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Comment by seattle_spring | Hacker News Reader

I'll never forget this spot on NPR where they interviewed a machine learning engineer working on AI videos. The engineer was purely focused on how cool the technology is, how real it looks, etc.

The interviewer asked, "aren't you worried about this getting into the hands of the wrong people, and creating deepfakes for extortion and things like that?"

The engineer paused for a few seconds, and then said, "gosh I never even considered that." She created this monster and all she could think about was how neat it was technologically.

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Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was in university, we used to have at least one engineering ethics class in undergrad. Have they stopped those? It sure seems like it, given how many engineers are out there who only seem to care about how technically cool and interesting their projects are.

I took one back in 2018 or so, and I assume it's still a degree requirement. If most are like the one I took, however, very few people seriously engaged with the class, and it's just viewed as a filler class.

It didn't help that the workload was a joke. I believe the entirety of our assignments were 5 single page "essay" responses to some ethical scenarios, and the professor seemed to hand out As just for writing enough. It probably took me less than 2 hours of total writing. I imagine most of the students these days are just having ChatGPT write it for them. We absolutely need to take ethics more seriously though, even if it involves adding more/more rigorous courses to the curriculum.

They exist for the "college of engineering" majors such as mechanical, chemical, civil etc. Computer science is considered a natural science in many universities (and is in the corresponding college) and thus does not have an ethics course mandated like other engineering disciplines.

When I did mine, it was mandatory to get BCS accreditation for the degree to teach some professional ethics.

I don’t know if that is still the case though, I’m not sure how relevant BCS membership is these days, I don’t know anyone who has it.

Took one in my undergrad circa 25

Yeah engineering as a discipline tends to be pretty naïve to the consequences of what they build, and sociopaths take advantage of it. Norbert Wiener [1] observed this about the engineers working on nukes in the 1940s-1950s:

“Push-button warfare... possible for a limited group of people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions, without any immediate risk to themselves.... Behind all this I sensed the desires of the gadgeteer to see the wheels go round.”

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener

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