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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

Corollary: plenty of skilled engineers with fewer moralistic constraints will jump at the chance to do interesting work for high pay. For a company as large and wealthy as Google, they can continue to raise offer salaries until they are adequately staffed.

There is a school of thought that recommends “moral” people doing “immoral” work because if those people left then other “immoral” people will take those jobs and more readily implement “immoral” features. So the “moral” engineers have an incentive to stay and act as a front line against “immoral” actions, or at least have an insider’s position for whistleblowing.

Military drones are here to stay, and whether or not the US builds them, other military powers certainly will.

Ultimately, I don’t think this changes anything.

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These two comments, the parent and grandparent, capture the essential challenge of integrity in engineering. You can have integrity and choose not to work on things you feel are morally wrong, or your can choose to set aside your reservations and continue the work. It is not an easy place to be and it causes many people stress.

I don't know if my experience is typical or not but I do know that several times in my career I have encountered or been put into a position where it was clear that 'success' was tied to doing something which I felt was also wrong. I have always chosen not to set aside my principles for that success.

And still I know people who have made the immoral choice and reaped the rewards, and then they have used that success to step into places of higher influence or control. They would no doubt argue that they were in a much better place to do good now, because they chose to do something wrong once before.

It is not surprising that this conflict is the underpinning of many dramatic stories.

It at least makes a statement. It may not prevent the work from being done, but at least these people have washed their hands of it.

"If you don't do it, someone else will" does not go infinitely far. It's entirely possible that if enough people don't do it, no one will.

The military industrial complex is a huge employer, both in the state of California and the rest of the county. The likelihood of enough people saying no to a high paying job like this is effectively zero.

And even if - wave a very large magic wand - every AI/ML engineer in the United States pledged to not work on military applications, the U.S, would just contract that same work out from the U.K., Canada, etc...

There is a limited amount of total work that can be done by those people. Every low-level employee who refuses to work on this decreases the overall capacity. Every manager who has to deal with recruiting new people and getting them up to speed reduces capacity. Every company with reduced ability to compete for bids reduces capacity. Pushing the work to foreign companies and getting more red tape involved reduces capacity. It's not zero.

> "So the “moral” engineers have an incentive to stay and act as a front line against “immoral” actions, or at least have an insider’s position for whistleblowing."

This is true if the engineer is in such a position of power within the company that he can effectively influence things towards the ethical goal. Most of typical for-profit corporation engineers who care about that ethical goal have no such position. If they strongly disagree with what they contribute to, the best decision for them and the ethical goal is to quit.

It changes the answer you give to your kid's question: "Daddy/Mommy what do you do at work?"

Do you think there is a moral difference between the person who carries a gun in the military and the person who designs it? It seems like whatever feelings, positive or negative, we have about military personnel should carry at least in part to weapons designers.

But now the "immoral" people are no longer doing whatever immoral thing they were doing before going to Google. Fewer immoral things are being done. It is a win.

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