I am much more interested in reigning in the industry itself with top level regulation to protect human rights like privacy. Once the excesses of the industry and its thirst for personal data result in crimes for the executives then we can talk about what happens if the developers decide to go along with the regulation breaking.
I had two whole semesters of ethics in my CS college. It's very naive to believe this makes any difference, like most suggestions in this childish article, in the way engineers act in the workplace (vs let's say an effective judiciary and appropriate liability laws).
Doctors make bank they they were still happy to prescribe tons of oxy in exchange for pretty minimal kickbacks as long as it was plausibly deniable to them.....
At the end of the day most of these calls for regulation are about bucking responsibility. People want to go punch the clock at EvilCorp and they want to be given a set of rules that they can just follow without thinking that will enable them to look themselves in the mirror and say "I'm not evil, I'm following the rules, if the complainers don't like it they should write their congressmen".
So it seems like this guy doesn't realize that for a lot of real world effecting systems like Health and Aviation that he calls out there is already a ton of regulation and rules around it.
In fact the biggest issue with safety he has seems to be the use of tech in military drones, which 1) wouldn't really be prevented by a "code" and 2) isn't an issue of engineering, it's a whole separate philosophical debate and question of values.
I mean remember the guy who invited the process for mass producing nitrogen which led to fertilizer production vastly increasing and is largely responsible for ending world starvation, for which he won the novel prize, was only doing it because he wanted to figure out how to speed the production of TNT for wartime uses, he also later went on to become the father of chemical weapons in WW1.
So if your hope is "if we give every software engineer an ethics 101 course then everyone will hold hands and sing cumbaya" is hopelessly naive. In the meantime for a lot of the industries where your software can kill people there is already heavy rules around it.
Code is speech, and if you aren't allowed to run the code, what good is it being being available or free? Any "regulations" would start by restricting code, it's no different from saying writers need a lot of regulations because of dangerous or badly written text/books/publications has caused a lot of damage.
It’s very different. It’s doesn’t matter that source code (as “speech”) is useless without running it (though I don’t think that’s quite true) - the definition doesn’t care about how inconvenienced you are. The point of having free speech is to be able to freely express views. Running code isn’t expressing a view, it’s a machine that’s having an independent effect in the world. You may as well say that running industrial equipment is “speech”. It generalises so much it loses meaning.
I am much more interested in reigning in the industry itself with top level regulation to protect human rights like privacy. Once the excesses of the industry and its thirst for personal data result in crimes for the executives then we can talk about what happens if the developers decide to go along with the regulation breaking.
I had two whole semesters of ethics in my CS college. It's very naive to believe this makes any difference, like most suggestions in this childish article, in the way engineers act in the workplace (vs let's say an effective judiciary and appropriate liability laws).
I have been saying exactly this for decades, except that I have no optimism that such regulation will ever happen.
Doctors make bank they they were still happy to prescribe tons of oxy in exchange for pretty minimal kickbacks as long as it was plausibly deniable to them.....
At the end of the day most of these calls for regulation are about bucking responsibility. People want to go punch the clock at EvilCorp and they want to be given a set of rules that they can just follow without thinking that will enable them to look themselves in the mirror and say "I'm not evil, I'm following the rules, if the complainers don't like it they should write their congressmen".
So it seems like this guy doesn't realize that for a lot of real world effecting systems like Health and Aviation that he calls out there is already a ton of regulation and rules around it.
In fact the biggest issue with safety he has seems to be the use of tech in military drones, which 1) wouldn't really be prevented by a "code" and 2) isn't an issue of engineering, it's a whole separate philosophical debate and question of values. I mean remember the guy who invited the process for mass producing nitrogen which led to fertilizer production vastly increasing and is largely responsible for ending world starvation, for which he won the novel prize, was only doing it because he wanted to figure out how to speed the production of TNT for wartime uses, he also later went on to become the father of chemical weapons in WW1.
So if your hope is "if we give every software engineer an ethics 101 course then everyone will hold hands and sing cumbaya" is hopelessly naive. In the meantime for a lot of the industries where your software can kill people there is already heavy rules around it.
[flagged]
> Software is speech.
You might be able to argue source code is “speech”, but running software definitely isn’t. It’s so different it’s difficult to know where to start.
Code is speech, and if you aren't allowed to run the code, what good is it being being available or free? Any "regulations" would start by restricting code, it's no different from saying writers need a lot of regulations because of dangerous or badly written text/books/publications has caused a lot of damage.
It’s very different. It’s doesn’t matter that source code (as “speech”) is useless without running it (though I don’t think that’s quite true) - the definition doesn’t care about how inconvenienced you are. The point of having free speech is to be able to freely express views. Running code isn’t expressing a view, it’s a machine that’s having an independent effect in the world. You may as well say that running industrial equipment is “speech”. It generalises so much it loses meaning.
Code does not operate under the rights of a country, and your definition of "speech" and "Free speech" is misguided and wrong.