"Dr. Oppenheimer, when did your strong moral convictions develop with respect to the hydrogen bomb?"
"When it became clear to me that we would use whatever weapon we had."
Unfortunately, whenever you read an article about a new technology or read an interview of a founder or something, they spend all their time talking about the first two, and either ignore or give passing lip service to the third one. Even look at HN discussions. Few engineers here really care about the ethics of what they are working on. It's just "is it cool technology?" and (sometimes) "does it make money?" You ask someone if they are working on something good for the world and they look at you like you have an antler growing out of your head. "Yes, I'm making the Torment Nexus, but it uses blockchain and LLMs and it's written in Rust. It's written in RUST!"
Or perhaps "If it isn't me inventing the torment nexus, then someone else will"
Either way, I wish people cared more about how their inventions would be used
it's like Joe Rogan trashing factory farms and bragging about only eating wild elk be killed with his bare hands on his private game preserve.
writing software for an oil company doesn't make you evil it makes you like everyone else. not particularly helpful nor particularly harmful
Just about anything ever created can be used to oppress and do evil. But you don’t have to be the final step that enables that evil.
Rockets - you can build rockets to take us to the moon. And somebody will repurpose it for destruction. But you don’t have to be that somebody.