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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

I’d also posit it would be helpful for larger tech firms and most accelerators to have an ethecist on staff, to help with the “could we vs should we” evaluation.

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For this to work the ethecist would have to be well versed in philosophy. In our current political climate I would suspect that anyone who obtained this position would be anything but.

"Our profits have soared ever since we started hiring nihilists!"

It would definitely be helpful from a corporate strategy perspective, but I think the real solution is educating engineers in the humanities or liberal arts.

That sounds like a great way to waste time and create barriers of entry to the field.

Barriers to entry are not necessarily a negative. I want my doctor to have an "MD" credential as a barrier to providing me care, for example.

Too many technologists with too little empathy and ethics makes the world dystopian "because I can" at scale.

If you can come up with a way to make people more moral that works, that sounds great. Right now I can't think of any.

Legislation and regulation as a hard stop, ethics staff as guardrails.

Legislation does not make anyone more moral.

It gives society the right and responsibility to punish people caught violating it.

Those are two very different things.

I argue it nudges in the right direction. I agree you can't force someone to be moral anymore than you can force them to be decent or civil. That's what parents, free will, and introspection are for.

Fair point. I suppose law does provide some pressure towards better behavior, even if it only very rarely touches the mind or the heart.

Of course, it's only a nudge towards being moral when the law itself is moral, which is obviously not always the case.

I'm willing to accept this if we only hire people who are on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum to whoever is suggesting this.

If you are a conservative, we will hire progressives to decide what is ethical and isn't ethical.

If you are a progressive, we will hire conservatives to decide what is and what isn't ethical.

You point out a good principle which is to be willing to give to your greatest enemy the power you desire to have yourself.

I'm all for heterodoxy, but what about people who are just not ideological? Who do we pair them up with?

Both..?

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