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Social responsibility is about more than newly mainstream DEI programs. ACM and IEEE have promulgated professional codes of ethics for a while. Social respons

by cxr 3y ago

Social responsibility is about more than newly mainstream DEI programs. ACM and IEEE have promulgated professional codes of ethics for a while. Social responsibility can involve questions about everything from AI concerns (which HN has no qualms talking about) to whether to add a stored payment option (credit card numbers) on a POS terminal that you know will be deployed with no protections to saying "no" when a client that's an insurance carrier says they want their self-service online claims system to refuse to accept a submission unless a checkbox is ticked that explicitly opts the submitter in to forms of correspondence that work to the submitter's disadvantage (e.g. non-written), including overriding what preferences/demands they've communicated to the carrier in the past. I think every course I took that was offered under the umbrella of the college of engineering at my school had a mandate that the instructor spend one week (2–3 classes) out of the semester on professional ethics, complete with HBS-style case studies. And this wasn't recently. Related: this month's issue of Communications of the ACM also has an obvious focus. <https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2023/5 https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2023/5>

askvictor 3y ago
It would be nice if there were some sort of industry protection for engineers who do refuse unethical tasks. At present, I'd expect you'd get fired pretty quickly if you said no (at a lot of companies).
- cxr 3y ago
  Most "software engineers" don't have licenses/credentials backing up their job title, anyway. Compared to other industries, it's lightly regulated at best. So long as that's the case, I think the current balance, which includes the possibility that a programmer will be dismissed for failure to comply, is reasonable. From an HR and PR standpoint, companies who do so will be facing the threat of blowback related to disclosure that a programmer was fired for using their judgment on an ethics question rather than taking orders. That's not nothing.
  - derivagral 3y ago
    > That's not nothing Any thoughts on how most ignored the "software engineer" from Google and his thoughts on their AI? [0] I know personally I tended to ignore it and let it get buried. However, in this sort of context I do wonder what would make something like that actually effective in persuading others. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en...
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  Software engineers tend to be pretty anti-union (or at least, union-agnostic). This is among the kinds of protections unions grant industry professionals in other industries.
  - nbow 3y ago
    Yeah I think this ties into not only the fact that we are highly paid, but also how unions generally form. When everyone works at a factory and have similar positions, you can stand outside and hand out flyers and have face to face conversations. With programmers, you might have a few others on your team that match your job description, then PMs, managers, designers, etc. Imagine trying to get a portion of the engineers at a midsize company together and you won't even have enough power to do anything but get yourselves fired. To me, this is why if you want a more ethically bound software industry, you need regulation, not unionization.
thr-nrg 3y ago
Social responsibility is not programming a nuclear warhead to target Moscow but target an arbitrary location which happens to be the location of Moscow.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  Agree, not sure why software engineers believe that engineering ethics is about doing what's in the users interest and what's morally correct. In most of the traditional engineering professions, the ethics course is mostly about building bridges that don't fail, and weapons that work as expected. If engineering ethics is about doing what morally right, then aerospace and mechanical engineers are the greatest sinners in the world. Engineering codes of conduct with legally binding power usually involve building things to specifications and things that won't fail (based on the specification). They don't make any prescriptions about the ethics of building a hypersonic missile or a tracking users en masse. Beware what you wish for, these rules exist to bind and regulate engineers. They are exist so capital holders can feel secure about their return on investment. Unless you want this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35970283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35970283 to become reality, better push back attempts to regulate software engineering.
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
That's 3/4 of it, knowing when to say no. The other 1/4 is knowing when to say yes ;) so you can sabotage the project later.

by cxr 3y ago

askvictor 3y ago

It would be nice if there were some sort of industry protection for engineers who do refuse unethical tasks. At present, I'd expect you'd get fired pretty quickly if you said no (at a lot of companies).

cxr 3y ago
Most "software engineers" don't have licenses/credentials backing up their job title, anyway. Compared to other industries, it's lightly regulated at best. So long as that's the case, I think the current balance, which includes the possibility that a programmer will be dismissed for failure to comply, is reasonable. From an HR and PR standpoint, companies who do so will be facing the threat of blowback related to disclosure that a programmer was fired for using their judgment on an ethics question rather than taking orders. That's not nothing.
- derivagral 3y ago
  > That's not nothing Any thoughts on how most ignored the "software engineer" from Google and his thoughts on their AI? [0] I know personally I tended to ignore it and let it get buried. However, in this sort of context I do wonder what would make something like that actually effective in persuading others. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-en...
shadowgovt 3y ago
Software engineers tend to be pretty anti-union (or at least, union-agnostic). This is among the kinds of protections unions grant industry professionals in other industries.
- nbow 3y ago
  Yeah I think this ties into not only the fact that we are highly paid, but also how unions generally form. When everyone works at a factory and have similar positions, you can stand outside and hand out flyers and have face to face conversations. With programmers, you might have a few others on your team that match your job description, then PMs, managers, designers, etc. Imagine trying to get a portion of the engineers at a midsize company together and you won't even have enough power to do anything but get yourselves fired. To me, this is why if you want a more ethically bound software industry, you need regulation, not unionization.

thr-nrg 3y ago

Social responsibility is not programming a nuclear warhead to target Moscow but target an arbitrary location which happens to be the location of Moscow.

KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
Agree, not sure why software engineers believe that engineering ethics is about doing what's in the users interest and what's morally correct. In most of the traditional engineering professions, the ethics course is mostly about building bridges that don't fail, and weapons that work as expected. If engineering ethics is about doing what morally right, then aerospace and mechanical engineers are the greatest sinners in the world. Engineering codes of conduct with legally binding power usually involve building things to specifications and things that won't fail (based on the specification). They don't make any prescriptions about the ethics of building a hypersonic missile or a tracking users en masse. Beware what you wish for, these rules exist to bind and regulate engineers. They are exist so capital holders can feel secure about their return on investment. Unless you want this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35970283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35970283 to become reality, better push back attempts to regulate software engineering.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago

That's 3/4 of it, knowing when to say no. The other 1/4 is knowing when to say yes ;) so you can sabotage the project later.