4 ms·

This bill sucks, a developer should never be held accountable for software they work on or produce.

rileymat2 2y ago
But then won't you get a bunch of things that have tons of fine print that no one reads that say do not use it for these purposes. Then have users use them for those purposes harming others?
roughly 2y ago
That's an insane standard. Your work has real-world consequences, act accordingly.
- codr7 2y ago
  Hm, once we draw that line a shit ton of people will have to start asking difficult questions about their work. Not saying it's a bad idea, but it has consequences that I suspect you have not considered. It's very rare for the people writing the code to have any say in what it does.
  - otterley 2y ago
    > It's very rare for the people writing the code to have any say in what it does. That's no defense. Employment is voluntary, and you cannot break the law while doing your job, even if your employer commands you to.
    - TZubiri 2y ago
      It's also a separate issue. One thing is whether we are responsible for our work,and another is whether employers or employees are responsible. In the second case responsibility doesn't vanish, it is transferred.
      - roughly 2y ago
        If your argument is that employees are not responsible for the results of their work - not legally accountable, but morally responsible - I strongly disagree with this. You are always morally responsible for the results of your actions. Always. There may be mitigating circumstances - you need health care for your child’s chronic medical condition, you were faced with an impossible choice and chose the lesser evil, someone literally held a gun to your head - in which case the full moral picture may absolve you, but you still performed the actions that led to the outcomes in question, and you are still responsible for your actions and their consequences.
        TZubiri 2y ago
        That is yet a third separate question. Let's recap: 1- Are software developers (whether a company as a whole, or an indepent developer) responsible for the software they develop? 2- When a company develops software, is the responsibility on the company owners, the managers, or the employees or all in shared manner? 3- What is the moral responsibility and what is the legal responsibility in what way are they similar in what way are they different? At this point I'd forego the hopes of getting an answer and just focus on trying to make clear questions.
        roughly 2y ago
        You’re putting in a lot of effort to avoid actually answering any of these questions. I’m sorry if your work leads you to not want those answers. You bear moral responsibility for the outcomes of your actions, whether you do them on your own time or while acting as the agent of a company. You do not get to “transfer” moral responsibility. Soldiers are responsible for their conduct, employees for theirs. And, the overlap between legal and moral responsibility is that legal responsibility sometimes aligns with moral responsibility, but that’s irrelevant for the discussion of the moral. And to cut off the obvious question of “whose morality” - yours. You are accountable to whatever moral system you prefer to live by, but you are always accountable for your actions and their consequences, even when that’s uncomfortable or you’d prefer not to be. We don’t get days off from being human.
    - codr7 2y ago
      So if I write say the ORM code for a system that causes some kind of (completely unknown to me) harm, I'm guilty. Sorry, that doesn't compute for me.
      - otterley 2y ago
        No, but if your employer asks you to write software specifically designed to defraud a financial institution, yes, you are breaking the law.
        deadbabe 2y ago
        Except an employer wouldn’t say that. They would break up the project into separate pieces and engineers would work not really knowing what they’re putting together.
  - roughly 2y ago
    Legally liable is one thing, but if you contribute to a piece of software that has real-world consequences - your trading algorithm generated the money used to fund an election, your guidance software was used to bomb civilians, your algorithmic tweaks led to vaccine denialism becoming widespread - that's consequences of your actions. You can dress it up any way you want - you've got bills to pay, you were ordered to do so, you didn't see it coming, you can't control how people use your software - but at the end of the day, you contributed to those outcomes.
- lesuorac 2y ago
  Eh, I'm not even sure why the developer would ever be held accountable for developing things as required. It's not like a machinist is ever held responsible for a firearm death or a barrel maker is held responsible for an alcohol death. Making tools is just not a liable line of work. Using the tools or selling the tools historically is. _Brewers_ not barrel makers have been sued for alcohol deaths. However, if you were to add a backdoor to some software then yeah that's just general crime.
  - otterley 2y ago
    > Making tools is just not a liable line of work. The law says otherwise. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/products_liability https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/products_liability
    - lesuorac 2y ago
      If I sell you a hammer and the hammer breaks sure I'm liable. If I sell you a hammer and you hammer in somebody's head, I'm not liable. The second scenario is what we're actually talking about for developers. If I write VoIP code and you use it to commit ransomware; nobody is taking a developer to court over it. At best corporate is going to court. Even in the first scenario, you can't sue the individual worker that produced the hammer. You're limited to getting a refund or replacement of the hammer from corporate.
unsnap_biceps 2y ago
Wouldn't that broad statement also apply to malware or other malicious software development practices?
Muromec 2y ago
You just get an insurance, like every other reputable professional does.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tylerchilds 2y ago
My reading of this is that it will be tied to owners, not necessarily authors. Today, when code does illegal things, the company gets sued. This applies that to AI as well, which is that employers are liable, not that they can pin it on the dev that actually made the implementation. You’re still incentivized to not get your employer sued, since you’ll get fired, same as today. This just removes the “a robot did it” immunity. For self driving cars, this is a win, since if you die due to waymo, your literal death concludes as a hypothetical as it currently stands.
Cheer2171 2y ago
yeah, what do you think this field is called, software engineering?
TZubiri 2y ago
Lol, found the crazy scientist
IX-103 2y ago
Professional engineers are held liable for mistakes in their work. If a house falls or a dam breaks the responsibility falls on them to show it wasn't built as designed or there was some other factor involved that a professional engineer would not be expected to have considered in their design. And, yes, as others have mentioned they get insurance, but there's more to it than that. The level of verification that those designs go through before being released is on a completely different level than what is usually applied to software.

But then won't you get a bunch of things that have tons of fine print that no one reads that say do not use it for these purposes. Then have users use them for those purposes harming others?

roughly 2y ago

That's an insane standard. Your work has real-world consequences, act accordingly.

codr7 2y ago
Hm, once we draw that line a shit ton of people will have to start asking difficult questions about their work. Not saying it's a bad idea, but it has consequences that I suspect you have not considered. It's very rare for the people writing the code to have any say in what it does.
- otterley 2y ago
  > It's very rare for the people writing the code to have any say in what it does. That's no defense. Employment is voluntary, and you cannot break the law while doing your job, even if your employer commands you to.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    It's also a separate issue. One thing is whether we are responsible for our work,and another is whether employers or employees are responsible. In the second case responsibility doesn't vanish, it is transferred.
    - roughly 2y ago
      If your argument is that employees are not responsible for the results of their work - not legally accountable, but morally responsible - I strongly disagree with this. You are always morally responsible for the results of your actions. Always. There may be mitigating circumstances - you need health care for your child’s chronic medical condition, you were faced with an impossible choice and chose the lesser evil, someone literally held a gun to your head - in which case the full moral picture may absolve you, but you still performed the actions that led to the outcomes in question, and you are still responsible for your actions and their consequences.
      - TZubiri 2y ago
        That is yet a third separate question. Let's recap: 1- Are software developers (whether a company as a whole, or an indepent developer) responsible for the software they develop? 2- When a company develops software, is the responsibility on the company owners, the managers, or the employees or all in shared manner? 3- What is the moral responsibility and what is the legal responsibility in what way are they similar in what way are they different? At this point I'd forego the hopes of getting an answer and just focus on trying to make clear questions.
        roughly 2y ago
        You’re putting in a lot of effort to avoid actually answering any of these questions. I’m sorry if your work leads you to not want those answers. You bear moral responsibility for the outcomes of your actions, whether you do them on your own time or while acting as the agent of a company. You do not get to “transfer” moral responsibility. Soldiers are responsible for their conduct, employees for theirs. And, the overlap between legal and moral responsibility is that legal responsibility sometimes aligns with moral responsibility, but that’s irrelevant for the discussion of the moral. And to cut off the obvious question of “whose morality” - yours. You are accountable to whatever moral system you prefer to live by, but you are always accountable for your actions and their consequences, even when that’s uncomfortable or you’d prefer not to be. We don’t get days off from being human.
  - codr7 2y ago
    So if I write say the ORM code for a system that causes some kind of (completely unknown to me) harm, I'm guilty. Sorry, that doesn't compute for me.
    - otterley 2y ago
      No, but if your employer asks you to write software specifically designed to defraud a financial institution, yes, you are breaking the law.
      - deadbabe 2y ago
        Except an employer wouldn’t say that. They would break up the project into separate pieces and engineers would work not really knowing what they’re putting together.
- roughly 2y ago
  Legally liable is one thing, but if you contribute to a piece of software that has real-world consequences - your trading algorithm generated the money used to fund an election, your guidance software was used to bomb civilians, your algorithmic tweaks led to vaccine denialism becoming widespread - that's consequences of your actions. You can dress it up any way you want - you've got bills to pay, you were ordered to do so, you didn't see it coming, you can't control how people use your software - but at the end of the day, you contributed to those outcomes.
lesuorac 2y ago
Eh, I'm not even sure why the developer would ever be held accountable for developing things as required. It's not like a machinist is ever held responsible for a firearm death or a barrel maker is held responsible for an alcohol death. Making tools is just not a liable line of work. Using the tools or selling the tools historically is. _Brewers_ not barrel makers have been sued for alcohol deaths. However, if you were to add a backdoor to some software then yeah that's just general crime.
- otterley 2y ago
  > Making tools is just not a liable line of work. The law says otherwise. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/products_liability https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/products_liability
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    If I sell you a hammer and the hammer breaks sure I'm liable. If I sell you a hammer and you hammer in somebody's head, I'm not liable. The second scenario is what we're actually talking about for developers. If I write VoIP code and you use it to commit ransomware; nobody is taking a developer to court over it. At best corporate is going to court. Even in the first scenario, you can't sue the individual worker that produced the hammer. You're limited to getting a refund or replacement of the hammer from corporate.

unsnap_biceps 2y ago

Wouldn't that broad statement also apply to malware or other malicious software development practices?

Muromec 2y ago

You just get an insurance, like every other reputable professional does.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tylerchilds 2y ago

My reading of this is that it will be tied to owners, not necessarily authors. Today, when code does illegal things, the company gets sued. This applies that to AI as well, which is that employers are liable, not that they can pin it on the dev that actually made the implementation. You’re still incentivized to not get your employer sued, since you’ll get fired, same as today. This just removes the “a robot did it” immunity. For self driving cars, this is a win, since if you die due to waymo, your literal death concludes as a hypothetical as it currently stands.

Cheer2171 2y ago

yeah, what do you think this field is called, software engineering?

TZubiri 2y ago

Lol, found the crazy scientist

IX-103 2y ago

Professional engineers are held liable for mistakes in their work. If a house falls or a dam breaks the responsibility falls on them to show it wasn't built as designed or there was some other factor involved that a professional engineer would not be expected to have considered in their design. And, yes, as others have mentioned they get insurance, but there's more to it than that. The level of verification that those designs go through before being released is on a completely different level than what is usually applied to software.