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Re: "The ethics in technology"
@Morgan
@mozz I don't see any particular reason to think that that's what's happening here. Perhaps I missed some detail.
Under the "What I should do then" section of the blog post, the author suggests that you:
I'm not trying to be uncharitable here, really. I think the author's rules are probably all learned from experience and are *true* in the author's environment as well as my own. But I'm sad when I look at them because the trend that I see is "stay in your lane, stick to the implementation details...". Which is something that I've seen a lot in engineering orgs when ethical concerns (or business concerns, for that matter) are raised.
But there is also an entirely different problem, which is when engineers honestly do their jobs with the aim of making the world a better place--or at least not worse--and have to put up with being told over and over that they / their ideas / their company are evil. It leads to a kind of numbness to input; the outside world just throws so much crap that it's hard to stay positive.
I agree with you that this is a problem. Google is not evil (because we shouldn't anthropomorphize corporations) and the people who work there aren't evil either. Nobody is backstage twiddling their mustaches and scheming up ways to screw people over. There are many things that google produces that are ethically neutral or even downright positive.
My opinion is that all of this stuff emerges slowly, organically out of a system aggressively tuned to optimize stock value for shareholders. Google just happens to be crazy good at generating value, and its incentives can often end up misaligned with actual human beings. Which sucks for the people who work there when it happens.
2023-07-26 · 2 months ago
@mozz well put--thanks :)
@mozz, with all due respect, corporations are specifically created to be anthropomorphized! And they can be, and usually are, evil -- golems designed to extract every penny of profit -- everything else be damned. And while corporations don't sit around coming up with evil ideas, the executives are empowered to sit around and come up evil ideas! Screwing people is not a goal, but is not a deterrent for implementing profitable strategies, and if that is not evil, we may have different definitions.
2023-07-27 · 2 months ago
The ethics in technology — We developers should stop just looking at the technical side of our work only. There’s social, economic and values to be taken into account when we put our minds to solve a problem. We tend to go blindly into it, without thinking what it can cause when it is released into the world. It’s like if we put a bunch of developers into a secret project to develop an Internet World Wide Nuclear Bomb a là Project Manhattan… the leaders shouldn’t really have to hide what they...