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It's a shame we don't have more engineers today that refuse to invent things because so many technological inventions today are being used to further the destru
by vouaobrasil 2y ago
It's a shame we don't have more engineers today that refuse to invent things because so many technological inventions today are being used to further the destruction of our planet through consumerism.
Sadly, human society has a blind spot when it comes to inventions with short-term benefits but long-term detriments.
I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.
- dartos 2y agoIf only it were that easy. A lot of engineers in the US who are both right out of school and are on visas need to find and keep work within a couple months of graduation and can’t be picky with their job or risk getting deported. We have a fair number of indentured programmers.
- xeonmc 2y ago"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should."
- sph 2y ago> I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI. Refusing to work on something is not newsworthy. I refuse to work on (or use) AI, ads and defence projects, and I'm far from being the only one. Though let who is free of sin throw the first stone, I now stand on a high horse after having worked in the gambling sector, and now ashamed of it, so I prefer to focus the projects themselves rather than the people and what they choose to do for a living.
- sweettea 2y agoI am curious why you avoid ads - personally I view them as a tremendous good for the world, helping people improve their lives by introducing them to products or even just ideas they didn't know existed.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoI also believe advertisements are useful! However, by this definition, the ad industry is not engaged in advertisement.
- myrmidon 2y agoTo me, ads are primarily a way to extract more value from ad-viewers by stochastically manipulating their behavior. There is a lot of support in favor. Consider: - Ads are typically NOT consumed enthusiastically or even sought out (which would be the cases if they were strongly mutually beneficial). There are such cases but they are a very small minority. - If product introduction was the primary purpose, then repeatedly bombarding people with well-known brands would not make sense. But that is exactly what is being done (and paid for!) the most. Coca Cola does not pay for you to learn that they produce softdrinks. They pay for ads to shift your spending/consumption habits. - Ads are an inherently flawed and biased way to learn about products, because there is no incentive whatsoever to inform you of flaws, or even to represent price/quality tradeoffs honestly.
- throwuxiytayq 2y agoI tend to view ads as the perfect opposite of what you mentioned; it’s an enormous waste of money and resources on a global scale that provides no tangible benefit for anyone that isn’t easily and cheaply replaced by vastly superior options. If people valued ad viewing (e.g. for product decisions), we’d have popular websites dedicated to ad viewing. What we have instead is an industry dedicated to the idea of forcefully displaying ads to users in the least convenient places possible, and we still all go to reddit to decide what to buy.
- IggleSniggle 2y agoWe do have such sites though, like Tom's Hardware or Consumer Reports or Wirecutter or what have you. Consumers pay money for these ads to reduce the conflict of interest, but companies still need to get their products chosen for these review pipelines.
- 2y ago
- sneak 2y agoAvoiding the use of AI is just going to get you lapped. There’s no benefit to your ideological goals in kneecapping yourself. There’s nothing morally wrong with using or building AI, or gambling.
- vouaobrasil 2y agoThe benefit is a clear conscience.
- datameta 2y agoIn what context? Code generation? Art exploration?
- Tao3300 2y agoThere's a lot baked into that thought, but I wanted to extract this part: > There’s nothing morally wrong with ... building... gambling. Say you're building a gambling system and building that system well. What does that mean? More people use it? Those people access it more? Access it faster? Gamble more? Gamble faster? It creates and feeds addiction.
- slumberlust 2y agoI agree with you. It's also worth noting that this isn't unique to anything discussed here. EVERYONE has their line in the sand on a huge array of issues, and that line falls differently for a lot of people. Environment, religion, war, medicine; everything has a personal line associated with it.
- sneak 2y agoLots of things create and feed addictions, including baking cookies. Let’s not confuse the issue. Just because you find something distasteful doesn’t mean it’s bad or morally problematic.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Tao3300 2y agoI also refuse to work on the war machine, blockchain, or gambling. Unfortunately it looks like that might also be refusing to eat right now. We'll see how much longer my principles can hold out. Being gaslit into an unjustified termination has me in a cynical kind of mood anyway. Doing a little damage might be cathartic.
- doctor_eval 2y agoI’ve been gaslit, I ended up walking away from my company. It was extremely painful. > Doing a little damage might be cathartic. Please avoid the regret. Do something kind instead. Take the high road. Take care of yourself.
- Tao3300 2y agoKindness doesn't have any dev openings.
- doctor_eval 2y agoOf course. But at least try to minimise the damage. Don’t do anything you’ll regret.
- Tao3300 2y agoRegret right now would be letting the stress of unemployment rip my family apart. I've got maybe a handful of door-slamming "what the fuck did you do all day then?" rants that I can tolerate before I'm ready to sign on with Blockchain LLM O-Ring Validation as a Service LLC: We Always Return True!™ if it'll pay the bills and get my wife to stop freaking out.
- immibis 2y agoAnd this is how all unjust systems sustain themselves. You WILL participate in the injustice, or be punished SEVERELY. Why do the people doing the punishing want to punish you? Because they WILL participate in punishing, or be punished SEVERELY. People have wondered how so many people ever participated in any historical atrocity. This same mechanism is used for all of them.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago> Refusing to work on something is not newsworthy. One person, no. A hundred, who knows. Ten thousand programmers united together not to work on something? Now we're getting somewhere. A hundred thousand? Newsworthy.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoThe issue is quantifying this sentiment. How would you even identify programmers who are doing this? Yet another reason why software engineers really ought to organize their labor like a lot of other disciplines of engineering have done decades ago. Collective action like this would be more easily mustered, advertised, and used to influence outcomes if labor were merely organized and informed of itself.
- int_19h 2y agoYou can do public pledges, e.g.: https://neveragain.tech https://neveragain.tech
- BlarfMcFlarf 2y agoI would bet there are a hundred thousand people refusing to work in war, ai, ads, gambling, crypto etc. I certainly am. But all it means is that pay goes up and quality of engineering goes down a little in those sectors, but not much more.
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoIf all the programmers working on advertising and tracking and fingerprinting and dark pattern psychology were to move into the field of AI I think that would be a big win. And that's not saying that AI is going to be great or even good or even overly positive, it's just streets ahead of the alternatives I mentioned.
- ModernMech 2y agoI feel like AI is going to be all those things on steroids.
- Jensson 2y agoYeah, Google, Facebook and Microsoft putting a massive fraction of their resources on AI is what already happened, but isn't really encouraging.
- ModernMech 2y agoYeah they are the dark pattern, tracking, advertising l, privacy violating kings. Of course they’re going to keep doing all that “but with AI (TM)”
- BLKNSLVR 2y agoI'll reply here since your comment was first. AI has the potential to go in many directions, at least some of which could be societally 'good'. Advertising is, has always been, and likely always will be, societally 'bad'. This differentiation, if nothing else. (Yes, my opinion on advertising is militantly one sided. I'm unlikely to be convinced otherwise, but happy for, and will read, contrary commentary).
- Dove 2y agoI don't think it's advertising that's inherently evil. Like government, it's a good thing, even a needed thing. People need laws and courts, and buyers and sellers need to be able to connect. It turns evil in the presence of corruption. Taking bribes in exchange for power. Government should never make rules for money, but for the good of the people. And advertising should never offer exposure for sale - exposure should only result from merit. Build an advertising system with integrity - in which truthful and useful ads are not just a minimum requirement but an honest aspiration and the only way to the top of the heap. Build an advertising system focused, not on exploiting the viewer, but on serving them - connecting them with goods and services and ideas and people and experiences that are wanted and that promote their health and thriving. I won't work on advertising as it's currently understood... I agree it's evil. But I'd work on that, and I think it would be a great good.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago> I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI. This is not effective. Having a regulated profession that is held to some standards, like accountants, would actually work Without unions and without a professional body individual action won’t be achieving anything
- chris_t 2y agoBut... accountants do work for AI companies, right? That doesn't seem like a good example.
- nradov 2y agoSo do you think that people should be required to become members of a "regulated profession" before writing a VBA spreadsheet macro, or contributing to an open-source project?
- ClumsyPilot 2y agoAre you required to become a chartered civil engineer to build a house for your dog? But the software developer who’se code handles personal information of 10 million million people should know that you don’t store them in plain text, which developers and business leaders at Virgin Media did not know, and if you click ‘forgot password’ they would send you a letter with you password In The Mail
- michaelt 2y agoSadly it's not enough for 99% of engineers to refuse to work on an unethical technology, or even 99.99% Personally I don't work on advertising/tracking, anything highly polluting, weapons technology, high-interest loans, scams and scam-adjacent tech, and so on. But there are enough engineers without such concerns to keep the snooping firms, the missile firms, and the payday loan firms in business.
- Frost1x 2y agoOne issue we have is that economic pressures underly everything, including ethics. Ethics are often malleable depending on what someone needs to survive and given different situations with resource constraints, people are ultimately more willing to bend ethics. Now, there’s often limits to some flexibility and lines some simply will not cross, but survival and self preservation tends to take precedent and push those limits. E.g., I can’t imagine ever resorting to cannibalism but Flight 571 with the passengers stranded in the Andes makes a good case for me bending that line. I’d be a lot more willing to work for some scam or in high interest loans for example before resorting to cannibalism to feed myself and I think most people would. If we assure basic survival at a reasonable level, you might find far less engineers willing to work in any of these spaces. It boils down to what alternatives they have and just how firm they are on some ethical line in the sand. We’d pretty much improve the world all around I’d say. Our economic system doesn’t want that though, it wants to be able to apply this level of pressure on people and so do those who are highly successful who leverage their wealth as power. As such I don’t see how that will ever change, you’ll always have someone doing terrible things depending on who is the most desperate.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoThere are even engineers with such concerns working in these firms. They might figure that the missile is getting built no matter if they work there or not, so they might as well take the job offer.
- throwaway22032 2y agoI no longer work as a software developer because I feel that technology is ruining normal human interactions by substituting them in incomplete ways and making everyone depressed. I think we'd be better off making things for each other and being present and local rather than trying to hyperstimulate ourselves into oblivion. I'm just some dude though. It's not making it to the headlines.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago> I'm just some dude though. It's not making it to the headlines. Doesn't have to be on headlines. Even just hearing that gives me a bit more energy to fight actively against the post-useful developments of modern society. Every little bit helps.
- tryauuum 2y agoHow do you get money nowadays?
- constantcrying 2y agoThe curse of technology is that it is neither good nor bad. Only in the way it is used t becomes one or the other. >I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI. That is just ridiculous. Modern neural networks are obviously an extremely useful tool.
- hbossy 2y agoI will never forget the grumpy look on the face of a imperial tobacco representative on a job fair in my university years ago. No one was visiting their booth for anything except for silly questions about benefit package including cigarettes.
- nasaeclipse 2y agoAs others have said, a big part of the problem is the need to eat. I have a family. I work for a company that does stuff for the government. I'd _rather_ be building and working on my cycling training app all day every day, but that doesn't make me any money, and probably never will. All the majority of us can hope for is to build something that helps people and society, and hope that does enough good to counteract the morally grey in this world. Nothing is ever black and white.
- dylan604 2y agoThe problem is that for every one that refuses, there's at least one that will. So standing on principles only works if the rest of the rungs of the ladder above you also have those same principles. If anywhere in the org above you does not, you will be overruled/replaced.
- Ekaros 2y agoI would wish lot more programmers refuse to work with surveillance and add tech... But nearly every site has that stuff on them... Goes to tell what are the principles of profession or in general...