Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors • Hacker News Board

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#51

Post by pdimitar » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #25

hnruss wrote: post #19

While I agree that individuals should consider the ethics of the projects that they work on, I think it's unfair to place the entire burden on them. Those in management who make the product requirements in order to sell the software are in the best position to evaluate the ethics of how software will be used. Why haven't I read a story about management conscientiously objecting to something?

I’m in management (at a company that doesn’t make anything where conscientious objection could be relevant). When we make other ethics-based judgment calls, we don’t go crowing about them generally. They’re simply “how things are done around here.”

Maybe you should tell the world about it. More people need inspiration to stand up to morally bankrupt leaders. Your story might just push them in the right direction.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#52

Post by pdimitar » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

geofft wrote: post #44

ben509 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being smaller, though, those companies can simply be up front about what they do during recruiting and people who don't like it won't sign up for them. Succinctly, prudes don't work in porn.

Is there a name for this phenomenon in general? Your phrasing is quite clear but apparently novel, and I think it happens a lot - anti-war clergy don't apply to be military chaplains, so soldiers and commanders hear biased opinions of whether their work is incompatible with their religion compared to civilians of the same faith; people who don't think self-driving cars are a good goal tend not to apply for self-drivi…

Selection bias, filter bubble, self-selection -- all these could apply to a varying degree.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#53

Post by AstralStorm » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

ABCLAW wrote: post #27

I think the imposition of this burden on engineers is the result of our belief that our legislators are too incompetent or unwilling to act in the fact of clear moral hazards. Tech has a very strong history of conscientious objectors. They're not the problem. Other institutions need to do their part.

Guess who pays the most lobbyists. That on the point of moral hazards.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#54

Post by spaced-out » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

itronitron wrote: post #45

dageshi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the only place I see the kind of rabid hatred of Google and Facebook for their data collection practices are here on HN. Of course these people want their services, actually expect them for free, continuously at the same standard. They just don't want to be tracked, don't want to pay for them, don't want to be advertised too and don't have any real solutions on how they would be paid for other than some handwavin…

>> don't want to be advertised too Most people probably don't mind seeing advertisements. It's just completely ridiculous that Google or FB think they need to track individuals in order to provide targeted advertising. If someone searches for 'football', then just show a fucking ad that is relevant to 'football' along with the search results.

What makes companies like Google valuable is that they can tell whether the user searching "football" should be shown an ad for "American football" or soccer.

For that, you need tracking.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#55

Post by Retric » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #53

ABCLAW wrote: post #27

I think the imposition of this burden on engineers is the result of our belief that our legislators are too incompetent or unwilling to act in the fact of clear moral hazards. Tech has a very strong history of conscientious objectors. They're not the problem. Other institutions need to do their part.

Guess who pays the most lobbyists. That on the point of moral hazards.

That’s less sinister than you might think. New legislation is more common for new industries.

Consider the internet began as the Arpanet is just 50 years ago. For much of that time the idea that the average person would be online from their own home would have seemed like crazy science fiction.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#56

Post by AstralStorm » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #49

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...

That does not give any moral right to corporation to suppress clear facts. No matter how bad they are for their PR.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#57

Post by 3xblah » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

"We are a small - as-of-yet unincorporated - nonprofit providing pro bono consulting on algorithmic and policy issues arising from the proliferation of: Statistical inference / Automated decision making - often called 'AI', ..."

From the author's website, listed at the bottom.

Imagine if journalists and other people posting to the www called "AI" what it actually is, instead of constantly portraying it as something futuristic to capture people's imaginations.

Even terms like "statistical inference" and "automated decision-making" could probably be explained using more common language to be comprehensible to the general public.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#58

Post by AstralStorm » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #16

I think this is s bit naive. Americans and EU citizens could conceivably follow some protocol such that what they produce will not go against certain principles (if we even presume no such thing as dual use tech), but that would do little to stifle and control developers outside this sphere. Vladimir, Jinping, Jeong-Un, Narendra, etc., aren’t about to handicap themselves and have some realization, oh, you know what g…

At least they won't be handed solutions to make their dictatorship more effective and harder to avoid. Much less to combat.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#59

Post by klez » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #49

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...

No, it's not premised on that only. If that was the case they wouldn't be talking about JEDI and Maven.

Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors

#60

Post by vorhp » Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #46

saagarjha wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discussions about ethical, privacy, surveillance issues get hand waved and diluted here. Do they? I tend to find that Hacker News often has a lot of discussion of ethics, especially with respect to technology.

Entirely one-sided discussion (to put it kindly), with dissenters finding their comments invisible. For as good as the discussion around here usually is, there are some topics that even HN cannot have an open discussion on, and that happens to be one of them. Try an experiment: Argue in a thread that Facebook/Google/etc. are anything less than mustache-twirling-villian levels of evil, or that the people that work for…

Arguing against the mainstream position can even get your comment flagged. Doing it a few times (even about unrelated topics) will get your account banned for being "incendiary". HN is an echo chamber. But that's not surprising, all Internet communities are an echo chamber to some point.