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Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers

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

#311

Post by bantunes »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #289

Absolutely 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…

There's checking people using your libs downstream (which, admittedly, is quite hard to do) and there's not writing software for cruise missiles.

> This can be used for good, or evil, but by whose standard?

Your own. The oath is taken by humans, and humans differ in opinion - no one can impose an absolute standard on you, and you follow your oath as you understand it. There's no board to deprive you of your license in IT.

> Any such oath is useless posturing, and subject to the whims and pressures of what's in vogue today.

It's only as good as the will to uphold it. I think that's what's in short supply among the stereotypical "bro" coders.

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

#312

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

01100011 wrote: post #17

Software engineering isn't medicine. It isn't that difficult to learn and you can wield many of the advantages without much training. If software folks refuse to assist with morally questionable tasks, those tasks will be compartmentalized and the unethical components will be handed off to people willing to do the job. Sadly, just about everyone in ML/AI is contributing to an easily weaponized technology. Every time…

> Software engineering isn't medicine. It isn't that difficult to learn

I would never hire someone that treats software engineering as something easier that medicine or other branches of engineering.

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

#313

Post by makomk »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #60
spunker540 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is behaving ethically not a part of being a designer or a PM or a director/boss?

And, what's more, isn't behaving ethically not part of being human? Aristotle and a while host of philosophers certainly thought so. Extending this, why don't we expect everyone in society to behave ethically? But then we get into arguments about what is ethical, because people disagree on that, and people naturally will disagree on what is ethical in software development, which isn't always a problem. The is a diver…

Yeah, the problem with this idea is that it assumes there's one fixed set of right ethical values everyone should agree on. Take for example the actual, original Hippocratic Oath - it required, amongst other things, doctors not to provide abortions to women. There's still a large number of Americans who hold this ethical belief, but I'd venture a guess that almost all the people pushing for ethics in software development hold the exact diametrically opposite view.

A lot of the demands for software ethics get into even fuzzier and more complicated territory, like whether the companies which control our mass communications should use that control to decide which political views people should be able to share and what they should target, whether this is good or bad for democracy, etc. Also, many of them seem to be things that would've been incredibly niche viewpoints even a decade ago. I've seen people in another thread thinking that Google promised not to use e-mail contents to sell ads originally and then snuck that in, but in reality basing ads on the contents of e-mails was part of their business model all along and it's just that no-one cared when they launched because it was so much less obnoxious than the ads on other providers. Somewhere along the way, we got this meme about big tech selling our personal information, and everyone seems to project it backwards in time onto how people felt before the meme.

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

#314

Post by watt »

MattGaiser wrote: post #133
skissane wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Said another way, engineers now need to be technical and legal experts in the business domain? Consider something like the 737 MAX debacle – did the programmers writing the MCAS code actually have enough aviation domain knowledge and understanding of where the component fit in the overall system to realise it was a threat to people's lives? I don't know, but my guess is the most likely answer is "No".

I can’t imagine software engineers staying in a company long enough to acquire it. For this to work, software engineer compensation would need to change radically.

Maybe that's the point of this oath? Software engineers will refuse to work on these areas, unless demands of the oath can be met.

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

#315

Post by throwawaygh »

austincheney wrote: post #192
spaced-out wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who actually decide to do these unethical things are the executives, not engineers. Executives are the ones who should be taking Hippocratic oaths.

So? The goal is to eliminate improper behavior not cry about it and point fingers.

So, there’s always a sucker who needs the cash or health insurance.

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

#316

Post by imtringued »

The way I see this is that someone is trying to shift responsibility away to someone who has even less power and is now in a vulnerable position.

Smells like diesel gate where executives claimed that they did not know about the cheating device. It is entirely possible to force subordinates to do things in secret in a way that cannot be traced back to the original decision maker. If there is money to be made it's going to happen.

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

#317

Post by Ygg2 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #304
Ygg2 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Dynamite is a good example of why the philosophy is complete bullshit. How about you blame the stupid evil fuckers who started all of the futile wars to try to get rich in the quagmire that was European geopolitics instead of tbe person who made them safer? It is the same sort of stupid blame shifting involved with the hippocratic oath for x nonsense. Oaths are majorly outmoded in the zeitgeist anyway because everyon…

> How about you blame the stupid evil fuckers who started all of the futile wars

And I fully agree. Expecting people to individually bear the burden of "some oath", is a fool's errand.

My point was software on its own, much like a fridge, is amoral. You can use it to store your groceries, or you can use it to store corpses.

That said, there are some extreme cases (like a gun), that have very limited non-violent uses. And IMO, that should be regulated, instead of depending on people Doing The Right Thing™.

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

#318

Post by MaxBarraclough »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #285
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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

Ah, got it :-P

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

#319

Post by Nasrudith »

jlokier wrote: post #223
tdeck wrote: post #10

> There are no common ethics codes to determine how lethal autonomous weapons and systems that are developed for the military should be used once they end up in the hands of civilians. It's interesting to me that this just presumes developing these autonomous weapons systems in the first place is ethical. I understand there is a difference of opinion on this ethical point, but it immediately frames the discussion pre…

I like the way you challenge the framing, and I agree, the right first question is "should we develop lethal autonomous weapons at all, and if so what kind is ok, what's the limit on that". The way its asked looks like an attempt to shift the Overton window until autonomous weapons of all kinds are treated as a mundane inevitability not worth worrying about, with just the niggling details subject to ethical questioni…

Well for ine autonomous weapons were already there. Landmines for one. Back in the stone age even with snares even meaning /rope/ is an autonomous weapon.

There is no human in the loop (no pun intended for snares). It decides when to strike using physics and the answer is always "yes" if it is triggered.

What makes the new "autonomous" weapons different is that they attempt target differentiation. Mobility becomes useful then when weapons systems can say "no" when presented a target. Since even the Military Industrial Complex, purveyor of unneeded bullshit which wantonly takes lives would find it impossible to sell a drone that goes around shooting missles at all targets after launch.

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

#320

Post by Nasrudith »

jimmySixDOF wrote: post #230
spunker540 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is behaving ethically not a part of being a designer or a PM or a director/boss?

That's why Smith also talks about a new DIGITAL GENEVA CONVENTION - not just a code for devs - so there is a defined framework for everyone in the chain. Pls excuse the caps, but too many people seem to ignore this very important part of his argument here.

I thought everyone ignored it because that is what would happen in practice. Like the actual Geneva convention only applying in an unconditional surrender or complete defeat.
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