- Human Greed
- A system set up on the principal of the more you have capital you have, the more capital you can acquire.
- The instinct to achieve "security" for you and your family
- Democracy being run on averages, and the IQ/EQ of the average person is frighteningly sub-par
- Ethics being an idea not a formula
- The instinct for most of our educated population to focus on second rate problems they are not in a position to solve
Then get back to us
It's very difficult for an individual to refuse a huge salary based on ethics. Especially for engineers, who did not go into engineering because they cared about ethics in the first place.
And in my observation is the most ethical amongst all kinds corporations.
I think people like attacking big tech because it's a soft target.
Meta using my messages to sell me more products of what I may actually like. It's isn't that evil.
Go look up what people in banking, oil, minning, spyware & manufacturing are doing. You will find murders, war financing, people being cut up with bone saws, people being enslaved by debt, people being bombed into bits while sitting in their apartments.
The reason why people don't talk about this kind of "real" evil is because the contenders are _actually dangerous_ they don't play games and most of us are spinless cowards.
The only reason there is alot of backlash on big tech because big tech is actually not dangerous.
If you want to improve ethics and actually move the needle look talk of people actually doing evil.
First, things like murders are not exactly ethical problems: they are criminal problems. They fall in a different category in that you can go to the police. Try to go to the police to complain about surveillance capitalism and you'll see the difference. There are fully honest people who contribute to unethical stuff Big Tech does (ask an engineer working in AI with a BigTech salary if they ever think about ethics: they get a ton of money to have fun, why should they care?).
Second, because they are not the worst guys does not mean that they are not bad guys. Still worth improving.
And third, BigTech is dangerous. If you don't see the problem with surveillance capitalism (now moving to a new level with LLMs), then you are missing something.
Apart from above accept that corporations are fundamentally amoral entities.
Also “ethics” aren’t some monolithic thing everybody agrees on.
I have 0 issue with a company selling whatever data they have on me in exchange for use of a service I like. It’s a fair trade. I can’t monetize my data myself so I may as well get to watch a few videos or something out of the deal.
Can an individual reasonably know the data that every platform has on them? Is it ethical if a government obtains a warrant to an individual's data they don't know the tech company is on possession of? What's stopping the government from buying data from companies without the need for a warrant?
Any other more serious examples?
To be fair Google gives you a lot of control over what data is kept but the defaults suck.
I am not sure what happens now but there was the PRISM debacle. Send an email to a non US citizen and they can end run your rights because the other person isn’t.
At scale things that are innocent are no longer so. Your neighbour knows you had a visit from the police at 6am. But what if a company knows who has visited who, where everyone has been, what sites they have visited (e.g. anger management class, criminal lawyer) and then can piece it all together in a world where, well look at Trump - you can make a misdemeanour into a felony with the right constructs against even a powerful person.
It is quite dangerous for the average person.
And this is pre AI revolution.
Which is not the case, speaking from experience.
It means it is not a serious threat by itself, no more than professional pilots is a threat to air travel safety.
Just because they know too much about flying.
Of course not. A company does not have "intentions" or "feelings". A company is just a big profit maximization machine, and people at every level contribute to it.
But I think we can say that the result is that BigTech results in unethical stuff (starting with surveillance capitalism). Without blaming individuals, it's possible to recognize it and search for solutions.
Nope. This is a pretty big claim to be taken without a good proof.
Why do you think so?
Because of _some_ bad actors today (out of many)? Because of _some_ bad practices in the past (already covered by new regulations in place)?
As mentioned in the next words of my quote (which you apparently ignored): because BigTech brought us surveillance capitalism, and surveillance capitalism is unethical. The evolution of surveillance capitalism being mass spying (with AI accessing all that data), which is unethical.
And because of tons of documented "bad practices" over the years. New regulations will just bring new unethical practices if that goes with profit maximization.
Until then all you say is just opinionated generalizations and dropping cool looking but meaningless words.
Surveillance capitalism [1] is a pretty well-defined concept. If you don't know it, maybe you should refrain from talking about ethics in the context of BigTech.
> prove that it is what big companies purposfuly do
Why should it be purposeful? That's just your addition to support your point of view. I clearly said above that the purpose of companies is to maximize profit. All the rest kind of comes from there. A company is not unethical because it is "evil". It is unethical because that's the rational way to maximize profit.
> Until then all you say is just opinionated generalizations and dropping cool looking but meaningless words.
Sure. And yours are not. Let's stop it here.
I base it on some facts I know about big companies from inside - while some of them sometimes had bad intentions and do bad unethical things,
vast majority is just genuinely trying to do business and bring value to customers or consumers. While wasting ton of money and people-hours to meaningless work around another dumb regulation promoted by dumb bureaucrats.
And btw, define “ethical” before you ignorantly label the whole industry sector as unethical. Can you?
Can you tell me where I said the opposite? It feels like either you don't read what I write, or you don't understand. That would explain why you ask me to define every second word.
> While wasting ton of money and people-hours to meaningless work around another dumb regulation promoted by dumb bureaucrats.
Define "wasting" and "dumb" before you ignorantly label a whole industry sector. Can you?
That and easy off-ramps for alternatives. “X is bad, so use Y instead” is a powerful move, but it only works if Y is actually a viable alternative to X.
I find it alarming how many engineers just don't ever think about the impact technology has on the world.
As well as designer unions?
Basically empowering tech workers to refuse unethical work, collectively, without the threat of losing their jobs and becoming homeless.
And, sufficient diversity to ensure representation of vulnerable populations in the workforce.
For example, a product team having women in decision making positions is much less likely to ship a product lacking basic protections from types of abuse that only women experience - compared to a product team consisting of tech bros.
Mike Monteiro has a fantastic talk on the topic.
The problem is that we live in a society where the bulk of people focus on money as the #1 priority. Fixing technical ethics involves making changes that allow people to have different top priorities.
Before criticizing whether the business is ethical instead focus on whether your own work or conduct is ethical. It likely isn’t. There is no reason it should be.
Software has no concept of ethics. If developers were career limited to ethical conduct, as are doctors or lawyers or truck drivers, the business has fewer options to perform in an unethical manner.
I don’t mean diversity on the basis of gender, ethnicity, or sexuality…
I mean, hire people who are experts in other areas other than tech as well… and maybe teach them some tech along the way because they’re working in tech, but hire them for the potential gains that can come from having people who see the world a different way, who have a different perspective and who are experts in other areas that are not tech.
Too optimistic.
I contracted for a company for a few months where I worked on GDPR.
While I was there they talked about their plans to release their next product without microtransactions because that tanks reviews, and then add microtransactions later in an update.
They are very conscious of what they're doing.
They were compelled to work on GDPR issues, not microtransactions.
... Oh right now as I'm writing this out, I realise this restaurant is only playing shitty covers of well-known songs. The streaming services are already only paying the original artists pennies, and now they need to cut out that expense too?