Sadly, human society has a blind spot when it comes to inventions with short-term benefits but long-term detriments.
I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.
Refusing to work on something is not newsworthy. I refuse to work on (or use) AI, ads and defence projects, and I'm far from being the only one.
Though let who is free of sin throw the first stone, I now stand on a high horse after having worked in the gambling sector, and now ashamed of it, so I prefer to focus the projects themselves rather than the people and what they choose to do for a living.
There is a lot of support in favor. Consider:
- Ads are typically NOT consumed enthusiastically or even sought out (which would be the cases if they were strongly mutually beneficial). There are such cases but they are a very small minority.
- If product introduction was the primary purpose, then repeatedly bombarding people with well-known brands would not make sense. But that is exactly what is being done (and paid for!) the most. Coca Cola does not pay for you to learn that they produce softdrinks. They pay for ads to shift your spending/consumption habits.
- Ads are an inherently flawed and biased way to learn about products, because there is no incentive whatsoever to inform you of flaws, or even to represent price/quality tradeoffs honestly.
If people valued ad viewing (e.g. for product decisions), we’d have popular websites dedicated to ad viewing. What we have instead is an industry dedicated to the idea of forcefully displaying ads to users in the least convenient places possible, and we still all go to reddit to decide what to buy.
I'd consider word-of-mouth a type of advertising as well.
When it's totally organic the person doing the promotion doesn't stand to gain anything. It less about trying to get you to buy something and usually just people sharing what they enjoy/has worked for them, or what they think you'd enjoy/would work for you. It's the intent behind the promotion and who is intended to benefit from it that makes the difference between friendly/helpful promotion and adversarial/harmful promotion.
Word of mouth can be a form of advertising that is directly funded by a manufacturer or a distributor too though. Social media influencers are one example, but companies will pay people to pretend to casually/organically talk up their products/services to strangers at bars/nightclubs, conferences, events, etc. just to take advantage of the increased level trust we put in word of mouth promotion exactly because of the assumption that the intent is to be helpful vs to sell.
There was a site dedicated to ad viewing once (adcritic.com maybe?) and it was great! People just viewed, voted, and commented on ads. Even though it was about the entertainment/artistic value of advertising and not about making product decisions.
Although the situation is likely to change somewhat in the near future, advertising has been one of the few ways that many artists have been able to make a comfortable living. Lying to and manipulating people in order to take more of their money or influence their opinions isn't exactly honorable work, but it has resulted in a lot of art that would not have happened otherwise.
Sadly the website was plagued by legal complaints from extremely shortsighted companies who should have been delighted to see their ads reach more people, and it eventually was forced to shutdown after it got too expensive to run (streaming video in those days was rare, low quality, and costly) although I have to wonder how much of that came from poor choices (like paying for insanely expensive superbowl ads). The website was bought up and came back requiring a subscription at which point I stopped paying any attention to it.
For example, many years ago I worked on military AI for my country. I eventually decided I couldn't square that with my ethics and left. But I consider advertising to be (often non-consensual) mind control designed to keep consumers in a state of perpetual desire and I'd sooner go back to building military AI than work for an advertising company, no matter how many brilliant engineers work there.
I would agree with you if ads were just that. Here's our product, here's what it does, here's what it costs. Unfortunately ads sell the sizzle not the steak. That has been advertising mantra for probably 100 years.
There’s no benefit to your ideological goals in kneecapping yourself.
There’s nothing morally wrong with using or building AI, or gambling.
> There’s nothing morally wrong with ... building... gambling.
Say you're building a gambling system and building that system well. What does that mean? More people use it? Those people access it more? Access it faster? Gamble more? Gamble faster?
It creates and feeds addiction.
Environment, religion, war, medicine; everything has a personal line associated with it.
Let’s not confuse the issue. Just because you find something distasteful doesn’t mean it’s bad or morally problematic.
We let adults make their own choices.
2) If you were devising more efficient sugar delivery systems for those acquaintances as a means to take every last cent they had, knowing they'd be unable to resist, you're complicit in robbing and killing them.
Hint: most of my consulting rate is not about writing fizzbuzz. Some clients pay me without even having to write a single line of code.
Unfortunately it looks like that might also be refusing to eat right now. We'll see how much longer my principles can hold out. Being gaslit into an unjustified termination has me in a cynical kind of mood anyway. Doing a little damage might be cathartic.
> Doing a little damage might be cathartic.
Please avoid the regret. Do something kind instead. Take the high road. Take care of yourself.
People have wondered how so many people ever participated in any historical atrocity. This same mechanism is used for all of them.
I think you have already listed one big reason that isn't a high-minded principle. You want to make money. There may be others.
It's always wonderful when you can make a lot of money doing things you love to do. It stinks when you have to choose between what you are exceptionally good at doing and what your principles allow.
If only somebody could figure out how the talents of all the people in your situation could be used to restore housing affordability. Would you take a 70% paycut and move to Nebraska if it allowed you to keep all your other principles?
As you say, kindness isn't hiring. I'd love to see an HN discussion of all the good causes that need founders. It would be wonderful to have some well known efforts where the underemployed could devote some energy while they licked their wounds. It might even be useful to have "Goodworks Volunteer" fill that gap in employment history on your resume.
How do we get a monthly "What good causes need volunteers?" post on HN?
You're right, it doesn't. It feels more like an attempt to minimize. The rest was you spitballing some unrelated idea.
One person, no. A hundred, who knows. Ten thousand programmers united together not to work on something? Now we're getting somewhere. A hundred thousand? Newsworthy.
And that's not saying that AI is going to be great or even good or even overly positive, it's just streets ahead of the alternatives I mentioned.
AI has the potential to go in many directions, at least some of which could be societally 'good'.
Advertising is, has always been, and likely always will be, societally 'bad'.
This differentiation, if nothing else.
(Yes, my opinion on advertising is militantly one sided. I'm unlikely to be convinced otherwise, but happy for, and will read, contrary commentary).
It turns evil in the presence of corruption. Taking bribes in exchange for power. Government should never make rules for money, but for the good of the people. And advertising should never offer exposure for sale - exposure should only result from merit.
Build an advertising system with integrity - in which truthful and useful ads are not just a minimum requirement but an honest aspiration and the only way to the top of the heap. Build an advertising system focused, not on exploiting the viewer, but on serving them - connecting them with goods and services and ideas and people and experiences that are wanted and that promote their health and thriving.
I won't work on advertising as it's currently understood... I agree it's evil. But I'd work on that, and I think it would be a great good.
Advertising is similar, of course, and the only thing that has kept the internet working as a communications medium in spite of advertising is that it was generally labeled, constrained, enclosed, spam-filtered, etc.
The AI of today is being applied to help advertising escape those shackles, and in doing so, harm the ability to communicate.
A lot of engineers in the US who are both right out of school and are on visas need to find and keep work within a couple months of graduation and can’t be picky with their job or risk getting deported.
We have a fair number of indentured programmers.
Personally I don't work on advertising/tracking, anything highly polluting, weapons technology, high-interest loans, scams and scam-adjacent tech, and so on.
But there are enough engineers without such concerns to keep the snooping firms, the missile firms, and the payday loan firms in business.
Now, there’s often limits to some flexibility and lines some simply will not cross, but survival and self preservation tends to take precedent and push those limits. E.g., I can’t imagine ever resorting to cannibalism but Flight 571 with the passengers stranded in the Andes makes a good case for me bending that line. I’d be a lot more willing to work for some scam or in high interest loans for example before resorting to cannibalism to feed myself and I think most people would.
If we assure basic survival at a reasonable level, you might find far less engineers willing to work in any of these spaces. It boils down to what alternatives they have and just how firm they are on some ethical line in the sand. We’d pretty much improve the world all around I’d say. Our economic system doesn’t want that though, it wants to be able to apply this level of pressure on people and so do those who are highly successful who leverage their wealth as power. As such I don’t see how that will ever change, you’ll always have someone doing terrible things depending on who is the most desperate.
I think we'd be better off making things for each other and being present and local rather than trying to hyperstimulate ourselves into oblivion.
I'm just some dude though. It's not making it to the headlines.
Doesn't have to be on headlines. Even just hearing that gives me a bit more energy to fight actively against the post-useful developments of modern society. Every little bit helps.
>I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.
That is just ridiculous. Modern neural networks are obviously an extremely useful tool.
I have a family. I work for a company that does stuff for the government.
I'd _rather_ be building and working on my cycling training app all day every day, but that doesn't make me any money, and probably never will.
All the majority of us can hope for is to build something that helps people and society, and hope that does enough good to counteract the morally grey in this world.
Nothing is ever black and white.
This is not effective.
Having a regulated profession that is held to some standards, like accountants, would actually work
Without unions and without a professional body individual action won’t be achieving anything
But the software developer who’se code handles personal information of 10 million million people should know that you don’t store them in plain text, which developers and business leaders at Virgin Media did not know, and if you click ‘forgot password’ they would send you a letter with you password In The Mail