It seems like you're distracted. You wrote the same comment as your two siblings. If you're going to tell me I'm being disrespectful at least have the respect to see if my response will be the same. You should also have the respect to look at the blog post being referenced. At minimum, the title...
Then I'm concerned as the writer is quite explicit. So let me quote from the post
> We build tools, and ultimately some responsibility lies with us to think through how those tools will be used. Not just what their intention is, but also what misuses might come out of them. None of us wants to build things that will be used for evil.
> The Association for Computing Machinery is a society dedicated to advancing computing as a science & profession. ACM includes this in their Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct:
>> Well-intended actions, including those that accomplish assigned duties, may lead to harm unexpectedly. In such an event the responsible person or persons are obligated to undo or mitigate the negative consequences as much as possible. One way to avoid unintentional harm is to carefully consider potential impacts on all those affected by decisions made during design and implementation.
> So how can we “carefully consider potential impacts”? Honestly, I don’t have any answers to this. I don’t think that there really is a universal answer yet, because if we had it I have to believe we’d not be building these dangerous pieces of software.
> I do have a couple of ideas though. One I got from my friend Schneems is to add to the planning process a step where we come up with the worst possible uses of our software.
It doesn't matter if the tech is about finding WiFi or if your contract is with the DOD. Any technology that can do good can also do harm. It is easy to be distracted by the challenge of the project. It is fun and exciting, but it makes it easy to ignore how people who aren't well intentioned may use your creations. You'll never be able to prevent your creations from being used maliciously, but this adversarial process certainly can reduce the potential for harm.
I'll mention that in traditional engineering this is often a more explicit discussion. Ethics is required in the coursework and even outside the ethics classes you hear many such examples of unintended consequences. Of where people do their best yet mistakes are made that cost peoples lives or do other types of harm. If you were lucky you'd have a professor that walked you through this, showing you how easy it is to be blindsided by such things and where the harm is obvious post hoc but not before.
So if you want to not be distracted you have to know what the distraction is. You have to know what distracts you. You have to know that you too can be distracted. None of us are immune. The moment you think you cannot be distracted is the moment you are deeply distracted.
Probably because I repeated "don't get distracted". But if you read the article then I think it'll take on a different context, as I'm mimicking the author, including their short paragraph style.
I get really annoyed at those articles which advocate the developer to sacrifice themselves towards a better future.
Companies externalize costs. I refuse to be the one, as an individual, with the burden of fixing society ills to my own detriment.
Tell me to get into politics, join an association, whatever. Now, as an individual, lose money for morals? No thank you. I may, and probably will, do it -- but don't expect I do it. I have no business, in a society with less and less public services, to harm myself and my family for refusing to do well paying jobs.
I will externalise those costs as much as possible. I will bring awareness. I will write letters. But don't ask me to leave a well paying job -- that's someone else job to fix.
But that's the problem. Your logic applies to everyone in an organization (a business, a family, a country, and so on). The organizations actions are not the result of any single actors decisions, even if weight isn't equal. The decisions of an organization are made of the decisions of the collective. The agglomeration of them. And that's why everyone's decisions matter. Because you don't know when your actions have more weight than when they have less.
We're all in this together. One way or another, your actions affect others. Your actions aren't in isolation. Conversely this is true for others, and I suspect you would rather others treat you well, right? So which feedback loop do you want you contribute to? That's the only question there is
