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As a physician and, prior to that, military officer, I have been struck by the fierce non-ethics of many software folks. Strawman, I know, but there it is. I t
by niels_olson 11y ago
As a physician and, prior to that, military officer, I have been struck by the fierce non-ethics of many software folks. Strawman, I know, but there it is.
I think part of the issue is that software engineering is abstracted from the immediate problem the person in the world is trying to solve, and one engineer may cross many industries in their career. In some sense, that abstract transience inhibits the feeling of duty that, say, a small town cardiologist feels toward his patients. My grandmother's doctor quit medicine after she died of a heart attack. He couldn't stand seeing all his friends die.
Conversely, there's an opportunity here to think about methods to pierce the abstraction. Perhaps that is the first order issue for software ethics: pierce the abstraction. Know the user's ethical problems. Know the customer's ethical problems (the therapist may be the user, but the hospital is the customer).
I hypothesize that the ethical issues are more obvious at the user's level. Hospital business offices, for instance, are famous for claiming the ethical high ground while ignoring the strain productivity requirements place on their staff. How much of software ethics in healthcare could be boiled down to "making healthcare easier, one less click at a time"?
That's where money and abstraction prevents the development of a coherent ethics: why develop ethics when I'm getting paid and will never get sued. No one is going to sue the software house for the hours of delay that accrete 1/2 second at a time. No one is going to sue the IT guy for the hours of delay that accrete on slow networks. No one is going to sue the developer that doesn't bother to anticipate that the PACS system will eventually be called upon to store digital pathology images also (at 10x the storage per image and 10x the number of images).
In fact, no one's going to sue the hospital for those things. And the hospital is the customer. So there's definitely no path from the nurse or doctor to the software house. Who cares about the intern wearing running shoes at 2 am trying to keep patients alive in 10 different units on 7 different floors in the 3 different wings of 2 hospitals? Nobody.
Similar issues could probably apply to roughnecks in the oil industry watching oil blow into the ocean because there's no button to override power on the valve, home buyers who are just trying to get their kids into a good school district, etc, etc.
- jacquesm 11y agoIt would start with accepting liability for the products we create. And no software company to date has been willing to do that.
- tomjen3 11y agoThat would require one hell of a liability insurance premium and as such would cause software development to stagnate due to all the bullshit it would require.
- jacquesm 11y agoAs I said, it would slow things down tremendously. I realize that and it's a huge problem, we basically get to choose between crap with huge unspecified risks (and those risks compound as systems become more interconnected and larger) and technological stagnation. Neither are desirable. But maybe we're overlooking a possible solution.
- lambdaelite 11y agoMy primary objection to most people calling themselves "software engineers" is that professional engineers are personally and professionally liable for their mistakes. It feels like software engineers want to shirk professional responsibility and ethics, yet gain some sort of ego boost by calling themselves an engineer.
- jimmaswell 11y agoMost software has no need to be held to such high standards. Very rarely is a bug going to actually hurt someone beyond some mild inconvenience. Where it matters, like in space shuttle code, it's done. This whole comment section is entirely overblown.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Turing_Machine 11y ago"Who cares about the intern wearing running shoes at 2 am trying to keep patients alive in 10 different units on 7 different floors in the 3 different wings of 2 hospitals?" It certainly isn't the AMA and the rest of the medical establishment, which do everything they can to keep the supply of doctors low and the salaries high.
- tomjen3 11y agoThe hospital will care when it gets sued.
- Turing_Machine 11y agoNah. They'll just raise their rates some more to cover the increased cost of malpractice insurance. And so the cycle continues...
- ftheama 11y ago>As a physician and, prior to that, military officer, I have been struck by the fierce non-ethics of many software folks. Yes! Compared to the noble physician, programmers like like Linus Torvalds (Linux, Git) and Richard Stallman (Emacs, GCC) who freely give away the fruits of their labor, even when it generates billions of dollars in value of which they reap only a tiny fraction, are nowhere near as ethical. Physicians are so ethical, in fact, that medical bills are number one cause of bankruptcy in the US!
- sirseal 11y agoDoes it make sense that doctors have to charge 10x just to even-out the insurance companies only paying 1/10 the price? Nope. You should direct your anger at for-profit medical insurance companies, which make billions of dollars in profit every month. To your ethical claim: can engineers go to prison for being unethical? No. Can physicians? Yes.
- ftheama 11y ago"But that’s not remotely true. The last time the OECD looked at this (PDF), they found that, adjusted for local purchasing power, America has the highest-paid general practitioners in the world. And our specialists make more than specialists in every other country except the Netherlands. What’s even more striking, as the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff observed last week, these highly paid doctors don’t buy us more doctors’ visits. Canada has about 25 percent more doctors’ consultations per capita than we do, and the average rich country has 50 percent more. This doctor compensation gap is hardly the only issue in overpriced American health care—overpriced medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, prescription drugs, and administrative overhead are all problems—but it’s a huge deal. Doctors aren’t as politically attractive a target as insurance companies, hospital administrators, or big pharma, but there’s no rational basis for leaving their interests unscathed when tackling unduly expensive medicine." http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/02/american_doctors_are_overpaid_medicare_is_cheaper_than_private_insurance.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/02/amer...
- jimmaswell 11y agoI am pretty sure an engineer can face some kind of serious charges if they were negligent in part of a system that ended up killing people, like a faulty airplane