
Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors - andrewvc
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/google-privacy-china.html
======
ABCLAW
I think the imposition of this burden on engineers is the result of our belief
that our legislators are too incompetent or unwilling to act in the fact of
clear moral hazards.

Tech has a very strong history of conscientious objectors. They're not the
problem. Other institutions need to do their part.

~~~
robertAngst
What is the problem again?

You used google while signed in and now the world knows you like barbies?

Serious question, because I do not feel violated.

~~~
ohyes
Assume that a hypothetical future government that you find yourself living
under is not good.

Assume furthermore that a future hypothetical company is equally not good and
the two collude to do not good things together.

Now assume you’re motivated to do something about it. Sucks for you, they have
already predicted that and cleansed you because they know everything you’ve
ever read and it was a high probability that you’d be against them.

Consider another situation where hypothetical evil overlords know exactly what
buttons press in order to influence you to act a certain way. They press them
regularly. You dance as expected.

Both circumstances undermine your personal autonomy and right to self
determination. Furthermore they undermine the humanity that we share where our
society is no longer controlled by the needs of humans, but instead arbitrary
algorithms coded for whatever mundanely evil purpose.

And that’s the point (that you’ve more or less hit on), this is evil, but also
so boring that it is actually a threat to society because no one will care
enough to do anything.

~~~
closeparen
Does increased government authority over the tech industry make abusive access
to its data and eyeballs less likely, or more likely? How would such a
collaboration start? My money's on "It sure would be a shame if we audited the
shit out of your infrastructure and hit you with everything we can find in the
500,000 page rulebook... or you could do me this one favor."

Doing something about a bad government is called terrorism. Rooting out such
people before they act is called preventing radicalization, stemming the flow
of hatred and bigotry (the #1 talking point in calls to regulate tech).

Knowing what buttons to press to influence populations to act a certain way is
called called campaigning. Belief in democracy is exactly equal to belief that
whoever is best at that each election cycle should have the most power.

~~~
ohyes
Abuses are just that. If a corrupt person is using the law corruptly in order
to achieve something illegal, and getting away with it, that is something we
should root out. Including your hypothetical racket.

Creating laws to prevent the population from being abused and manipulated via
big data is somewhat orthogonal to that, as it would be a separate set of
laws. we can’t _not_ do something just because it might be abused by those
implementing it. We have to include reasonable limits to the powers we grant.

We don’t do away with all rule of law because it is occasionally abused, we
prosecute the abusers under said laws and create new laws when loopholes are
inevitably found.

------
mfoy_
I've long thought that tech needs like.. a guild or trade union, or a
professional association of some kind. The problem though, is that it's so
easy to get into, so there's no easy way to "police" ourselves, because tech
has been democratized so well-- Anyone can do a code boot-camp and be up and
running within weeks. Not that that's a bad thing, it just makes it harder to
hold developers to a code of ethics or anything like that...

Maybe we just, as a society, need to adopt morality and ethics more deeply
into our cultural DNA.

~~~
jammygit
Canada has a professional software engineering organization, at least in some
provinces. That said, they talk a lot about ethics but then award first place
at a local engineering competition to a team that tracks people's position and
movements without them knowing using their cell signals (for use in airports),
so maybe it doesn't do any good. Great technical work by them mind you.

~~~
armagon
I'm a Canadian coder ... and my first thought, reading your comment, was, "We
do?"

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I think Canada has had a professional, and pretty serious, association of
engineers (in the traditional sense) for a long, long time. Maybe the software
thing is a spin-off of that.

~~~
mfoy_
In Ontario, at least, "engineer" is a protected designation.

[http://www.peo.on.ca/](http://www.peo.on.ca/)

~~~
jammygit
Alberta too.

The regulation is coming on very gradually since they're confused about how to
define and regulate the title/practice.

The regulation won't necessarily help anything but to outlaw a lot of smart
people from being able to write certain software. It will put us further
behind the USA in our ability to create tech companies that matter (or that
can compete with offshoring) and lead to higher unemployment as computers take
away more jobs.

Luckily the restriction is barely enforced at this point, though it is getting
stricter. I guess it will benefit me in the future when somebody will be
forced to hire me because there weren't enough other applicants with
professional membership... sort of a depressing thought

~~~
Zaphods
> The regulation won't necessarily help anything but to outlaw a lot of smart
> people from being able to write certain software. It will put us further
> behind the USA in our ability to create tech companies that matter (or that
> can compete with offshoring)

Has any of that happened with engineers in Canada? We still have plenty of
engineers.

A lot of this comes off as any industry wanting to hold onto the engineer
title without any of the accountability that should come along with it, or
really any accountability at all.

I don't want a random self taught engineer involved in building my house or a
local highway overpass. So why would I also want a random self taught software
engineer working on vital computer systems or on autonomous vehicles or on the
software that controls the pitch controls on a Boeing 737? Software is not
just some shit-tier SaaS app. It being hard to get official credation means
accepting holding oneself to high (legal) standards. If that means lots of
people have to go around calling themselves a developer instead of an engineer
then I'm fine with that.

It might seem depressing that we hold engineers to high standards and expect
legal accountability for the things they sign off on or create or approve, but
I think more accountability in the tech industry is a good thing. The modern
tech industry and software engineers hold themselves to ludicrously low
standards because they basically operate on the idea that innovation = good
and if-it-makes-money it must also be good. I know fast food workers who are
held to higher standards than software engineers. That many continue to call
themselves engineers is mainly just a hold over from a metaphor that describes
computer systems as "architecture".

Software is a big deal and it effects every fabric of daily life in 2019. We
shouldn't treat it like it's ephemeral stuff that has no consequences beyond
the next VC exit or going public.

~~~
icebraining
> Software is not just some shit-tier SaaS app.

I think the fear is that the same restrictions _will_ affect shit-tier apps as
well as aeronautic control software. After all, it's not like you can't
already say "to work on aeronautic software you must have credential X or Y".
So what's the point of restricting the word "engineer" as a whole?

~~~
Zaphods
The problem with that argument is that they can just call themselves
developers and nothing would change. Currently, "software engineer" doesn't
_mean_ anything. There is _no_ credential that obligates software engineers to
the same standards as other engineers or more than developers. Right now it's
just an empty title in the tech industry.

It's not a restricted word. It's a restricted accredation that, should one
carry it, obligates them to a certain set of standards and accountability.

The people making those apps don't need to call themselves engineers. They can
call themselves developers. And the world will keep spinning. But a developer
calling themselves an engineer is like a local contractor calling themselves a
"residential engineer". An engineer can be a local contractor, but a local
contractor can't simply call themselves an engineer, of any sort, unless
they're accredited. That distinction matters because engineers have
obligations that they are held to that a local contractor doesn't. That's the
point.

------
3xblah
"We are a small - as-of-yet unincorporated - nonprofit providing pro bono
consulting on algorithmic and policy issues arising from the proliferation of:
Statistical inference / Automated decision making - often called 'AI', ..."

From the author's website, listed at the bottom.

Imagine if journalists and other people posting to the www called "AI" what it
actually is, instead of constantly portraying it as something futuristic to
capture people's imaginations.

Even terms like "statistical inference" and "automated decision-making" could
probably be explained using more common language to be comprehensible to the
general public.

~~~
stendinator
How would you rewrite that short passage in a way you think is optimal?

~~~
laughinghan
Your parent comment was praising that passage and wishing more journalists and
others would take that as an example of how to describe about AI.

------
newscracker
Compensation, including perks, is usually very good in tech in comparison to
many other industries. Most people rationalize and convince themselves that
they're not really doing bad things, and that it's someone else who's the
problem.

In some companies, the culture is also that of being oblivious (or acting
oblivious) to the harm caused by the work. Facebook is the best example of
this. Has there been any conscientious objector in that company? People like
the WhatsApp and Instagram founders, who grew a conscience after getting
billions in their pockets, don't count (even if one or two left some money on
the table when quitting).

Money tells many a true tale of what goes in in people's minds.

The article, sadly, does not mention Facebook and all the surveillance that it
enables and grows, along with oppressing people by forcing them to use "real
names".

~~~
seppin
> Has there been any conscientious objector in that company?

No it's a cult. They wouldn't hire you unless you drank the koolaid.

~~~
opportune
Usually in articles with a lot of facebook bashing, some facebook employee
comes out of the woodwork and tries to spin it as "haters" being the problem
somehow (for not doing anything, for (potentially) using the service?)

------
hnruss
While I agree that individuals should consider the ethics of the projects that
they work on, I think it's unfair to place the entire burden on them. Those in
management who make the product requirements in order to sell the software are
in the best position to evaluate the ethics of how software will be used. Why
haven't I read a story about management conscientiously objecting to
something?

~~~
sokoloff
I’m in management (at a company that doesn’t make anything where conscientious
objection could be relevant). When we make other ethics-based judgment calls,
we don’t go crowing about them generally. They’re simply “how things are done
around here.”

~~~
pdimitar
Maybe you should tell the world about it. More people need inspiration to
stand up to morally bankrupt leaders. Your story might just push them in the
right direction.

------
mc32
I think this is s bit naive. Americans and EU citizens could conceivably
follow some protocol such that what they produce will not go against certain
principles (if we even presume no such thing as dual use tech), but that would
do little to stifle and control developers outside this sphere. Vladimir,
Jinping, Jeong-Un, Narendra, etc., aren’t about to handicap themselves and
have some realization, oh, you know what guys, we should be respecting human
rights, we gotta stop.

~~~
AstralStorm
At least they won't be handed solutions to make their dictatorship more
effective and harder to avoid. Much less to combat.

~~~
joejerryronnie
You’re right, soon we’ll be using their solutions.

------
bentona
A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse
to perform military service" [0]

I believe that it is dangerous to conflate job choice with conscientious
objection.

Everyone should be held accountable for what they spend their day contributing
to - this shouldn't be a special case.

Comparing this to a situation in which someone doesn't want to participate in
compulsory murder, and in some cases risks being killed themselves, is not
helpful.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientious_objector#cite_no...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientious_objector#cite_note-1)

~~~
roenxi
On the one hand, I agree with you that it isn't helpful.

But on the other hand, there is a plausible parallel. The _reason_ for strong
controls on privacy is because every couple of generations governments tend to
do a lot of damage to their own citizens.

If I thought the worst that was going to happen was the risk of being wrongly
accused, public shaming or something, then privacy isn't really worth it. I
trust law enforcement to be generally correct in assessing the situation, and
if you are doing something shameful you may as well be shamed.

Privacy is important because it is one layer of protection against
institutions participating in the murder of citizens, seen in Germany, China,
Russia in the last generation and China + others this generation. Who knows
for next generation? Change is very quick - there is no law of nature that
says it won't be an Anglophone country. We can get thingy about whether a
conscientious objector has to be the last person pulling the trigger or not,
but in practice that distinction is not an important one.

------
oldjokes
Tech has had many conscientious objectors, I've watched them come and go over
the decades.

Most of them drive trucks now. A few lucky ones became artists or writers, but
mostly a lot of bad outcomes.

One of these failed truck drivers even makes deliveries to the house of the
person who forced him out sometimes, a fact which he loves laughing about.

~~~
itronitron
>> the person who forced him out

Worth noting that probably everyone here has seen something like this happen.
Not sure if it is specific to tech, but some of the egos and pathologies are
extreme.

~~~
patrec
I have never seen up close someone risking and losing their livelihood over
moral issues with a business. It clearly does happen, but I would have assumed
it to be rare, maybe more so in IT. So if you or GP have some details they can
share about cases you witnessed, I'd love to hear.

~~~
itronitron
Oh, I meant more generally seeing someone getting forced out by a single other
person in the organization.

I think taking a moral stance usually leads people to move on of their own
volition, as they tend to know the rules (and want them followed) and don't
want to be associated with the fall out or with an organization that enforces
them selectively.

------
olalonde
This article is premised on the idea that basically everything the Chinese
government does is unethical, which is debatable. For one, the Chinese
government is largely supported by its population. There might actually be
engineers working on Dragonfly who do not believe the project is unethical.
It's not that black and white...

~~~
stendinator
How would one know if the Chinese government was supported by the population
or not, given that anyone expressing a contrary opinion is likely to be a
thorn in the eye that is China's surveillance state?

~~~
olalonde
It's quite apparent to anyone who has lived there for a while and talked to
people. Some large scale anonymous surveys done by not particularly
sympathetic outsiders also confirm it (e.g.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2016/10/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2016/10/04/read-this-book-if-you-want-to-know-what-chinas-citizens-
really-think-about-their-government/)).

~~~
lern_too_spel
That's what happens when the party controls information to paint a very
specific picture. You'll find that anonymous surveys in DPRK will also show
that most support the Kim regime.

------
1e-9
Encouraging dissent is a small piece of what is needed. Developers must
certainly consider the moral and ethical consequences of their work, but most
situations are not going to be black and white, and no matter how diabolical a
project might be, there is always a way to rationalize it. What is most needed
is widespread public debate among those who understand the technologies in
order to form consensus on appropriate directions of development. Any
consensus then needs to be effectively communicated to the public and to
policy makers. This helps everyone, including developers, make better
decisions about what they should or should not support. Forums such as HN and
various blogs can foster debate, but there seems to be a need for a more
consolidated approach that someone needs to establish. As far as communicating
consensus goes, I think that nonprofit organizations like the Electronic
Frontier Foundation can be a good conduit, but they need more widespread
support from the technical community.

------
AndyMcConachie
I wrote an article on why this kind of thinking is naive a while back. I still
think it is naive.

[https://ctsp.berkeley.edu/ethical-pledges-for-individuals-
an...](https://ctsp.berkeley.edu/ethical-pledges-for-individuals-and-
collectives/)

~~~
chillacy
Yea I frequently see sentiments like “if only everyone would stop working for
X”. It’s true but when we’re all locked in a game of the prisoners dilemma,
moralizing isn’t going to get us to move, laws and changed incentives will. I
think americans finally figured that out about climate change, which is why
we’re looking at carbon taxes instead of just public pressure.

------
ETHisso2017
It's worth remembering that most of the directly attributable harm we
associate with tech was created by small entities like the NSO Group and
Cambridge Analytica. Instead of conscientious objectors applying pressure to
large companies, it might be better for tech employees who come across small
companies doing shady activities to report them. Many times, these smaller
firms are more susceptible to pressure anyways, so this is a double benefit.

~~~
ben509
Being smaller, though, those companies can simply be up front about what they
do during recruiting and people who don't like it won't sign up for them.
Succinctly, prudes don't work in porn.

~~~
geofft
Is there a name for this phenomenon in general? Your phrasing is quite clear
but apparently novel, and I think it happens a lot - anti-war clergy don't
apply to be military chaplains, so soldiers and commanders hear biased
opinions of whether their work is incompatible with their religion compared to
civilians of the same faith; people who don't think self-driving cars are a
good goal tend not to apply for self-driving car companies; people who think
on-prem is better than public cloud tend not to apply for companies that are
all public cloud; a company that is known for a certain work culture will tend
to get applications who don't think that culture is hostile; etc.

~~~
pdimitar
Selection bias, filter bubble, self-selection -- all these could apply to a
varying degree.

~~~
geofft
"Filter bubble" is almost right but some of those seem somewhat intentional -
the phenomenon here is that even if a porn studio _wants_ to have its
employees' prudishness reflect the general population, it can't. Even if the
military wants to hire chaplains whose views on just war reflect the general
population, it can't. You can usually turn off a filter bubble and you can
usually actively avoid self-selection because you're doing it yourself: the
phenomenon here is that the selectees are doing the filtering for you.

------
randomacct3847
As someone who has worked in sf tech for 5-6 years I feel like I’ve gotten to
the point where I’ve become too critical of the industry to continue working
in it.

------
learnstats2
I know plenty of conscientious objectors in tech, they just /don't work in
tech any more/.

------
oedmarap
I've always ended up with, and still reach the conclusion that there are only
two tenable options which will work against a corrupt and unethical system.

1\. Infiltrate, subvert, and implode the system from within (that's meant to
be as Tzu-esque as it sounds).

2\. Using parallel propaganda to get the public to realize that they have the
ability to disable the system if they can collectively wield a moral,
objective, and ethical compass (with all the McLuhan-esque difficulties that
come with it).

I prefer the former. As dangerous as it is, I think it's strategically easier
to wield covert action as a tool for effecting change than it is to attempt a
unification of the masses. But, maybe a combination of both these approaches
would be ideal.

~~~
neilv
It's tricky. It's really easy for "I'll change things from within" to be a
convenient rationalization for $400K total comp.

I considered it once again myself last year, when I talked with a big-name
company, and my version that time was "I can do good work on good stuff,
promote that over the not-as-good stuff, and generally be a positive citizen
of the company".

Of course, I was also thinking I could really use the big-corp money. But when
they insisted that I'd have to do the new-grad hazing rituals, I decided I was
kidding myself that I was being considered for any position where I'd have any
input into goodness, and they were really only considering me as a junior frat
pledge.

------
6gvONxR4sf7o
For my part, I'm just not interested in working at facebook or google or
certain other companies because I disagree with their practices. Luckily, I'm
far enough along in my career that I don't need to take just any job, even if
it is limiting to be a privacy conscious data scientist.

I do worry that people like me just staying out of these places leads to an
echo chamber, and change from within is great. I wonder whether my individual
impact on social good is greater trying to be moral at a moral company, or
trying to be moral at an immoral company.

Luckily I don't have to twist my logic around to justify staying and vesting.

~~~
x3n0ph3n3
Yeah, it's hard to be a conscientious objector when you never put yourself
into the position of working for a company whose goals you need to object to.

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
Huh, I would have said it's easy to. Would you mind expanding on that?

------
chriselles
I respect the choices of tech sector workers who choose to protest against
certain company policies and even refuse to perform certain types of work that
enhance mass personalised surveillance and the enhancement of military
lethality.

It’s a different world from 30 and 70 years ago.

70 years ago nearly all R&D spent was specifically military in nature. So it
was pretty clear from the point of hire that you were(or weren’t working on
military or related(surveillance) projects.

30 years ago military and commercial R&D hit parity and it was still quite
easy to known going into an employment contract what side of the fence one was
on.

Today, almost all R&D is commercial in nature, but with vast duel use
military/surveillance potential.

So it’s much more convoluted and nebulous to delineate project output, perhaps
a major contributing factor to recent decisions and actions.

Combined with the long standing low supply, high demand for talent enhancing
leverage.

I agree that tech talent conscience is critical.

I only hope we see the same from Chinese software engineers working at Baidu,
Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, etc.

I wonder if the future will see a convoluted analog to the Manhattan Project,
the Rosenbergs, and apex talent migration out of 1930’s fascist countries.

------
mrspeaker
I remember drafting up a blog post a decade ago where I theorized/ranted that
tech workers would end up being the bad guys in history. I didn't post it
because it seemed so unrealistic at the time (and because I don't really know
what I'll do when tech is killed... maybe some kind of appliance repair?).

It's quite amazing the difference 10 years makes!

------
malvosenior
What I object to is mass media and political activists trying to shame or
force me to agree with their idea of "ethics" and political positions. I'll
decide that for myself thank you very much. When you see activists making
noise you can bet there are plenty of people who disagree with them.
Unfortunately when you have outlets like the New York Times and mobs of
Twitter journalists adding fuel to the fire (for one side of the debate only),
speaking out for what you believe becomes incredibly dangerous if you don't go
with the mainstream message.

So yeah, I object to everything this article says and stands for. Sadly I
can't do that under my real name because I need to keep my job.

------
throw2016
Discussions about ethical, privacy, surveillance issues often get hand waved
and diluted here. See yesterday's thread on Google's retaliation as an
example.

We need a diversity of communities that can represent the the software
industry in more dimensions than the VC funded side of things, growth hacking
and the singular focus on success that are often in heavy conflict with any
kind of value dimension and ultimately greed and opportunism crowds out every
other concern.

There is also often a extremely selfish mercenary view of the world this is
disturbing and can jade most of us and needs some maturity to handle without
letting it poison ones worldview.

~~~
saagarjha
> Discussions about ethical, privacy, surveillance issues get hand waved and
> diluted here.

Do they? I tend to find that Hacker News often has a lot of discussion of
ethics, especially with respect to technology.

~~~
Karunamon
Entirely one-sided discussion (to put it kindly), with dissenters finding
their comments invisible. For as good as the discussion around here usually
is, there are some topics that even HN cannot have an open discussion on, and
that happens to be one of them.

Try an experiment: Argue in a thread that Facebook/Google/etc. are anything
less than mustache-twirling-villian levels of evil, or that the people that
work for those companies sometimes make actual human mistakes.

~~~
vorhp
Arguing against the mainstream position can even get your comment flagged.
Doing it a few times (even about unrelated topics) will get your account
banned for being "incendiary". HN is an echo chamber. But that's not
surprising, all Internet communities are an echo chamber to some point.

------
Aunche
Tech needs fewer conscientious objectors, not more. These people rarely know
anything about what they're protesting, and resort fearmongering and populism
to get what they want without even attempting to resolve things civilly.

The most recent example is Google's AI ethics council debacle. Activist
employees were so stubborn that they can't won't even let people have a
discussion about AI ethics because one of them held views they disagree with.
Half the authors of the American Constitution thought that slavery should be
legal, but they managed draft the foundation of modern day democracy anyways.

~~~
geofft
> _Half the authors of the American Constitution thought that slavery should
> be legal, but they managed draft the foundation of modern day democracy
> anyways._

This is a story of democracy happening _in spite of_ the founding fathers, not
_because of_ the founding fathers. It was, as you may know, a long (multiple
centuries) and bloody (a pretty big war, plus lots of extrajudicial lynchings
etc.) road from what they drafted to universal suffrage. It's still in
progress in many ways, and a lot of people were hurt in the progress. So this
seems like a pretty good argument that we should not let people who have views
that are contrary to the long-term goal be setting the direction of how to get
to the long-term goal.

~~~
Aunche
It's easy to criticize someone when you're not the doing the work. The world
was a lot more racist a few centuries ago, so considering what they had to
work with, the founding fathers did well. The alternative is that there still
would have been civil war, and slavery could have continued to this day.

~~~
geofft
This counterfactual would be more convincing if the UK did not ban slavery
before the US did, and did not need a civil war to do it.

And it is just as easy to praise someone when you're not the one they're
hurting.

~~~
Aunche
Even if the Great British Empire was "better" than the early US (I'm sure some
of their former colonies would say otherwise), it bears no relevance to the
discussion of whether the American Constitution was a success or failure. The
US isn't Great Britain, so it can't be compared as such. I also don't
understand why you would hold the founding fathers responsible for things that
happened several decades in the future.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I also don't understand why you would hold the founding fathers responsible
> for things that happened several decades in the future.

The Constitutional explicit protections for both slavery and the slave trade
were written in by the framers, they did not occur several decades later. The
concrete divergence between UK and US policy on slavery began no later than
the UK 1807 ban on the slave trade, which was less than two decades after the
adoption of the Constitution while the framers were still politically active
in many cases (Jefferson was President, for instance).

~~~
Aunche
The US actually banned the slave trade the same year. Slaves didn't become
fully emancipated in Britain until 1838 or so.

------
drak0n1c
The educational Youtube channel SmarterEveryDay made a video about his day job
as a military rocket engineer. It's an insightful how-and-why explanation for
those wondering why there aren't more conscientious objectors:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTYgcdNrXE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTYgcdNrXE)

------
TallGuyShort
There are plenty of people who don't work at these companies for these
reasons. There could be more of those people. But there will still be enough
who are willing to do it for the right price or who actually support the
morality and ethics of doing it, that it will still get built even if the vast
majority of the tech industry conscientiously objected.

------
debatem1
I worked at Google and frequently found myself acting in this capacity. I
think I did well at it and was explicitly promoted for doing so. At the time I
admired the way the company walked the walk in that regard.

------
ggm
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener)

------
kevintb
Disheartening to see so many apathetic or downright hostile responses on here.
I applaud this article for taking a stand.

~~~
Retra
There's no point in taking a stand if it means relinquishing responsibility.

You'd rather have weapons in the hands of pacifists than warmongers, but that
won't happen if pacifists "conscientiously object" and throw down their arms;
police brutality isn't eliminated by making it a job that appeals only to
bullies; and software development doesn't become ethical by asking everyone
with a sense of ethics to quit.

What you need is for people to communicate and understand the world well
enough that they can find solutions that are as ethical as they are effective.

~~~
int_19h
I don't see "asking everyone with a sense of ethics to quit" _software
development_ , though. I'm seeing a call to refuse working on things that are
unethical. Most software engineering does not involve working on projects that
have immediate side effects that significantly impact human rights and
freedoms. To build on your police analogy, this is about asking police
officers to refuse to enforce policies such as "stop and frisk".

~~~
Retra
You can't ask individuals to make that decision; they'll just be replaced with
ones who are willing. Leadership needs to agree with you. You can't ask people
to work at a place while undermining their companies' business plans.

~~~
int_19h
Of course you can ask individuals directly working on such stuff to make that
decision. Implementers (who are aware what they're implementing) are just as
much responsible for it as the people who gave them directions. In fact, this
is just a rehash of the "just following orders" defense, except in this case
it's not even orders, since you can walk out on them.

Not only that, I seriously doubt that Google would punish anybody who would
simply request to not work on that particular project, instead of
accommodating them by reassigning to a different team. So this is a very low
bar to clear.

Does it mean that somebody else will do it? Probably, but responsibility
matters. If you're the one who assists in illegal or unethical activities,
then you're personally responsible for them.

------
natalyarostova
I'm very uncomfortable with how we are importing Chinese censorship into our
lives, due in part to tech companies needing to build services that can
operate in both regions.

At an object level, it's an important point to make and re-iterate.

On a meta-level, I am annoyed at how much special pleading I see from the
NYtimes about the evils of tech, while it's simply par for the course for --
say -- Finance to act with near impunity when managing, fund raising, and
dealing with autocratic and communist regimes.

------
maxheadroom
When Google's internal turmoil surfaced about the work on Project Jedi, it did
not ultimately kill the project[0].

As long as there's someone else still willing to compromise their moral
grounds for the value returned, it's still going to get made. That's just how
capitalist societies work: People need to make money and someone is going to
fulfill that objectional need because they have a need to fill their own
coffers.

One need only look at the fervor against Facebook and realise that they still
employ over 35k people to understand that, at the end of the day, people are
either _willing_ to do the task or they're in a position that they have no
other choice (considering that the US doesn't have much of a social safety
net).

So, while "conscientious objectors" might be good for a single business
direction, it - sadly - does nothing for the overall scheme of things.

...but even _if_ all of the engineers organised in North America to create
manifestos, under psuedo or actual unions, which dictated what the future of
tech should be used for, this does nothing to dissuade the partners (e.g.:
5Is) from doing the same and then sharing that technology _back_ to their own
government.

I concede that maybe I'm misunderstanding the author's intent but to me, the
posit seems too idyllic to be fruitful (overall) in modern society.

[0] -
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-23/pentagon-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-23/pentagon-
s-designer-of-10-billion-jedi-cloud-is-stepping-down)

------
_lessthan0
It really does, if you look at different engineering companies like Rolls
Royce whilst the military takeover in Chile, a group of engineers in Scotland
stopped working because they knew where their product was being sold too. HN
seems to think that Programmers can and should get away with everything.
Disturbing to say the least.

------
TACIXAT
I am honestly surprised that Dragon Fly is the last straw for people at
Google. The company is the embodiment of surveillance capitalism. Why is there
no talk about changing that model? It just seems the activists there are
piling on the "China Scary" bandwagon (see: Huawei and ZTE losing hella
business due to US pressure) rather than changing the revenue source in order
to improve privacy and reduce data collection.

~~~
0815test
Do people actually care about privacy or data collection these days, though?
It's not clear that most do - see the amount of people who freely interact on
Facebook, even though they surely must be aware that everything on that site
will ultimately be something that Facebook knows about. Google just doesn't
seem very different by that standard.

~~~
dageshi
No, the only place I see the kind of rabid hatred of Google and Facebook for
their data collection practices are here on HN. Of course these people want
their services, actually expect them for free, continuously at the same
standard. They just don't want to be tracked, don't want to pay for them,
don't want to be advertised too and don't have any real solutions on how they
would be paid for other than some handwaving about breaking Google/Facebook up
which apparently will solve everything.

Everytime I've pointed out that most people simply don't care about the level
of tracking Facebook and Google do I'm endlessly shouted down with words to
the effect of "No! If they understand how much they were tracked they'd
care!", but I don't believe that's the case, I think most people simply don't
care based on the value they get from these companies.

~~~
itronitron
>> don't want to be advertised too

Most people probably don't mind seeing advertisements. It's just completely
ridiculous that Google or FB think they need to track individuals in order to
provide targeted advertising.

If someone searches for 'football', then just show a fucking ad that is
relevant to 'football' along with the search results.

~~~
spaced-out
What makes companies like Google valuable is that they can tell whether the
user searching "football" should be shown an ad for "American football" or
soccer.

For that, you need tracking.

~~~
vonmoltke
How are you (any everyone else in this conversation) defining "tracking", and
how does it differ from profiling? I can't seem to tell what people mean by
"tracking" anymore.

------
ArtDev
Coding is a craft. I wouldn't work on something I had moral issues with. There
are grey areas for sure, but for me, work for the defense industry or a local
gun shop.. nope.. go find someone else.

There will always be someone that doesn't have any moral compass about their
work or income. That person is simply not me.

~~~
spunker540
Do you feel defense contractors should go out of business and that the work
they do is immoral? Or is it just not for you?

I don’t know what country you’re from but would you prefer you had no military
or weapons or defense? Like it or not there will always be other countries
with weapons and they may not always be friendly towards you or your
interests.

I wouldn’t want my work to have anything to do with killing people either, but
I also think the defense industry (while unfortunate) is probably here to
stay, for good reasons too.

------
phs318u
Perhaps one day, we'll see lists like this [0] for companies that helped the
Chinese government detain entire ethnic populations, or for those that
provided assistance to the Turkish regime during its purges and disappearances
of opponents, or those that facilitated states, such as Russia, to politically
interfere in the democratic functioning of their rivals, and the extra-
judicial killing of their opponents.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust)

------
Not_anchovie
Tech has plenty, but tech also has censorship.

------
malandrew
The NY Times and other media companies need more conscientious objectors too.

