> how much more ethics training > medical community, or civil engineering, or aviation engineering, or physics or chemistry Honestly, I think this conflates t

> how much more ethics training > medical community, or civil engineering, or aviation engineering, or physics or chemistry Honestly, I think this conflates two very different problems. If we're talking about Chris Wylie? Yeah, he built a thing that did real harm and said "I didn't think about the consequences, I just wanted to write the code." If people are disinterested in the harm they cause, or hiding behind "someone else would have", that's time for an ethics class. But GrayKey? Or Prism, XKeyscore, Echelon, or whatever else? There's no shortage of people who believe they are doing the moral thing with projects like this. GrayKey (supposedly) doesn't sell to everyone - they request data to approve buyers first. It's not hard to imagine the people behind it think the government should have this access and believe they're the ones doing the right thing. (And on the flipside, I'll bet some of the engineers on Greyball thought it was justified to fight harmful government regulation.) I don't think this is an isolated example. Psychology has a strong code of ethics and associated training, but the American Psychological Association helped the CIA design a torture program. British aviation engineers design fighters that end up sold to Saudi Arabia. Hell, civil engineers design prisons to support widespread solitary confinement and other treatment many people consider unethical. Either their ethics training isn't working, or the people doing this stuff consider their behavior ethical. There are programmers doing unethical things because they never thought about the consequences, or because they just don't care. But the focus on unethical software is rarely "somebody wrote ransomeware" - it's usually about controversial political applications. Calls for licensing and ethics training in the industry all too often look like an endrun around "what's moral?", attempting to settle moral disputes by treating disagreement as ignorance.