem. In some companies, the culture is also that of being oblivious (or acting oblivious) to the harm caused by the work. Facebook is the best example of this. Has there been any conscienti…
> Has there been any conscientious objector in that company? No it's a cult. They wouldn't hire you unless you drank the koolaid.
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.
A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" [0] I believe that it is dangerous to conflate job choice with conscientious objection. Everyone should be held accountable for what they spend their day contributing to - this shouldn't be a special case. Comparing this to a situation in which someone doesn't want to participate in compulsory murder, and in so…
But on the other hand, there is a plausible parallel. The reason for strong controls on privacy is because every couple of generations governments tend to do a lot of damage to their own citizens.
If I thought the worst that was going to happen was the risk of being wrongly accused, public shaming or something, then privacy isn't really worth it. I trust law enforcement to be generally correct in assessing the situation, and if you are doing something shameful you may as well be shamed.
Privacy is important because it is one layer of protection against institutions participating in the murder of citizens, seen in Germany, China, Russia in the last generation and China + others this generation. Who knows for next generation? Change is very quick - there is no law of nature that says it won't be an Anglophone country. We can get thingy about whether a conscientious objector has to be the last person pulling the trigger or not, but in practice that distinction is not an important one.
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I get the point you're making, and it's valid... but "Vladimir, Jinping, Jeong-Un, Narendra, etc" is a bit offensive. One's ethnic background, and even citizenship, does not define one's morality. Take a look at the list of names on http://neveragain.tech/ - it's not all Americans and Europeans.
I think you might have misunderstood me. Those leaders are not going to respect whatever ethics are set up and will ensure their own developers do what they are told irrespective of this effort. Calling out those leaders isn’t an affront to their citizens any more than calling out George W (or Obama or Trump) is an affront to Americans.