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I think all these types of questions and statements do a good job assuming a disconnect between software and the real world, between humans and the systems we b
by friend_and_foe 4y ago
I think all these types of questions and statements do a good job assuming a disconnect between software and the real world, between humans and the systems we build. If I build a bridge and it collapses, nobody asks "where did bridge building go wrong?" If I cut corners on a bridge and it doesnt collapse, and create a culture of doing this such that other builders also do it, if I normalize misaligned incentives to those that pay me rather than those that drive on my bridge, and then they all start to collapse, we don't talk about bridge building failing us all. We talk about what we did, our behavior and what it caused.
The state of software, computing, social media, information availability, human rights on the internet, these are all because we, as in you and me, built something we knew was wrong for a paycheck, or at the very least overrepresented our skillset for a paycheck and delivered crap and swindled our employers and their customers. And questions like "where did software go wrong" are our way of passing the buck to a non entity, it's cowardly, it's pathetic, and every one of us, you and me, should take responsibility for what we have done, I mean literally, specifically, not some general collective truism, if not publicly at least when we look in the mirror by ourselves, and understand our role in the current state of the world, and either decide not to do it anymore or accept what we are.