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Comment by agentofoblivion | Hacker News Reader

This is easy to pontificate about. How do you actually bring about culture change?

This is a great question. I would agree a lot with gnulinux here. I have a degree in physics and took some engineering class. In both the engineering classes and physics classes we talked about ethics, moreso in the engineering ones. We also had a required ethics course.

But I will add that another thing to help is to encourage it within your social sphere. This can easily be done by just asking your colleagues about their ethical concerns. You can also encourage this by talking about things that aren't your software. This helps everyone get in the frame of "I need to constantly think about ethical implications". Other people are talking about fear of being fired. While I think that has to come down to you and your ethical code/leverage, it is much harder to fire and replace a team. So I would actively encourage this kind of talk. Having worked as an engineer I can tell you that we constantly did talk about ethical implications of things that we worked on, things that our technology could be used for, and if other companies were doing ethical things. It's hard to draw the line sometimes, but the best thing I can think of is to constantly be talking about it and being aware that you have power.

Education. Engineering and science schools should have good and rigorous ethics courses. Taught by actual philosophers and engineers on the field dealing with ethically sensitive issues (like writing a real-time OS for an airplane, self-driving car etc). An engineer or a scientist shouldn't graduate without the ability to reason about the social and ethical implications of their jobs. Engineers, physicists, scientists, social workers change the world more than most individuals and thus they need the ability to reason ethically more than most individuals.

Do you think that teaching an unethical person about ethics makes them ethical? I never understood the point of ethics classes.

It’s hard to imaging that people working on emissions cheating would have been less likely to work on this, had they only taken the CS ethics class.

Certainly not. But they can help sway people who are on the border to the ethical side of things. Ethics classes can also provide tools and mental models for dealing with gray areas which aren't as cut and dry as cheating on an emissions test.

Yes, and the the thing is that most people are "on the border" - that is to say, little more than a product of their environment (speaking of their actions/attitudes, not their worth as people). If you teach an entire population ethics (assuming it's done well and everything that comes with that), you will still have your 5-10% of rotten apples, just as you'd have 5-10% who would seek out ethics on their own. The big difference will be in the 80-90%.

Like most classes, the point is to educate people about something they don't know about, broaden their horizons and perhaps cast new light on apparently familiar topics.

I've never understood the point of computer science, I can produce a perfectly functional BASIC program.

It's not about making an evil person not-evil. You don't have to be evil to make evil things. The point of ethics classes is to learn how to think ethically. How did old and modern philosophers think about ethics? If you're an evil person, then law enforcement should be there to discourage you not to be evil and hopefully penalties are high enough to stop you. But if you're not an evil person, and the law gives you certain freedom on ethically sensitive issues, then an ethics class will help you how to reason in such situations. When I don't debug my code properly sometimes I feel terrible because a bug can significantly change a person's day or maybe even injure them (I work in telematic industry). Being a competent engineer requires one to understand the implications of one's job and act accordingly which may be debugging properly etc...

Ethics has its own vocabulary, history, and arguments in ethics are common and often don't have a resolution other than compromise. It's predicated on making logical arguments and has ties to epistemology: how do we know what we know?

So saying you don't understand the point of ethics classes, as if people are ethical or are unethical, is like saying you don't understand the point of teaching logic or debate as if people either pop out of childhood with an innate conformance or resistance to one kind of logic or debate, no other kinds exist and there are no arguments.

If you took an ethics class and don't understand the point of it, then I'd argue it wasn't a good ethics class.

I think the real answer here is "legal obligation". You may sway some number of sw devs with classes on ethics, but in reality many will throw it all out the window to save their job unless there's a real and significant consequence in breaking said ethics.

You're mostly right. As I said to some other answer below, I think law enforcement is crucial to limit evil people doing evil. But well-intentioned people can do evil too, just because they didn't know any better. Engineers who made Therac-25 probably didn't wanna kill bunch of people, but they did. (Also read Hannah Arendt on how she talks about most Nazi officers thought 'they were just doing their jobs') Understanding that your job may have such implications is why ethics classes are very important. This shouldn't be optional, engineers should have the ability to be able to think about the implications of being an engineer.

Of course, I wonder if that would result in no-degree-me being out of a job :). I have worked in medical equipment and cancer diagnostics for 14 years now.

Well, I didn't mean to be an elitist. My point was that ethics is an important "skill" for engineers and you can train this skill by other means such as reading books. There are tons of books about theoretical ethics, scientific ethics, engineering ethics, bioethics etc. Even reading something as basic as Stallman can be very helpful for software engineers. I'm just pointing out that engineers should think more about ethics.

>Well, I didn't mean to be an elitist

No no no, I didn't take it that way. I was just remarking that I may find myself out of a job if regulation similar to civil engineering existed in our field due to the fact that I don't hold a degree. Nothing beyond that and it wasn't a response to anything you said.

I've argued to (and with) my coworkers on more than one occasion that we _should_ be personally liable in certain situations (we already have the FDA watching over us at a high level.) For example, if I were complicit in fudging the results of an inter-system repeatability test in my current position.

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