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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

#71

Post by SllX »

trimbo wrote: post #49
SllX wrote: post #16

Translation: we need to increase barriers of entry to working in this field by spreading the social cancer that is vocational licensing to software engineering.

How do you hire an architect to design your house? Pick a doctor? Pick a lawyer?

That’s a bad faith question asked in an attempt to setup a straw man argument and you know it, and I know it, so cut the crap. Worry about the guy writing software for all the nuclear power plants we’re not building, not the guy who makes webshit, word processors and compilers for a living.

Architects, Doctors and Lawyers are closer to one extreme, you can make as strong a case for licensing them as you can for not licensing them. Software engineers are vocationally with the florists, where licensing is less a matter of ethics or workmanship or safety as it is an artificial government sanctioned means of preventing new competition from entering the market, or only allowing it in a controlled and revocable manner.

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

#72

Post by logicchains »

juanbyrge wrote: post #55

We need to go far beyond that -- we need an actual profession. It always strikes me as odd that someone can go through a 4 week bootcamp and call themselves a software engineer. Robert Martin has been advocating this for point for years -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17vTLSkXTOo

>It always strikes me as odd that someone can go through a 4 week bootcamp and call themselves a software engineer

Why? If four weeks is enough for somebody to learn enough that they can build Joe the Plumber a slightly nicer-looking website that he's happy with, what's wrong with that? A lot of excellent software engineers have zero days of formal software education. Even Donald Knuth doesn't have a software engineering degree; he has physics and maths degrees. Should Donald Knuth be forbidden from developing software because he doesn't have a piece of paper saying "software engineering degree"?

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

#74

Post by baggy_trough »

austincheney wrote: post #66

It’s unfortunate, perhaps to the point of irrelevance, that a need for ethics was raised and then summarily limited to AI. Software, all software, needs an ethical standard and it currently has nothing remotely close in common practice. This will be a hard sell though, because most developers have no idea what ethics are, why they would be needed, or how they apply to practice. Frequently when the idea of ethics are…

Certainly we can be very happy that it is so.

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

#77

Post by jrumbut »

p1necone wrote: post #51
batiudrami wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the point is that we can't just rely on individual ethics to enact change. People have bills to pay and kids to feed, if it's all on the man at the bottom to say no then a lot of bad software is still going to be created.

I think making a statement as an industry helps avoid some of this stuff even being asked. With research you can easily find doctors who are brought in to assist with torture or other heinous crimes, but in general I would expect it to be harder to find a doctor to help with my project of creating a more addictive cigarette versus finding a web developer to help me market them.

There's some (not a lot, but some) power in a profession just claiming to have ethics, even if there is no enforcement and change in the hearts of practitioners.

Plus, at some point, we all just have to own what we do with our lives. It's great to advocate for systemic change but doing your own small part is at least as important.

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

#80

Post by Aerroon »

tfehring wrote: post #41
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…

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…

How about a compromise then? Software engineers are responsible for the negative consequences of the software. Any and all responsibility they take is then also shared with every person that is above them in the hierarchy.

Eg a developer does something and society finds this unethical and punishes them. The developer's boss, the boss's boss, the boss's boss's boss etc up to the CEO all get punished in the same way. Furthermore, to avoid companies trying to shield themselves from this by putting their developers into a different company, it will apply to software that you get from someone else too.

Suddenly this doesn't sound very appealing anymore, does it?

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