521–530 of 544 posts
Still, I'll always try to fight for the users in any code I write and, specially, in any code I control.
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…
In sufficiently complex systems, you can always blame someone else if you're motivated to do so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IssR_J0QWr4 But ultimately there's always a software engineer involved in the creation of software - and that's not true of any of the other roles you mentioned. Since software engineers are necessary and sufficient to produce software, they should always be held responsible, and any oath s…
Nah, it's not the same at all. The fundamental difference between creating a program and medicine is creating a program only has to be done once, or at least a only by a few.
Medicine on the other hand: it has to be redone with each new patient. If the Hippocratic Oath works to prevent 99.9% doctors from doing a harmful procedure then you've hit a home run. Sure, you will never completely stop some bad egg removing a perfectly good limb because a patient suffering from Xenomelia offered enough money. But who wouldn't call a thousand fold reduction a huge win.
We demonstrably have the 0.1% of programmers who are willing to break any oath. They make malware, and willingly take out Sony as mercenaries because Kim Jong-Un got pissed off at a movie. All that 0.1% has to do is write the program once. Thereafter you are not trying to discourage hoards of high skilled professional from doing it again, you are trying to stop a legion of dark net operators copying the thing and selling it to anyone. An oath is a waste of time under those circumstances.
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> I take it you have never worked outside of software. You take it wrong, and reasoning by analogy with other fields is a very risky line of logic, because they're not at all similar in terms of internal regulation and professional autonomy. First of all, in fields like medicine, that kind of responsibility is necessary because clinical autonomy is far wider than any kind of professional autonomy that software engine…
Since absolutely every other professional industry employs some manner of uniform credentialing the only way opposing it in software, where is has not been tried in a meaningful way, makes sense is an argument from ignorance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance Your bullet points conflate experimentation with production delivery. Licensed professionals in other industries can violate the ethical sta…
Or one from experience ;-).
It may help to read all of an argument, rather than stop mid-sentence, too, but who am I to argue with Wikipedia?
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You would lose the ability to practise medicine as a license is required. Do you want to license software developers?
I think we should license some software developers - if you're developing software to be used in industries where the people using your software need to be licensed (i.e medical equipment, structural engineering, industrial control systems) then perhaps the software engineers should be similarly rigorously qualified. But if you're working on video games, or pizza delivery, or really probably like 90% of software then…
Failures of a company responsible for this kind of thing that lead to injuries or deaths can result in imprisonment of (at least) the CEO and possibly others. I'm not sure licensing is necessary here, that's what documented process is supposed to manage (change tracking, development process, etc.)
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Being expected to behave ethically is part of being an Engineer regardless of what your boss expects. Now we increasingly see real world negative consequences of the work of software engineers I don't see why they should be any different.
In some Engineering societies maybe, in general you may be liable if you construct a building you shouldn't have. Software is fundamentally different because until you run it it has no consequences, and even if you run it, it can be contained. I can write a worm and not release it on world. In that regard, it is more like engineering _plans_. I can draw up plans for a building that is designed to collapse with X numb…
The programming of said robot isn't the bad act here, it's the act the robot actually performs.
The danger of being castigated for having written something that wasn't used is that we then get into the area of thought-crimes.
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. If we were to introduce an oath we would have to take further inspiration from doctors, e.g having a certification required to do the job, or, failing that at least having an industry-wide union/guild protecting the position.
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Can you point to the part of the book where it is stated that only few physicist (not including Feynman) knew this? I remember it very differently. From my memory: - lock picking was for fun and didnt gain info - some warehouse workers didnt know about critical mass of uranium and stored the stuff to closely together
ah maybe you're right. memory might be foggy. time for a fresh re-read!
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If a doctor says no, it's because of legal liability and risk to licence. For the same reason, it's harder to hire some rando budget doctor because the field is gate-keeped by the requirement of a licence, and liability. You can't magically make Engineering the same without the same conditions. Add barriers top entry that see my pay rise, or have cheap programmers with no liability.
Engineering already has these barriers, they just aren’t required or enforced. I’ve never been on a project that requires a software product stamped by a licensed engineer. NCEES dropped the software license because there was so little demand, compared to, say, civil engineers who consider a license a rite of passage to career growth.