I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but software needs a professional associstion (like the AMA) with teeth. Ethics are not easy, and without collective governing power, they simply won’t exist.
The original Hippocratic Oath did a fairly good job of this by stipulating ways that a doctor could prove his competence. Doctors who adhered to the oath weren't better doctors because they had some kind of internal moral compass or external adjudicating body. They were better doctors because only the doctors who had competency to spare were willing to make the sacrifices that adherence to the oath required.
https://hackernoon.com/on-the-difficulty-of-creating-a-data-...
Ethical problems get solved (as much as that type of problem can ever really be "solved") by individual practitioners refusing to work with other individual practitioners who refuse to adhere to some basic best practices. That creates a network of competent and trustworthy individuals, who are still totally fallible, but who put their own practice up toe constant public scrutiny.
Ethical problems are problems of systemic risk. Systemic risk doesn't get solved through organizations.
> The governing body would not just be there to arbitrate, advocate, or negotiate. They would also be there for promoting training and sharing of knowledge.
this reads like duct-tape solutions. it's always the case that a governing body grows and grows and gets in the way. "it's not just there to XYZ, it also BLAHBLAHBLAH".
a governing body is one possible solution to the problem of people not understanding ethics (or how to figure out what ethics are), that I don't think will solve the larger problem.
a governing body will need to be run by practitioners of governance, and enforced by practitioners of enforcement.
ethics needs to be practiced everywhere, all the time. and a governing body won't make that happen.
people need to be learning about why their activities are "good" or "bad" or "questionable".
in my (simplified version) view: we're not lacking incentive to work (money!), we're lacking incentive to not work (people shouting at us for being assholes for doing asshole work [e.g. bombs, baby killing, evil algos]).
we need to cultivate behaviors of ethical culture... instead we're cultivating behaviors that promote short-term-ism (buy your way to happiness, bomb your way to safety, build your dream home on loan!, opportunity cost services saving us from having to cleaning up after ourselves, trash removal services that vanish things away to faraway dumps we never think of)
Engineering is even more diverse and penetrating, and software is merely a subset.
It ain’t scope.
Roughly 30% of US workers have mandatory occupational licensing before they can do their jobs. Licensed services have roughly 15% higher prices than nonlicensed ones. Most of those workers are not in safety critical jobs - on average an interior designer faces more stringent licensing requirements than an EMT.
Unions and professional associations have consistently been the main lobbyists advocating professional licensing as a way to keep wages high (by keeping supply low) and guarantee a role for the organization. Even in medicine, the number of residency slots is controlled in a way that creates a stable, minor shortage of doctors.
I'm not against all licensing and oversight, obviously. I'd rather have a cap on residencies than untrained doctors, if those are the only two choices. But the history of 'every other endeavor' looks to me like a lesson in how oversight organizations will cause exactly this problem.
Ethical software with less competition seems better than unethical software with more competition, eh?
If you want to take the required measures to not circumvent the gate-keeper, that is strangling the entire sector. Since most developed countries see this sector as the basis for future growth, so doing that seems unlikely. Beyond that, the growth would probably move to less restrictive places.
My worry wouldn't be "they'll cut down on competition to ensure ethical behavior", it would be "they'll block competition and protect their member instead of ensuring ethics."
I think the top-level essay here is extremely cogent: oversight is almost always limited to ensuring competence. In medicine, that gets us 'ethics' when ethics means "providing good care and avoiding bad care". (It hasn't gotten us ethics when the question is anything complicated, like defining mental illness.) Competence in data science and software is largely orthogonal to ethics, so I expect an oversight board would achieve very little in that regard.