It also gives tech workers unprecedented abilities to fight it. Software engineers need to take social responsibility for what they create.
They won't. 99% of people hate to take responsibilities and will never take any voluntarily without being well-paid for this or believing success is guaranteed. Expecting them to is ignoring a fact, may we like it or not. And they are not broken, it's not their job. Taking responsibilities is a job of politicians we elect yet they want power over everything.
In the EU, however, a reasonable part of politicians seems doing the job so we have GDPR and Google/Facebook/etc fined billions every now and then. But they could certainly do better so we wouldn't have the fascist copyright reform.
Then denied it ... and then more details kept coming out showing Google continued working on it, just more quietly.
https://theintercept.com/2018/09/14/google-china-prototype-l...
Google is already an extremely large company, and I think that many are only just now realizing the problems that they were contributing to. It may take a while for employee actions (both protests and resignations) to have a visible impact due to it's size, but I think they're making progress.
As per my thoughts I expounded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19548485 I think that Google's available talent pool is shrinking. Many very talented engineers have left, and many new potential engineers would not want to work there. Sure, there are still plenty who do, but I would say their options are narrowing over time.
I think you overestimate how skilled you need to be to work at Google. Google has famously put people through enormous hoops to work there, regardless of the complexity the engineering the new hire will work on.
Organizations like NSA also have a negative reputation, but find plenty of people to hire. They just look outside Stanford,CMU, etc.
I suspect that as the people who don't have to work there stop applying, Google will widen it's parameters to snare in the people who have to work there.
(I've met many a person at Defcon who did a stint in the intel community because they saw it as the only path to a high paying job if you don't have an elite upbringing and don't want to directly kill people.)
The goal here is to ensure their ethical competitors have access to resources they don't.
Sure, but I also think if you have enough money to retire early, you're less likely to do something you don't agree with. Many people don't have that luxury.
No. As I previously stated Google puts people through enormous hoops to work there. That has no bearing on the quality of the worker.
For example, it's been noted that past a certain IQ, there is diminishing returns - eg, past ~130 IQ you're no more likely to win a Nobel Prize.
I think the real threat is that Google "lowers" it's standards and output remains the same. This would threaten the business models of "elite" schools who pretend to have a monopoly on talent.
Leaving Google is not enough already, it will manage on its own (because it already has the power and because because so many gifted people still just dream to work at Google). But creating and promoting numerous better alternatives to Google may help.
We need government regulation.
I also dislike the "someone else will take their place" logic. While a large number of jobs are, indeed, trivially replaceable, many are not, and many developers have significantly above average skill. Some believe they act ethically, and some do not care. If we can remove those who wish to act ethically from working at unethical companies, we significantly shrink the job pool for them. They'll have less options, and likely have to fight harder and pay more to get them. This means that unethical companies may be paying more (i.e. lower profit margins) and be getting worse talent.
If we can get more of the most talented developers working at more ethical companies, the more ethical solutions will be better, and they will win in the market.
[1] I am a big proponent of GDPR and a desire for a US version of it. Though ultimately, particularly in terms of government surveillance, I feel we need a Constitutional Amendment defining a right to privacy. Something far more lasting and enshrined into our future legal framework that recognizes that privacy is a fundamental human right.
Romania is not and never was part of the EEU aka Eurasian Economic Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Economic_Union
If so then you made another mistake :-) as Ukraine is not a member state of the European Union.
[EEU vs WEU] You could see it sometimes abbreviated that way."
Please don't read my comment as aggressive but I have NEVER seen such abbreviated form.
"Eurasian union (I thought that one was largely defunct anyway?)"
This entity is very much alive and kicking (usually as much as Vladimir Putin wants it to be). The EEU presidency is held throughout 2019 by Armenia.
With Eurasian union I thought that Ukraine basically killed it and since then Kazakhstan is trying to get rid of cyrilic and Lukashenko is all in to be either the Russian boss and Putin successor or moving Belarus towards EU, so the original Eurasian union idea is toast. At least from my outsider perspective (never visited any ex-Soviet Union countries, just knew some people from there, both pro and anti-western ones).
So far that dissatisfaction has been mostly inert, unfortunately. But I like to think that the typical engineer's morals haven't been as corroded by money as the typical CEO, and that we'll eventually reach a breaking point where things will get so bad that the engineers will finally take a stand. Tech puts power in the hands of the few, but that tech can't be built without lots of engineers. The sooner they see past the utopian narratives peddled by their bosses and set aside their comfy lives, the better.
Right now software engineering is one of the most fertile job markets out there. In the right city you can walk out on the street and stub your toe on a new job, offering good pay and office perks. Maybe it won't always be that way, but being a programmer right now feels like being the prettiest girl at the ball. That's a good climate in which to quit your job out of principle.
> Organized efforts won't stop any of it either, even if it succeed in one country, there are too many countries, some much more oppressive and brain washy than the others and make it practically impossible to have an influence.
It sounds like you've just succumbed to general defeatism, which to me seems like a waste of time and energy.
It's not like that for almost anyone in the world.
No, not all of us do this.
I’ve quite jobs over questionable morals/ethics a couple of times. It wasn’t a hard choice - I applied for a new job and was gone in two weeks.
I don't think this is true. Jobs are plentiful and easy to get in most of the nation for skilled software engineers.
Very few CEOs can do the coding of a secret project.
I don't know what I would do and neither do most of us without being in that situation.
"Tyle wiemy o sobie, ile nas sprawdzono"
Which translates roughly to:
"We only know as much about ourselves, as we've been tried"
During WW2 there was a lot of atrocities committed by people against their own. Not just Nazis against Poles or Jews, but Poles against Poles, Jews against Jews, Ukrainians against Ukrainians....etc etc. People who were given a choice to either hunt and kill their own, or have their families killed. Nazis frequently got the native population to do the most evil stuff(for the promise of being left alone in exchange), even documenting it on film and photos to show it back in Germany as "look at those barbarians killing each other".
Basically we don't know what we would do in case of extreme adversity until we actually face it. I personally wish with all my being that my test will never come.
I’ve quit jobs in the past over ethical concerns with the project. It is a valid reason, and it just takes courage.
2. I walk everyday by a large Bayer building, a company that sells chemicals that create cancer and sells chemicals that heal cancer. Hundreds of people enter the building every day and I think you just need to pay enough money, and you will always find people doing your work.