Oh yeah, WE are the problem.
Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
431–440 of 544 posts
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#432It doesn’t work for doctors in the U.S. (see opioid epidemic, pharmaceutical company deals, etc.), why would it work for Software Engineers?
“All the nations of the world may sign up for the kinds of principles and rules we've described now, but will everybody follow them? Will everybody even sign them? Well, we don't yet know. But if you get these kinds of laws or principles adopted, it makes it easier to galvanize everyone to stand up and defend them. It makes it easier to hold the violators accountable.”
It sounds more like a mandatory code of conduct for all software projects.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are orthogonal topics, though. This isn't about trust. Is using Libre Office Calc for operating a death camp more ethical than using MS Excel? Is the creation and use of an armed autonomous drone justifiable and ethical as long as its firmware is open source? Are misinformation bots and fake news generators OK, as long their source code is freely available for use and further modification?
well, then using Hippocratic Oatch is not a right metaphor. Doctors are supposed to take care of their patients and not judge their morals, even if such patient is a death camp commander.
Yup, if I'm a Libre office developer what am I suppose to do to prevent nazis using my program? It's absurd to put this weight on a software developer.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I mean, that is good of you to have a moral backbone, unfortunately there are many people behind you that will do the same job in software and they can be located anywhere in the world.
> good of you to have a moral backbone I don't want other people making decisions on morality for me. There are people who don't believe that software developers should develop software for the U.S. government because they don't like the way immigration law is being enforced. I'll make my own decisions about what is and isn't "moral", thanks.
Where did this come from? The parent comment simply commended the grandparent comment for not bribing a government official to push a project with poor privacy for users. I don’t see why anyone would see that as a challenge to their moral code.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a lawyer does something unethical, they could be disbarred. If a doctor does something unethical, their license may be revoked. These end your career. There are already professional organizations for developers and engineers. ACM's ethics code even includes, "avoid harm." You don't need to be in any of them to write software. We would need to pass laws dictating that Facebook et al can only employ licensed softwar…
> These end your career. Agreed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24106617 > You don't need to be in any of them to write software. Then they are irrelevant. > Do we really want to impose that level of gatekeeping on the profession? Yes, absolutely. Everybody benefits except developers who probably shouldn't be writing software professionally in the first place.
The key to lawyers and doctors losing their licenses to practice is that they have professional bodies that will police/enforce the rules. However, they also have a monopoly to provide those services.
I suspect corporations don't want limit software engineers to those with licenses only as there would be less of them available and costs of said licensed software engineers would increase.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
> he works at wants to use the MCAS for a non ethical purpose (namely operate and hide the existence of MCAS even when it is unsafe to do so). You think a programmer, handed a spec and asked to implement it, can be expected to know that their employer (or the employer's customer) wants to use it for a "non ethical purpose"? Again, I can't know for sure, but I doubt the programmers who wrote MCAS (who most likely didn…
With all of that being said, were these software engineers (probably subcontractors) even given access to actual MCAS readouts or, more likely, virtualizations of expected readouts. These people probably didn't account for this type of faulty readout because the virtual machine never put out that type of fault. Most types of development in these large companies is so compartmentalized that it's next to impossible to…
Generally, there is somebody (typically in software assurance or systems engineering) who is supposed to ensure the fidelity of the simulator. Additionally, the hazard analysis or failure modes effects analysis should trace to specific test cases.
Of course, there’s all kinds of pressures that make these fall through the cracks. I vaguely remember an article stating some of these documents in the case of MCAS were not up to date
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#437How about we start with a Hippocratic oath for public company executive management.
"I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant: I will respect the duty to increase shareholder profits by any means necessary."
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#438As a Microsoft employee how could I take a Hippocratic oath and continue to work or do for Microsoft? Is DOD and ICE not harming people? It's not the engineers that need to take the oath, it's the greedy business folk that will do anything for a dollar.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#439Why not some sort of professional standards body with examinations for admittance like any other engineering discipline.
Re: Microsoft President: We Need a Hippocratic Oath for Software Engineers
#440I’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. 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.
The nazi officers who committed most of the atrocities used similar arguments. "I was just following orders!"
I expect better from a software engineer on hacker news. You've single handedly convinced most here - through your weak logic - that such an oath is necessary.