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Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
281–290 of 544 posts
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#282Let's assume that the president of Microsoft said this but it was taken out of context. He of all people understands who decides what gets built and how it is used.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
> pretty far away from the Hippocratic oath's requirement to abstain from causing harm So does abortion and euthanasia, and probably plenty of other practices as well. Both of those are without doubt harm-causing practices, with their related points of controversy primarily revolving around whether the harm that is caused is worthwhile in the context of the alternative being a potentially greater harm. Putting aside…
> So does abortion and euthanasia, and probably plenty of other practices as well. A less controversial example would be something like chemotherapy. In fact, a lot of treatments for terminal and chronic ailments are pretty harmful.
All 3 of those examples are actually covered by the “original” Hippocratic Oath (which probably wasn’t written by Hippocrates, incidentally).
> Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.
Chemo is obviously a bit different though, because the potential harm caused by denying abortion or euthanasia is (generally speaking) the potential to deny somebody the right to exercise a form of personal agency over their body/life. The controversy isn’t really a medical one.
The Oath also doesn’t really address treatments that have potentially harmful side effects, and it’s debated whether the oath allows doctors to perform surgery. It’s basically not fit for purpose in 2020. If you wanted to suggest that software engineers adopt a code of ethics similar to that of doctors, what you’d be really suggesting is something like “We need a AMA Code of Medical Ethics for software engineers”. Which obviously doesn’t have the same broad appeal and simplicity of an oath.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So management bears no blame for requiring illegal work be done, on pain of termination? No, I wouldn't say that. In many cases, management and engineering share the blame jointly and severally since they both have an opportunity to stop it. > Said another way, engineers now need to be technical and legal experts in the business domain? Engineers should know enough about their business domains to understand the eth…
> Ethics and law are orthogonal, so thankfully this is generally much easier than being a legal expert. I suspect a lot of philosophers would disagree with you that ethics is much simpler than interpreting laws.
Philosophers would also make a distinction between being ethical and being an ethics expert.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> "I got nothing to hide" after all But that's a thoroughly discredited argument. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21416115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923548
Sorry that’s a /s
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#286I’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…
> Software engineers are accountable to their bosses before their users, no matter how high minded we like to pretend to be I've quit jobs in the past because of ethical concerns about the way in which those above me have been acting. In one case this involved bribery of senior government officials to push through a project that put at risk the privacy of hundreds of thousands of people. If you go along with shit lik…
Also once you learn how to ignore the ethical stuff it tends to repeat. Just like bad coding habits.
There is no point wasting energy and time around such people if they don't share the same values.
It's not complicated (requires some networking) to find in any org, the characters who will "do whatever it takes".
Then getting them kicked out, opposing them, sidelining them, subverting them, avoiding them are all choices every Engineer has.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I was only following orders." Edit to add: If you are being asked to perform illegal or unethical acts as part of your employment, then perhaps termination is an ideal course of action? Unless of course your personal enrichment outweighs legalities or ethics in your worldview?
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…
If a person is skirting responsibility at the expense of a structure, it isn't he fault of the structure but the one skirting responsibility.
Structures can and should be changed in this case. But shouldn't be outlawed.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#288Why should this concept be limited to just AI? How many developers knowingly enabled or directly wrote software for predatory companies like Facebook, (sometimes/mostly?) Google, sometimes Apple, historically often Microsoft, many of the large banks, Verizon and ATT and Comcast (and probably other major telcos), debt collection agencies, payday lenders, and on and on.
I'm quite certain that many HN readers knowingly contribute to companies that do plenty of evil. Heck, some of the HN crowd have created startups that specifically do gray things just for money.
Practically speaking, there's no way to know that your efforts will not somehow result in doing harm to others. Rather than taking some oath which frankly has little meaning without full knowledge of the outcomes, I think it would be more beneficial for everyone to make a concerted effort to get out in the world - see places that are in severe poverty or political turmoil. Meet other people who are very different from our bubble. Then we start to have an idea how even some of our good intentions can result in worse situations for others (such as giving lots of clothes away to have shipped to Africa).
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#289Absolutely not.
No.
No again.
A thousand times, no.
The reason that doctors take an oath is because their practice directly affects people. A patient puts their leg, their heart, their eyes right into the doctors hands. Any mistake, any "experiments"... this directly harms the patient in an objective way.
A "do no harm" oath doesn't work with software. A software engineer writes a piece of code. This can be used for good, or evil, but by whose standard? Once the code is out there, the software developer cannot be held liable for its abuse, except perhaps in the limited circumstance that the software was designed FOR abuse. (ie: a zero day released without responsible disclosure).
I would never take an oath that I wouldn't release "harmful software". First, because "harmful" today has become incredibly subjective. (Someone might say I'm being harmful in writing this!) Second, because it's difficult to tell how something will be used, and I don't have the time or energy to follow up with everyone using it to make sure they're using it to my liking.
Last year, someone got a lot of attention for taking down their insignificant NodeJS is_even implementation when they discovered that ICE was using it. Can you imagine what would happen if Redis disappeared, because the authors discovered it was being used by some disagreeable activists?
I'll tell you, very simply. People would continue to use it, having archived the source. The activists, ICE, you, me, everyone. Any such oath is useless posturing, and subject to the whims and pressures of what's in vogue today. Gives the appearance of doing good, without having to do any good.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#290Why should this concept be limited to just AI? How many developers knowingly enabled or directly wrote software for predatory companies like Facebook, (sometimes/mostly?) Google, sometimes Apple, historically often Microsoft, many of the large banks, Verizon and ATT and Comcast (and probably other major telcos), debt collection agencies, payday lenders, and on and on. I'm quite certain that many HN readers knowingly…
So true. I'd say much, much more harm has been done by regular CRUD programmers than any others. You really think AI is going to introduce regulation around this?
They're just going to treat it like munitions, because that's all the lawmakers know.