Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
nytimes.com
Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
1–10 of 225 posts
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#2Tech has had many conscientious objectors, I've watched them come and go over the decades.
Most of them drive trucks now. A few lucky ones became artists or writers, but mostly a lot of bad outcomes.
One of these failed truck drivers even makes deliveries to the house of the person who forced him out sometimes, a fact which he loves laughing about.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#3I've long thought that tech needs like.. a guild or trade union, or a professional association of some kind. The problem though, is that it's so easy to get into, so there's no easy way to "police" ourselves, because tech has been democratized so well-- Anyone can do a code boot-camp and be up and running within weeks. Not that that's a bad thing, it just makes it harder to hold developers to a code of ethics or anything like that...
Maybe we just, as a society, need to adopt morality and ethics more deeply into our cultural DNA.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#4I've long thought that tech needs like.. a guild or trade union, or a professional association of some kind. The problem though, is that it's so easy to get into, so there's no easy way to "police" ourselves, because tech has been democratized so well-- Anyone can do a code boot-camp and be up and running within weeks. Not that that's a bad thing, it just makes it harder to hold developers to a code of ethics or anyt…
We have the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) but it's not promoted or advertised near enough in my opinion to people in the field.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#5I've long thought that tech needs like.. a guild or trade union, or a professional association of some kind. The problem though, is that it's so easy to get into, so there's no easy way to "police" ourselves, because tech has been democratized so well-- Anyone can do a code boot-camp and be up and running within weeks. Not that that's a bad thing, it just makes it harder to hold developers to a code of ethics or anyt…
Canada has a professional software engineering organization, at least in some provinces. That said, they talk a lot about ethics but then award first place at a local engineering competition to a team that tracks people's position and movements without them knowing using their cell signals (for use in airports), so maybe it doesn't do any good. Great technical work by them mind you.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#6I am honestly surprised that Dragon Fly is the last straw for people at Google. The company is the embodiment of surveillance capitalism. Why is there no talk about changing that model? It just seems the activists there are piling on the "China Scary" bandwagon (see: Huawei and ZTE losing hella business due to US pressure) rather than changing the revenue source in order to improve privacy and reduce data collection.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#7I am honestly surprised that Dragon Fly is the last straw for people at Google. The company is the embodiment of surveillance capitalism. Why is there no talk about changing that model? It just seems the activists there are piling on the "China Scary" bandwagon (see: Huawei and ZTE losing hella business due to US pressure) rather than changing the revenue source in order to improve privacy and reduce data collection.
Do people actually care about privacy or data collection these days, though? It's not clear that most do - see the amount of people who freely interact on Facebook, even though they surely must be aware that everything on that site will ultimately be something that Facebook knows about. Google just doesn't seem very different by that standard.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#8Lots of businesses do, there is nothing special about tech companies in this regard. NYT really could have used some conscientious objectors in 2003, just as one example.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#9I am honestly surprised that Dragon Fly is the last straw for people at Google. The company is the embodiment of surveillance capitalism. Why is there no talk about changing that model? It just seems the activists there are piling on the "China Scary" bandwagon (see: Huawei and ZTE losing hella business due to US pressure) rather than changing the revenue source in order to improve privacy and reduce data collection.
Do people actually care about privacy or data collection these days, though? It's not clear that most do - see the amount of people who freely interact on Facebook, even though they surely must be aware that everything on that site will ultimately be something that Facebook knows about. Google just doesn't seem very different by that standard.
I really want to tell you that you're wrong, but you're not.
Re: Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors
#10Tech needs fewer conscientious objectors, not more. These people rarely know anything about what they're protesting, and resort fearmongering and populism to get what they want without even attempting to resolve things civilly.
The most recent example is Google's AI ethics council debacle. Activist employees were so stubborn that they can't won't even let people have a discussion about AI ethics because one of them held views they disagree with. Half the authors of the American Constitution thought that slavery should be legal, but they managed draft the foundation of modern day democracy anyways.