>I didn’t come up in computer science; I began my career as a physicist. That transition gave me a specific perspective on this situation. That the field of computer science, unlike other sciences, has not yet faced serious negative consequences for the work its practitioners do.
That right there should have eliminated the article entirely. First, most computer science courses include a course on ethics and how our industry affects peoples lives. If he'd come up in the CS world he would know that. Second, this is absolutely not anywhere near the first time CS has faced an ethics issue. There are classic cases I imagine everyone here went over in their ethics classes, like the cancer radiation machine with no failsafe that cooked people. The Boston 'Big Dig' project. The Denver airport failures. Or how about the NSA doing anything within their power to use technology to build a real world Big Brother? (Too bad Orwell didn't realize anyone paranoid enough to build a Big Brother apparatus would be too paranoid to ever actually use it.)
Engineers certainly need to start taking responsibility for the work they do. Moral responsibility. Because 'I was just doing my job' does not fly. It is identical to 'I only did it for money'. If that helps you understand how immature such a comment makes a person. And if they won't do it themselves, everyone else will do it for them.
Those who work at Cambridge Analytica, or Google, or Facebook, or other 'collect everything, exploit everything, never stop to consider consequences' companies are bad people, plain and simple. There are certainly those who work at those companies who didn't work on those particular projects and they're fine, but for those who built the tools to do this, they are bad human beings who actively made the world a worse place. And that they did it for money doesn't really absolve them of responsibility. Especially in an industry like software where it's so laughably easy to get another job that doesn't involve aggressively stalking people in a seeming bid to build every dystopia written about since the dawn of the 20th century.
>I didn’t come up in computer science; I began my career as a physicist. That transition gave me a specific perspective on this situation. That the field of computer science, unlike other sciences, has not yet faced serious negative consequences for the work its practitioners do.
That right there should have eliminated the article entirely. First, most computer science courses include a course on ethics and how our industry affects peoples lives. If he'd come up in the CS world he would know that. Second, this is absolutely not anywhere near the first time CS has faced an ethics issue. There are classic cases I imagine everyone here went over in their ethics classes, like the cancer radiation machine with no failsafe that cooked people. The Boston 'Big Dig' project. The Denver airport failures. Or how about the NSA doing anything within their power to use technology to build a real world Big Brother? (Too bad Orwell didn't realize anyone paranoid enough to build a Big Brother apparatus would be too paranoid to ever actually use it.)
Engineers certainly need to start taking responsibility for the work they do. Moral responsibility. Because 'I was just doing my job' does not fly. It is identical to 'I only did it for money'. If that helps you understand how immature such a comment makes a person. And if they won't do it themselves, everyone else will do it for them.
Those who work at Cambridge Analytica, or Google, or Facebook, or other 'collect everything, exploit everything, never stop to consider consequences' companies are bad people, plain and simple. There are certainly those who work at those companies who didn't work on those particular projects and they're fine, but for those who built the tools to do this, they are bad human beings who actively made the world a worse place. And that they did it for money doesn't really absolve them of responsibility. Especially in an industry like software where it's so laughably easy to get another job that doesn't involve aggressively stalking people in a seeming bid to build every dystopia written about since the dawn of the 20th century.