Ask HN: What ethical issues do you/we face?
As programmers (or more broadly, in the field of computer science) what ethical dilemmas must we (or will we soon need) to grapple with?
Another issue is that of whether machines can ever be sentient. The unconscious view of most atheists (i.e. the majority of people) is that consciousness is purely an emergent phenomena. I disagree with this view, but I think within a hundred years we'll consider strong optimization algorithms to be non-human people. The question then becomes, what about animals? I think humanity's treatment of animals will become an important moral issue before I die.