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No helping oppressive governments spy on dissidents. No high frequency trading. No financial targeting the vulnerable (subjective, use your own ethics and goo
by malux85 7y ago
No helping oppressive governments spy on dissidents.
No high frequency trading.
No financial targeting the vulnerable (subjective, use your own ethics and good judgement)
No dragnets
No devices to disrupt tor or P2P networks
No troll farming or mass media manipulation
No fake dating profiles
No metric stuffing
That’s it off the top of my head. I know that sometimes secondary effects can happen (e.g. an oppressive government may use a database, and I might work on that database) but that’s not me directly helping them.
Something like this, feel free to add others everyone!
- Zaskoda 7y agoNow if someone will make some sort of union I can join so I can strike and support others who share the same fundamental ethics. :)
- narrator 7y agoNo fully automated slaughterbots. There has to be a man in the loop that at least clicks a mouse every time the robot kills an enemy combatant. No one should ever say: "Oh yeah, we had a bug in the auto-kill algo and our killer robot shot a whole bunch of innocent civilians. Whoops! That's nobody's fault. Nobody's responsible. The algo did it all by itself!"
- merpnderp 7y agoI'm completely with you, but eventually "we" won't have a choice when adversaries go full autonomous.
- blotter_paper 7y agoIn the context of a military that accepts collateral damage as par for the course, I don't really see the distinction. Did anybody but Manning go to prison over that Collateral Murder video? We have humans approve airstrikes that we know will kill unidentified civilians when they're close to an identified target. We have humans approve airstrikes that target unidentified individuals which we probabilistically identify as combatants based on movement and cellphone metadata. What difference does it make if a human pulls the trigger --err, presses the button?
- chirau 7y agoOut of curiosity... why won't you work with HFT?
- edoo 7y agoThere are some good arguments that the entire point of HFT is to manipulate the market by front running people who are trying to make actual transactions. Here is a cool video of a few hundredths of a second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4ENWtfeYp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4ENWtfeYp8
- WJW 7y agoThere are many purposes for HFT, most of which have nothing to do with front running. Market making is an entirely legal and moral activity which benefits "people who are trying to make actual transactions" and happens to gain a lot from better tech.
- pixl97 7y agoThen add the caveat "outside regulatory frameworks" to the orginal statement.
- tzs 7y ago> Market making is an entirely legal and moral activity which benefits "people who are trying to make actual transactions" and happens to gain a lot from better tech. Does that require HFT, or just T?
- DuskStar 7y agoThe HF bit lets prices be adjusted faster, which means bid-ask spreads can be narrower. That's the theory, anyways.
- ATsch 7y agoMarket making is indeed a useful activity, in isolation. And market making is indeed technically what HFT companies do. However, pouring unspeakable amounts of money, watts and person-hours into completely unnecessary and wasteful infrastructure just because emergent properties of a system mean that billion dollar companies and their owners can make a lot of money by being a picosecond faster than each other in an eternal battle is of extremely questionable utility. What exactly do we as a society get in exchange?
- schlipity 7y agoWhy would your first rule be so limited? Why help anyone spy on anyone else?
- claudiawerner 7y agoSpying is not necessarily immoral, I presume.
- oh_sigh 7y agoAre you against spying on, say, white supremacists who you know are plotting terror attacks on minorities?
- Zombieball 7y agoHow would you know they are plotting terrorist attacks before you started spying?
- rockinghigh 7y agoTips to law enforcement, violent history, threats.
- m0zg 7y agoAnything that can be used to "spy on white supremacists" will almost certainly be (ab)used to spy on other people. There are very few real, actual white supremacists, and even fewer of those who are "plotting terror attacks". In recent memory (~15 years) I can only recall three major terror attacks against minorities perpetrated by real, actual white supremacists: Breivik, the Christchurch shooting, and Dylann Roof. Besides the definition of what constitutes a "white supremacist" has been getting more ambiguous by the minute over the past few years. Nowadays it pretty much just means "anyone who doesn't like illegal immigration" or "anyone I don't like, but I'm too lazy to articulate why".
- samatman 7y agoYou can add the Pittsburg synagogue shooting to that list. I'm not in favor of surveillance panopticons either, for what it's worth.
- ATsch 7y agoWhile I think these are incredibly important and extremely neglected in the industry, these ethical concerns are really something different from the spirit of the "Things I won't work with" series, which is mainly about safety and sanity.
- mattygee 7y agoNo software-only interlocks on anything that requires a safety interlock
- 8bitsrule 7y agoNo voting-machine software. Paper ballots guarded at all times by well-armed disabled vets. Ballot-scanners produce a paper checksum slip for each voter that they can later compare online to verify ballot has been counted correctly.