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Comment by rqtwteye | Hacker News Reader

When will people learn that companies will almost always sell stuff as long as it’s legal and profitable. They have no morals. If we declined into a dictatorship they would sell equipment for total surveillance and oppression. If we don’t make it illegal to pollute they will pollute if they think it makes money.

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I believe people should take care to add "men and women at" before talking about companies. Companies and corporations are abstractions. There are real people taking these actions.

- "Men and women at IBM promised to back off facial recognition, then signed a $70M contract for it"

- "Men and women would sell equipment for total surveillance and oppression"

etc.

The reason I think this is important is that there's actually a very small number of people relative to the general population that are capable of producing this technology. It's easy to be angry at the suits, or at the broad abstraction "IBM" for enabling this, but the fact of the matter is that there are spineless cowards out there getting up every morning to go and build facial recognition software. They deserve the ire of thinking people. No matter what the era is, there will be sociopaths running large organizations looking to control everyone, but these days there's a huge coterie of nerds getting paid handsomely to help.

> spineless cowards

It's hard to be brave when you have to support a family, pay for a mortgage, pay for the kids' college, etc.

I remember feeling queasy, almost 20 years ago, when I got hired for a very good salary to do helpdesk, and realized the customers I had to support included some Bad Actors: big mining, big arm manufacturing, even big spying... but I could finally afford to buy a small house, marry my partner, and start a family. So I sucked it up, and without that experience I wouldn't be where I am now.

> It's hard to be brave when

By definition, the only time it's possible to be brave is when it's hard.

Reminds me of my favorite DS9 quite

BASHIR: It's not your fault that things are the way they are. LEE: Everybody tells themselves that, and nothing ever changes.

But there is "putting your own at risk" and "putting your family at risk".

That's why I assume most commenters who talk the big talk about bravery are either uncommitted or privileged.

Point taken, but an important point here is exactly that companies are abstractions, and they exhibit emergent behavior -- cases where the the company as a whole, responding to "its" incentives, "does" things that no individual at the company would necessarily do or even condone if it were all up to them.

At the end of the day, some engineer has to sit down and say "I'm going to make this evil thing because the boss is paying me to do it". That's a breach of ethics. That emergent behavior is enabled, at every step, by complacency.

Groupthink.

Lots of those inside the company are convinced what they are doing is good.

They're not convinced, they convince themselves. To avoid mental dissonance. We all do all kinds of mental gymnastics in order to live with ourselves.

“there are spineless cowards out there getting up every morning to go and build facial recognition software.”

Almost any technology can be abused. There are a lot of good uses for facial recognition and also a lot of bad. I don’t think the people who develop technology are responsible of cowards for how it’s being used. That’s up to the big guys. If you want to work on stuff that’s for sure only used for “good” purposes, your world will be very small.

This isn't a case of "we're making this for some noble purpose, but it might be abused". This is "we're making this so that we can use it for evil". Like the engineers at Palintir who were working on the whole predictive policing thing. There's no good that can come of that (I suppose the same could be true if you left out everything after "Palintir" in that sentence). The core motivation of developing the technology is evil.

Predictive policing feels like something that someone could think would be noble but could be abused though? Like to me, most things that we consider "evil", someone else could conceivably consider noble or useful or at least a net positive.

I think you’re vastly underestimating how many people can figure it out with a little research and on the job training. The basic government consulting model is to take fresh collage grads and have them muddle through. And while yes it’s a horrific waste of taxpayer money, it also works surprisingly often.

I don’t believe that treating these orgs with kid-gloves solves anything and in fact only serves to perpetuate the ineffective repercussions leveraged against organisations that do the wrong thing.

“Oh no they’re just people, let’s be nice”: ok if they’re just people then they can hear the responsibility and the blame. They did the wrong thing and deserve the shame that comes with that. If we’re expected to remember the humans in the org, then the humans don’t get to hide behind nebulous, faceless, corporate veils.

You are right. This was settled with the Nuremberg principles and code in the wake of the last world war. Group apologetics are cowardly and unacceptable. People of excellent character, some of them genuine leaders, step up and accept responsibility for the moral failures of organisations they head. Those "merely following orders" deserve no protection.

We must stop blaming "the system", or "inevitable progress", or "capitalism", or whatever abstraction. It is terribly weak and avoidant to do so. It seems perfectly fair to put names to actions having broad effect. I think the (as you say) _few_ people who make far reaching decisions in technology deserve treating as de-facto public figures, as worthy of public scrutiny as political representatives.

Want to "invent" some disruptive new technology that changes the world? At least have the decency to put your name to it, stand by it and defend it ethically. Otherwise what you're doing looks more like terrorism than science.

Actual individual _people_ make awful decisions, knowing that they are awful, and hoping to get away with it through "safety in numbers". We should welcome whatever puts moral pressure on such individuals to act properly, and not to hide behind their "gang". Corporations have become a rock beneath which rather little sunlight shines nowdays.

> This was settled with the Nuremberg principles and code in the wake of the last world war

You're right about that, but unfortunately got the facts wrong. In reality most people that weren't high ranking officials were let go.

Or to avoid using the gender binary we could just use "People/Humans at IBM" :)

Agree otherwise.

Or to avoid using the anthropocentric language, we could just use "Consciousnesses at IBM" :)

They actually don’t even care if it’s illegal.

Businesses straight up killed a reporter with a car bomb a few years back. They don’t give a fuck.

How many companies blatantly break the law only to pull some accounting magic to entirely avoid consequences (Canada oil is legally required to clean up their mess, but never do. It always falls to the taxpayer with zero business consequence).

How many times to they break the law, only to get a small slap on the wrist while running away with billions in profit?

Companies don’t give a shit if something is illegal.

I’d be mad rich if not for my stinkin’ conscience. Doing evil is where all the money is, always has been. I need a pill so I can quite my conscience and get on with getting rich.

Nature knows no morals, so I guess acting without morals is a more natural state, thus provides fewer constraints.

Morals and ethics are purely human constructs, thus to follow your conscience is to be more human and less inhumane. That makes me feel good. Maybe we need a pill to improve one’s ability to hear their conscience.

Upton Sinclair — 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'

IBM already helped the Nazis in the Holocaust. They never had morals to start with. If we elected Hitler's reanimated corpse, IBM would gladly help again

Capitalism in a nutshell. It will always do this. It can't be reformed. Aside from the fact that we will eventually run out of resources to exploit. Infinite growth is just not possible.

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