Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

capitalandgrowth.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 544 posts

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#291

Post by jlnthws »

madrox wrote: post #8

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…

Exactly. An oath means nothing: what you need is skin in the game.

Some health practitioners are literally bought by Big Pharma, by their hospital accountant, etc. How would an oath fix that? Same with engineers or any other discipline.

You need to make sure that everyone in the process has skin in the game. For me it's less about control (legislation) than about responsibility and accountability (assessments, eating your own dog food).

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#292

Post by frobozz »

The relevant difference between medicine and software development is that doctors provide a service and software developers create a product.

A doctor's responsibility is solely to the patient. When the treatment ends, the doctor has done their job. They may be responsible for long-term damage from the treatment, but that's still about something the doctor did themselves. It's like being responsible for your software randomly running amok and deleting random files on a user's computer.

When a software developer has developed some software, that product continues to exist and can be used by anyone who can run it, to do anything the software is capable of.

Turning this around, given that the doctor's "product" is a healthier patient, it would be like making doctors responsible for the evils committed by patients that they have saved.

It's easy to come up with obvious unethical scenarios, but a lot of harm can come from less predictable unethical uses. If you make your software easy to use, the result is that people outside of any ethically-aware, license-controlled bubble can use it. Where does the responsibility end?

The developers of Excel and Access have almost certainly indirectly contributed to evil software.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#293

Post by [deleted] »

Someone1234 wrote: post #32

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…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#294

Post by LockAndLol »

pvtmert wrote: post #216

The missing point: You can't become surgeon by Googling and slicing things While you can become /Software Engineer/ entirely by yourself (self taught)

The oath is going to become the new "Terms And Conditions" checkbox at the end of online courses.

> Tick here to certify that you have read and understood the Techno Oath

"Yeah yeah, whatever"

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#295

Post by shp0ngle »

toohotatopic wrote: post #201

How about a Hippocratic Oath for business leaders? This is shifting the responsibility from management towards the engineers. It's not the engineers who pulled the trigger at Facebook - or Microsoft. They build the weapons. Management fires them. This is a hypocritic ode. If somebody is acting unethically at MS then it is management. All the innovation that is not happening because MS is abusing their position. Two t…

The website is called "capital and growth" so of course they won't advocate for business leaders being actually responsible for anything.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#297

Post by PJDK »

To my mind there are two types of ethics around being a software engineer. The first is just normal ethics, and it applies equally to everyone else - am I working towards something I think is ethical? For this reason someone might choose not to work at PornHub, or Facebook or Boeing or whatever. That's a personal choice. If you want to change the world so PornHub doesn't exist anymore, the solution isn't to force software developers into an oath that forbids it, but to do normal, boring politics.

There are professional ethics, but they are much more tightly bound - more comparable to an accountant's ethics than a doctor. For me that will be along the lines of

- I will not use trickery in a demo to decieve others about the progress of a project

- I will report all bugs and mistakes I find and make, regardless of any personal cost this may bring on me.

- I will be honest in my dealings with non technical people, and do my upmost to accurately represent the work I have done and the work I plan to do.

- I will make decisions and advocate for changes for the benefit of the codebase and organisation, not for the benefit of my own CV

... And so on - you can pretty quickly get into controversial territory I'm sure.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#298

Post by bryanrasmussen »

madrox wrote: post #8

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…

>To say it’s on the engineer to do no harm puts them in the tenuous position of doing the job or being replaced by someone who will. That isn’t setting us up for success.

obviously for a hippocratic type oath to work you need the same kind of system in place for qualifying engineers that you do for doctors and not allowing anyone to work as an engineer who failed the ethics board.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#299

Post by Ygg2 »

BeetleB wrote: post #175
Ygg2 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the start and goal are so far away you can legitimately claim you can't see the actual harm in writing something. You write a tool for let's say recognizing faces. Will it be used for login onto computer? Tracking dissidents? IDing corpses? Who knows. What if you start as something 100% ethical. But your company pivots to unethical application?

> You write a tool for let's say recognizing faces. Will it be used for login onto computer? Tracking dissidents? IDing corpses? Who knows. I mentioned this in another comment, but I'll say it again: Irrespective of any legal/ethical concerns, yes, I would like to know! If my boss just came to me and said "build a facial recognition system" I certainly will ask how it is going to be used. Not because I care about eth…

> If they pivot after my work is done, I won't feel responsible.

So if you invented dynamite you wouldn't feel responsible for its use?

But, let's change it a bit more personal. You write an awesome OSS yaml parser. It's so good, that GFW of China uses it as a main component, and this gets published in the news.

What would you do? Nothing you did changed, but suddenly your work is powering an unethical component.

Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

#300

Post by aiethicsthread »

PJDK wrote: post #297

To my mind there are two types of ethics around being a software engineer. The first is just normal ethics, and it applies equally to everyone else - am I working towards something I think is ethical? For this reason someone might choose not to work at PornHub, or Facebook or Boeing or whatever. That's a personal choice. If you want to change the world so PornHub doesn't exist anymore, the solution isn't to force sof…

>I will not use trickery in a demo to decieve others about the progress of a project

This is a good starting point. All those who've used dodgy marketing to convince investors that their machine learning is AI and so we're 'first generation of humans to endow computers with the ability to make decisions' have lent their words to a culture war with no basis in fact.

Post reply on HN