It's like any other thing in capitalism. You'll have a contingent of folk that won't do the work, based on ethical reasons, and you have folk that will, for financial reasons.
Anecdotally, the few folks I know that work for data collection companies are all "tinfoil hat" types. They have flip-phones, they have no online presence, they smile like a Cheshire Cat when you ask them about it and you generally get the impression they've just decided to categorize it as "us" and "them". :-\
> It's like any other thing in capitalism. You'll have a contingent of folk that won't do the work, based on ethical reasons, and you have folk that will, for financial reasons.
That is true, but going on my peers (especially the ones fresh from university), I think a dangerous proportion of people simply aren't aware on any level of the ethical implications of what they do. It's that which worries me.
I didn't have one, but many other "engineering ethics" courses I've seen inspire apathy just because they're terrible. It's like school anti-bullying campaigns - even if you're vehemently anti-bullying, most of the campaigns are too ridiculous to feel anything good about.
On the other hand, something like Canada's Iron Ring seems to get taken very seriously. It seems like a nontrivial part of the challenge is teaching ethics in a way that reaches even the people who want to behave ethically.
It's true, it wasn't a mindblowingly exciting class or delivery. There were a handful of people who cared to ask questions beyond the prompts for group assignments or during lectures. A lot of people accepted as obvious fact that every household should have a humanoid robot, or e-government would make perfect decisions, or complete quantification of the individual couldn't possibly be abused. (These are just the ones that stand out in my memory.) Then you also have the garden variety folks playing minecraft, doing other coursework, etc.
I'll also grant that I'm not very visionary or even great working/leading large groups of people. How would you teach a class exciting enough that virtually all students would attend it, enthusiastically, even if it were elective? (It was required for us.)
At the end of the day, it's only going to be as exciting as the students make it by involving themselves and thinking. They are the ones creating tomorrow's startups, not the professors. As it stands, it seemed like quite the accurate litmus test for how many people care to think about issues in this way in our field.
Because "society and ethics" sound a lot like "bowing to the man", which coincidentally is exactly what this fine article is against. Because the man does stupid decisions based on flawed assumptions.
It might sound that way to you. To me "society and ethics" means asking: what are both the positive and negative implications of something, and how do you weigh or mitigate them? What should you do, what shouldn't you do, and why?
We had innovation team member spawn a project that would track how often call center reps were seated and monitor their activity. I had to be the party-pooper that brought up how Draconian his amazing idea was. I told our lead I refused to work on projects that spied on people to punish them, but would love to work on projects that reward people for doing a good job as long as it respects their privacy.
Anecdotally, the few folks I know that work for data collection companies are all "tinfoil hat" types. They have flip-phones, they have no online presence, they smile like a Cheshire Cat when you ask them about it and you generally get the impression they've just decided to categorize it as "us" and "them". :-\