I wonder what "Things I wont work with" would be for tech. I can imagine particular technologies (e.g. predictive policing) or types of data (e.g. I refuse to put digitized therapist's notes on the internet).
No high frequency trading.
No financial targeting the vulnerable (subjective, use your own ethics and good judgement)
No dragnets
No devices to disrupt tor or P2P networks
No troll farming or mass media manipulation
No fake dating profiles
No metric stuffing
That’s it off the top of my head. I know that sometimes secondary effects can happen (e.g. an oppressive government may use a database, and I might work on that database) but that’s not me directly helping them.
Something like this, feel free to add others everyone!
Does that require HFT, or just T?
That's the theory, anyways.
However, pouring unspeakable amounts of money, watts and person-hours into completely unnecessary and wasteful infrastructure just because emergent properties of a system mean that billion dollar companies and their owners can make a lot of money by being a picosecond faster than each other in an eternal battle is of extremely questionable utility.
What exactly do we as a society get in exchange?
Arguing about HFT feels like you're questioning people about why they're spending billions on excavating single, individual sand grains and the defense you get is "well, sand is an incredibly important building material. It is used in concrete, and we wouldn't have modern society without it". Sure that's true, but why is it that nobody can tell me how what you're doing is actually necessary for that.
No.
Market event A is seen to correlate strongly with market event B. The correlation is so obvious that multiple participants compete to make the B trade first in reaction to A. It's part of having a healthy market, electronic or otherwise.
Besides the definition of what constitutes a "white supremacist" has been getting more ambiguous by the minute over the past few years. Nowadays it pretty much just means "anyone who doesn't like illegal immigration" or "anyone I don't like, but I'm too lazy to articulate why".
I'm not in favor of surveillance panopticons either, for what it's worth.
Still, that's very few events, which supports my point. It's basically a more potent "think of the children" trojan horse that routinely gives the government even more power (and potential for abuse) through harebrained and ineffectual laws. See e.g. the current FISA abuse scandal where the FBI _falsified the supporting documentation, and knowingly supplied fake documentation to the court_ to spy on a presidential campaign. Had it been you or me they spied on, nobody would even know.
Again, I agree with you that domestic extremism (be it white supremacist, Muslim, or Black Hebrew Israelites) should be countered through ordinary policing, rather than building the Stasi's wet dream.
Your post is similar to if I proposed a hypothetical about addition using apples, and you posted a screed about how apples are overused in American cuisine and their nutritional value is suspect, especially relative to oranges and pears.
Just the other week I saw the news that until recently we had 300 (!) Saudi nationals training to fly planes right here in the US. Software won't help us with stupidity/sabotage of this magnitude.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/navy-suspends-flight-trainin...
There is just no way that doesn't already happen all over the place already.
The "things I won't work with" blog lists things that will actually kill you in horrible, mind bendingly painful ways.
In Tech it's more like "things I won't work with because it might fail" or "is too difficult" or "might be a bit too unscrupulous"
For some of things, sure.
But there are other things that do cause death, pain and suffering.
If you wrote code that's used in military weapons, that's a more direct relationship.
If you write code that's used to power gambling sites/devices, it's perhaps somewhat abstract - but there are a large number of people who are harmed because of how addictive these things are.
If you write code that's used for managing high-interest loans (like the point-of-sales type of 'buy-now-pay-later' of loans) - then you're enabling the exploitation of people who by-and-large cannot afford the things they're being told they can have, and will spend a large portion of their life paying these loans off.
Being true to one's own ethics is a very worthy virtue. But it just isn't in the same league as not wanting to melt one's face off or accidentally die in a paralysing seizure of excruciating pain.
That's sort of the point of ethics though, it's pretty weak to say "I choose not to steal because it is wrong, but you do you."
Perhaps they're two degrees of the same thing, but it doesn't seem obvious to me.
I think there is also a subset of the first: things which I don't think anyone should be doing but social pressure forbids objection - eating meat comes to mind. Abortion may fall into this category for some, but in my experience even in fairly liberal circles people are willing to object to abortion, they just tend to couch it more.
For most of the things, my personal opinion on wanting to work for the ones you've listed are definitely in the "it depends on the organisation/management" category.
If it's a company that is (in my opinion) causing more harm than good, then it's not somewhere I'd want to work.
The point of my post was to point out that some tech roles are for companies who do cause harm/pain/suffering whether that's direct (military) or indirect (loan sharking).
Whether the military or an arms manufacturer is necessary is a whole other debate - but the whole point of those types of organisations is the ability to directly cause harm to those they're directed at.
However organisations that provide high interest credit to those who can't afford the thing they're buying, with the intent to keep milking money from their debtors do cause suffering, albeit in a more indirect sense.
I am ok with defence apart form Chem and Bio, "that just sqicks me out"
Though it does depend on who id be working for I did turn down a recruiter who was looking for people to work on the MET police Registry, but I would have worked for HMGCC.
Note these where both Avowed Jobs so I am not breaking any laws mentioning them.
Should the creators of Gmail or Word or etc feel bad because therapists are using their services to send their notes to colleagues?
Online voting. Anything more sophisticated than automated scanning of a paper ballot cannot be trusted, even in theory. Always, always be able to do an audit from the original ballots.
The bad thing about dangerous tech is that it is usually someone else who gets hurt, and the technologist is affected last or not at all. Predictive policing? It's not going to be rich white guys who catch the pointy end of that stick...
It should probably be required by law that Zuckerberg keep nude photos of himself on his Facebook account, to encourage security.
Detection of white collar crime? Surely detection of fraud in financial transactions isn't rocket surgery...
Interestingly, this has probably been the main beneficial effect of the GDPR so far. Personal data has shifted from being a pure asset to a combo of asset and liability, causing some companies to just avoid collecting anything but the essentials.
Computer tech is nowhere near as spectacular as chemistry, in an immediate, palpable sense. Almost nothing is. Maybe some narrow areas of physics or real-world engineering. But chemistry is pretty much unique that way.
Chemistry is a great hobby to pick up when you're a teen. Well, assuming you survive the whole thing.
So... No EHRs?