Comment by iamwil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamwil | Hacker News Reader

I don't know. On one hand, it is true we are the last line of defense. I do wish more of us said no to putting tracking on websites, among other things. But on the other hand, a random software engineer's sense of ethics might be different than you. Do we want activist software engineers?

I mean, field of study changes perspective. Recently, there was that backlash against a release of a 1-mil post dataset of bluesky users by some people on bluesky. https://eugeneyan.com/writing/anti/

I personally didn't think it was a big deal because the API and dataset is already public. And also if your text isn't available to LLMs, then your values are effectively invisible to the future, as society depends more and more on LLMs. To me, I think it's better that you get your thoughts out there into LLMs. As more of society relies on LLMs, culture wars will be fought not just on the internet, but in the embedding space of LLMs. So, given that, would these people want me to decide for them?

I dunno. Just as journalism lost the trust of the public by deliberately taking an activist stance, so too would engineering lose public trust by deliberately taking an activist stance. (You may say tech already lost public trust, but I think of tech as the industry and engineering as the profession).

Maybe we do need a Engineer's Hippocratic Oath, and a means to police our own.

Go look at the latest "Ask HN" thread - there's two projects proudly trumpeting their ability to allow applicants to cheat on their interviews. On the FAQ of one of the apps, a common question apparently is if it will work during proctored exams.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42375440

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42383928

With this kind of loose approach to morality, is it really any surprise that the world is filled with devs who build involuntarily telemetry, spyware, etc.?

It just doesn't make sense. So it is immoral for engineers to design weapons? That's like saying it's immoral to butcher an animal. Sure go ahead, ban butchering animals in your society so everyone can feel good about themselves while they import their meat and thereby outsource the butchering instead. Or you say that everyone just stops eating meat? Fine that works but here the analogy breaks, because everyone won't just stop needing weapons.

What I can agree with is that placing a moral cost on engineering designing weapons in some way increases the actual labor cost of weapon R&D, I guess.

They didn’t mention weapons in their post. Which, given the focus of the article, seems intentional. Edit: specifically they seem to have gone for lower stakes examples.

Don't use moral quandary to inject your propaganda. That is how a snake moves.

The ACM has a code of ethics to which members are supposed to adhere: https://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/

The author talks about thinking about consequences, implying bad consequences, but there are also good ones. Making the Internet faster, say, makes it possible for bad actors to do bad things more quickly. But also the opposite. Tracking phones more accurately can help the military find targets, but could also find a man down, someone who is being protected, or a criminal.

I applaud anyone who imbues their work with a sense of ethics and responsibility, but most tasks, inventions and creations arise in an environment filled with muddy grays, rather than being clearly good or evil.

> Do we want activist software engineers?

Regardless of whether "we" want them, we already have them, and that genie isn't going back in the bottle. In my view, every person has to decide their ethics and then act accordingly. The alternative is forcing people to accord with the principles of the employer or government or guild or whoever. There just isn't a coherent supermajority morality anymore - and no real path to one.

I don't have a solid object level opinion on the llm stuff. For the most part it seems like a tempest in a teacup to me. Some things will get easier, some things will get more annoying, and everyone will still have to get up and put on underwear one leg at a time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com