Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eli_gottlieb | Hacker News Reader

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I have a slightly different take: engineers shouldn't be blamed for negative outcomes that propagate down from the political and cultural levels.

For instance, machine learning is now widely used for surveillance and advertising in ways that violate basic presumptions about privacy rights. Thing is, I imagine that if, say, ML researchers had gone on strike over privacy issues somehow, society would have essentially told them to shut up and get back to work. Sure, the same larger society now wants to blame ML for the constriction of privacy and for extensive state and private surveillance networks, but it was that very society which cheered the construction of these exact surveillance networks "becuz terrorizm" and for the sake of "free speech" (for billionaire multinational corporations) and for other awful reasons.

The people who were skeptical or critical over this whole social trend knew damn well it was all a bad idea, and we said so. Society deserves to get what it voted for, with both its ballot box and its dollars, and on some level, it deserves to get it good and hard without scapegoating the hired help, when it was them in the first place who told us skeptical, critical engineers and scientists to shut up and produce what society wanted from us.

I agree but have a bit different take...

"For instance, machine learning is now widely used for surveillance and advertising in ways that violate basic presumptions about privacy rights."

Those same mathematical techniques are also being used to more accurately detect cancer in MRI scans. Saying everyone needs to be held responsible for second order effects is unrealistic and ultimately damaging to society. Blaming the toolmaker for things they cannot control will only cause no tools to be made.

To me it points to a larger issue in our society that we are on a trend of completely removing context. Context no longer matters, what matters are the effects, regardless of whether you can reasonably be held accountable for them or not. It is thought-crime induced by those who in the same breath rail against that totalitarian behavior and then skip to implementing a version of it themselves.

A number of people on this thread immediately jump to the argument on surveillance and data privacy which is a useful discussion but tangential to what is being proposed in the original article. The article is moral hand-wringing with zero clarity or practicality. And the judge of who is culpable or not is left to a hysterical press, driven by a hysterical and sometimes uninformed public.

Look at what this behavior has done to political (and personal) discourse. Now imagine it being applied to science. No thank you.

>Those same mathematical techniques are also being used to more accurately detect cancer in MRI scans. Saying everyone needs to be held responsible for second order effects is unrealistic and ultimately damaging to society. Blaming the toolmaker for things they cannot control will only cause no tools to be made.

As a matter of fact, my work covers fMRI scans of brains for a neuroscience lab, so I'm entirely with you here, but again, with a small caveat:

If society wanted the "toolmakers" (us) to take responsibility for which tools we make and how others use those tools, they would have to give us the actual power to decide what we work on and for whom. Instead the rule has usually been, "if you have ethical qualms about this, we'll find someone who doesn't". All exit and no voice means a society where nobody takes responsibility because everyone self-selects into positions where they can agree with what they're doing, and if broad masses and the hysterical press want to excoriate those doings while also materially demanding they continue, it gets to do so.

It's like when people say that engineers should refuse to work on weapons that would violate the Geneva Conventions -- but the same people then vote for a government that moves funding from the NSF to the Defense Department!

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