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Comment by brian-armstrong | Hacker News Reader

You ever finish working on something and then think to yourself, "damn, I just created something incredibly evil"?

3-letter agencies have reportedly been using RF for similar purposes for almost a decade https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/01/19/police-radar-....

So we agree it is evil then

I was working on a IT consolidation project in a remote country branch, replacing the old systems with those of the global IT infrastructure and a new local server managed by the global IT team. When I finished my work I was standing in the small servers room with the local IT admin, he said something that disclosed he felt there was nothing important for him to do anymore. The move was the right path for the business. I felt terrible.

How many steps removed is a bad actor from making it themselves?

Usually, we can't rely on things simply not being invented, so we do the next best thing: invent it, and use the invented thing to learn how to manage the risk that thing introduced.

That's not secund best. You can not invent it in the first place too. We have intentionally throttled recombinant DNA research for decades.

What recombinant DNA research do you believe is not being done?

Go find me the papers showing me it is. You can't ask someone to prove a negative.

Here's another one: name the private (not gov contractor) orgs who are currently working on fission/fusion or even radiological weapons. There aren't any. For as disparate as the cultures of China and the US are, both realize the fact that DIY nukes are bad and universally disappear anyone going down that route.

You can also make it illegal, like private-sector research into nuclear bomb development.

Ethics really should be mandatory for anybody making/designing anything. Some unis do fortunately have mandatory ethics courses depending on your programme.

Ethics is (often?) required in engineering curriculum, but it's mostly along the lines of "don't lie about work you didn't do then charge for it". There's nothing that touches on only using your powers for good. Like building 'autonomous' cars then letting them loose in public before they're proven, or building out algorithms designed to get people addicted to rage bait, or building in planned obsolesce, or building a device that uses WiFi to map out a private domicile without the occupant's knowledge.

Engineering ethics courses all boil down to "don't lie about stuff", not "think about the potential consequences of what you're building".

Bold of you to assume that anyone will care about what they heard in ethics class when presented with the opportunity to get rich and powerful.

I accidentally created a 200 loc bossware with PythonCV that reported if I was in-front of my computer's webcam to a dashboard with videofeed, for a sales meeting with Microsoft were we were supposed to show we could do stuff. I shit you not. I was so proud that I could encircle my face with a square that I didn't consider the obvious use case for it.

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