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Comment by rhacker | Hacker News Reader

I am a software developer and yes software is eating the world. One of the side effects of software eating the world is out of control software.

   * Autobans in facebook
   * Cheated instacart drivers
   * $10000 stolen from thousands of bank accounts (and returned hopefully) on Etsy
   * Tesla cars literally killing people (it now feels like it's once a month right?)

Now the software that runs software is running amok.

The interesting thing about software is that it runs very quickly and it acts as a giant lever that affects the entire world.

You can think of it like a giant airport suddenly being installed in your back yard and just start having planes take off, changing your $300k investment into a $120k valued house overnight. That's how quickly software is changing the real world.

I know there is at least one HN browser writing a book on it. But I would love to see more books on how the internet, and software, is messing our world up.

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This reminds me of recent talk by Jonathan Blow [1], where he talks about how we've made very little progress in the field of software and anything that appears to be progress is just software leveraging better hardware.

It's quite scary how low our standards have gotten.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

I agree with you, and I was coming here to find similar thinking folks in the comment section and the most worrying thing is that I haven't found any except you. Most people seem to take it as a normal thing that software simply ruins lives and businesses. Todays developers' simply have no ethics. Also most developers seem to think that they can do whatever and they can get away with it, because y'know "Reasons". Sigh. :(

I really don't understand this sheeple thinking, for example most people simply don't understand that an automated fraud detection system is not a technologically important thing, it's an economically important cost management system effectively.

Just like companies externalize the cost of helpdesk personnel by operating an automated call center (and by proxy making the customer bear the cost), the goal is the same with fraud systems. But we cannot just simply throw our arms up in the air or shrug our shoulders when the companies leverage our lives this way.

Take Facebook for example, they acted like they had no responsibility or any power to review and take down or prevent toxic and/or hateful comments by employing human reviewers until they were forced to do so in some countries. And guess what, they had no trouble doing so, their profit might have reduced somewhat, but not that much.

So all in all, anyone who thinks he has integrity as a developer should take a look into himself when he justifies systems like fraud systems (or any other unnecessary cost reducing actions) as necessary. They are economically beneficial, yes; necessary, no.

*writing an ebook on it

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