gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/u/stack/3486

I would stop short of say, making missile guidance systems, as that would make me feel bad. Even if it meant being unemployed...

As for privacy-invading stuff... I've been screaming at the top of my lungs for decades, but my otherwise intelligent friends are like "But google apps and credit cards are so convenient...". We lost that battle long ago, and no one should feel too bad building tracking software preying on the sheeple who voluntarily click through agreements giving up their privacy in exchange for a small convenience.

What google did here is a tactic that I've personally seen at companies that I have worked for. It's interesting to see it play out in public:

Leadership decides that they want to start killing puppies because it makes some metric go up. They task you, the engineer, with coming up with an ethical and humane way to kill them. They're looking for a win-win scenario.

If you push back and tell them not to kill the puppies in the first place, they will dismissively tell you that those concerns were already weighed and the decision was made to move forward with it. Basically, if they wanted your opinion, they would have asked for it. After all, your job is to solve problems, not decide the company's strategic vision.

Of course, you can still say "no" and put your foot in the ground. You probably won't be fired. But be prepared to burn through basically all of your social capital doing so. You will be labelled as someone who "gives unconstructive criticism" and "can't make forward progress". Even your peers will turn against you, because... surprise, not everyone shares your exact ethical framework, and you're making things difficult for everyone else.

I have met some very intelligent people who are capable of the political maneuvering to pull off saying "no" to leadership without burning bridges. But they always end up being managers and not ICs, because people like that thrive in that environment and often self-select into it.

"Technology is not good nor bad; nor is it neutral" - Melvin Kransberg. If you haven't heard this quote before it's well worth looking into.

A couple of well respected folks at my work were disappeared recently, very suddenly. Unsure what happened but it smells like may have taken a stand in some matter.

Apparently Tumblr engineers were well aware of the effects of the changes they were making. They fought tooth and nail against it, knowing the harm being done, but lost against management.

At a high level, I think the onus is on us to know what's going on. The ethical parts of our duty are real and it matters.

@mozz I don't see any particular reason to think that that's what's happening here. Perhaps I missed some detail.

The blog post linked in OP was talking specifically about this type of web proposal and covered this question as "Occam's Razor" ... usually the simplest possible explanation is true, it's just engineers doing their day jobs, no complex back story.

I covered the same topic it in my post "On Profit" from my own experiences, not related to Chrome. Mainstream media and commentators are very quick to assume something dramatic is happening--scary motives, devious long terms plans. Usually, in my experience, it's just someone doing their day job.

Again in my limited experience, the thing I've seen a lot that engineers hate that comes from management is cancellation, not coercion.

OP was about engineers in difficult ethical positions--which is obviously a real problem.

But there is also an entirely different problem, which is when engineers honestly do their jobs with the aim of making the world a better place--or at least not worse--and have to put up with being told over and over that they / their ideas / their company are evil. It leads to a kind of numbness to input; the outside world just throws so much crap that it's hard to stay positive.

I've never seen the first problem firsthand, but I've seen the second lots of times. Which is why I wrote about it. Almost all the engineers I've met are not just ethical, they're unusally so--highly principled people. Of course there are exceptions. But it would almost always be a more productive interaction overall to start from assuming the engineers are trying to do the right thing for the right reasons, then <check carefully> as appropriate, based on actual fact.

It's entirely possible for honest people with good intentions to do things that cause a bad outcome. The web has not exactly turned out to be what we dreamed about 20 years ago, and there is of course a complex interplay of contributors to that in which the tech giants have played a big part. An ethical look at what we have now combined with a time machine would cause some big changes, and I get that people are wary of tech developments as a result.

But, we still don't have a way to predict the future. There is no way to guarantee that the next change does not cause something else bad. What we can do--the best we can do--is exactly what is happening with this proposal: open discussion, frankness about the possible downsides, run an experiment and see what happens--be prepared to abort the whole thing.

This seems to me to be a pretty good state of affairs, because "stop the world" is not one of the options available. Now maybe <that> is a problem you could tie back to management--and ultimately to capitalism. There are some good posts around Gemini on possible alternatives ;)

> @mozz I don't see any particular reason to think that that's what's happening here. Perhaps I missed some detail.

Under the "What I should do then" section of the blog post, the author suggests that you:

Don't bother with non-technical arguments, because you won't change anyone's mind.

If you object to the core use-cases, you're in for an uphill battle.

Point out the risks so they can be addressed, or at least responded to.

Be kind and professional (don't make people feel uncomfortable).

I'm not trying to be uncharitable here, really. I think the author's rules are probably all learned from experience and are *true* in the author's environment as well as my own. But I'm sad when I look at them because the trend that I see is "stay in your lane, stick to the implementation details...". Which is something that I've seen a lot in engineering orgs when ethical concerns (or business concerns, for that matter) are raised.

> But there is also an entirely different problem, which is when engineers honestly do their jobs with the aim of making the world a better place--or at least not worse--and have to put up with being told over and over that they / their ideas / their company are evil. It leads to a kind of numbness to input; the outside world just throws so much crap that it's hard to stay positive.

I agree with you that this is a problem. Google is not evil (because we shouldn't anthropomorphize corporations) and the people who work there aren't evil either. Nobody is backstage twiddling their mustaches and scheming up ways to screw people over. There are many things that google produces that are ethically neutral or even downright positive.

My opinion is that all of this stuff emerges slowly, organically out of a system aggressively tuned to optimize stock value for shareholders. Google just happens to be crazy good at generating value, and its incentives can often end up misaligned with actual human beings. Which sucks for the people who work there when it happens.

@mozz, with all due respect, corporations are specifically created to be anthropomorphized! And they can be, and usually are, evil -- golems designed to extract every penny of profit -- everything else be damned. And while corporations don't sit around coming up with evil ideas, the executives are empowered to sit around and come up evil ideas! Screwing people is not a goal, but is not a deterrent for implementing profitable strategies, and if that is not evil, we may have different definitions.

The ethics in technology — We developers should stop just looking at the technical side of our work only. There’s social, economic and values to be taken into account when we put our minds to solve a problem. We tend to go blindly into it, without thinking what it can cause when it is released into the world. It’s like if we put a bunch of developers into a secret project to develop an Internet World Wide Nuclear Bomb a là Project Manhattan… the leaders shouldn’t really have to hide what they...

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