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- Hacker News
- That just moves the decision point to “could be used by a police state”. Some people prefer humans as being the only people who can determine what a civil violation is. E.g. if a policeman doesn’t pull you over you shouldn’t be punished. This allows for great personal discretion and the potential for a police state through such discretionary exertion of power as exemplified by the famous line
> “For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law”
I prefer speed cameras, red-light cameras, and so on because automated enforcement removes discretionary power from enforcement agents. I believe that enforcement agents are the arms of the civic body tasked with ensuring the commons are not ruined. Consequently, controlling the exertion of discretion is entirely an engineering approach to controlling quality of enforcement. Others believe that enforcement agents are our rulers or agents thereof that we must submit to - and therefore to whom we must give great discretion so that they can choose whether we are worthy or not.
That is incompatible with all being equal before the law.
by arjie - > I prefer speed cameras, red-light cameras, and so on because automated enforcement removes discretionary power from enforcement agents.
There can still be corruption with automated enforcement. If the punishment is fees and the fees go towards the budget of those in charge of the automation parameters, then you'll see manipulation of parameters to increase fees paid. Shorter yellow lights, shorter distance between a speed limit sign and the speed camera, requiring more effort to contest the automation when it's wrong than to just pay the fee, etc.
by goda90 - The sad irony of "Share this post on..." with neat list of all the services doing exactly what the post warns against. They can and often are already used by police state.by rini17
- Has this philosophical approach ever worked? It's a commonplace in the hard sciences and engineering fields (ie, refusing to work on weapons systems), but weapons systems are elite and well-compensated engineering projects that don't have any trouble finding talent. The same thing goes for NSA, which has a line out the door from elite academia.
I'm not dismissing the sentiment here. It's morally sound. You should act in accordance with your principles and it useful to be reminded how those principles intersect the world. I have similar guardrails (probably not the same as the author's). I just wouldn't want people to overestimate what can be accomplished with this approach.
by tptacek - A significant number of people in positions of power in the AI industry get their moral framework from science fiction books and a particular Harry Potter fanfiction. It’s hard to predict what ideas and philosophies will become important.by m-ee
- This is missing the "(2013)" at the end of the HN link, but it does seem weirdly prescient as we say a rise of more polarised politics across the World, just 13 years later.by PaulRobinson
- And a rise in tech companies building products and features that dont benefit the users, knowing we cant really escape at this point.by gumby271
- Thanks, didn't notice it before you pointed it out (and I already made my comment), actually turned into quite an interesting retrospective for meby NietTim
- I'm a tech worker.
I'm given a promotion for adding invasive features based on "insights".
I'm incentivized to create something patent-able to restrict competition.
I'm rewarded for more detailed metrics to reveal more.
I'm hired by how many people were affected by my previous work regardless of ethics.
There is no reward for protection, privacy, and restricting access to data.
by Xeoncross - I'm in the UK and it always seems weird to me how in the USA its totally normal to publically register yourself as either a Democrat or a Republican. To me seems like the kind of thing that should be private. In the UK I might choose to be a member of a political party but no-one needs to know that except that particular party. Or I can just join no party and vote in private on polling day.by codeulike
- Well you can join as many parties as you want no?
- Then again, EU citizens would find it questionable how in the UK recruiters are asking about your ethnicity, disability status etc.by odiroot
- It seems quite weird. Our parties are generally quite weird because were are not supposed to exist in the first place and so most of the rules are sort of ad-hoc.
I don’t belong to one, but it is sort of annoying to not be able to vote in the “primary elections” (where the parties pick their candidates). My state has a strong partisan lean so this is the only election that actually matters here. Oh well.
by bee_rider - Because by and large they're all trapped in an "us vs them" team sport where both sides believe everybody on the opposing team is literally Satan.by Hugsbox
- It's weirder still because you often don't actually have to register with a party, even to vote in the primaries like other commenters have mentioned; it depends on which state and which party. [0]
For example, I just voted in the Minnesota primaries. Ours are open primaries, so you don't need to register with any party and the ballot has every party on it. Though, it spoils your ballot to vote in multiple parties' primaries. So you gotta choose, but you do that privately.
by samhclark - It's because we have open primaries in the US - registering as a Democrat or Republican is only important as far as voting in primaries. In other countries the selection of candidates is internal to the political parties themselves. There are pros and cons for both systems but the US system is fairly unique globally aside from a few exceptions in South America.by owenversteeg
- The automobile, the transistor, the Internet, and basically every other technology ~could~ be used by a police state. I'm not sure how that is a helpful rule at all.by limagnolia
- The article says the same. I think the point is to be aware and try to build things in a way to minimize the chance for abuse. There's nuance and the author says as much.by gumby271
- I've been arguing with folks on Reddit about this lately when it comes to Google's changes to Android (where they've made it more difficult to install any software on your device without Google first tracking the identity of the developer). My argument ultimately comes down to the fact that Google (and Apple already) have built a technology that gives them immense power to control individual computing freedoms, and no matter their internal policy, they still must follow US law. No amount of promises or legit good faith on their part matter, they've made a dangerous technology and are behold to a government that is very eager to censor anything it doesn't like. It's so disappointing to see 1. Google engineers build such a thing, and 2. For people to support it.by gumby271
- This entire thread is such a strong case for why all undergrad CS programs should have a core requirement of at least one ethics course.by not_wyoming
- At least I had 6 humanities courses telling me why communism is good
Edit: To make this comment have a little substance, what I'm getting at is, universities are already way too biased and one-sided on humanities issues to be teaching ethics. Students notice it too. I've gotten As on some insanely bad papers just cause I knew what they wanted to hear.
by frollogaston - You really think taking an ethics COURSE will do anything?
How are you supposed to 'learn' ethics?
Never understood the point of those. My university had over 4 for the cyber students and over half the grads went on to work for the MIC contributing to blowing up brown children in the middle east anyway.
Clearly, our problem must have been that they didn't have 5 mandatory time-waster ethics courses. That surely would have solved the matter. Add in a few extra "racism is bad" and "don't be a meanie" courses to round out the collection, just for good measure.
by DaSHacka - We had an ethics course, it was a requirement for graduation if I remember correctly.
It was entirely performative. You can teach a curriculum of ethics, but that won't make a person empathetic. These are courses for credit hours, not firmware updates.
And a person with empathy can always find or be given reasons to not apply his empathy to a person or a group of people.
by therein - Especially if it has concrete historical examples of technology intended for good and how it was later used for evil, rather than something more generally-philosophical.by Terr_
- A course is nothing. I've long felt that Software Engineering should follow suit of many other engineering disciplines and push responsibility down to engineers. Like how when a bridge falls, an engineer has to answer for it.
I don't know exactly how that looks, and yes there are many issues with it, but we're living in the age of cowboy coding.
by wnolens - Don't ethics courses make people less ethical because they teach people how to come up with ethical justifications for straightforwardly bad things?by Bratmon
- I'm curious why you think an ethics course would actually change minds. In my experience in undergrad, we had a CS ethics course, and it went in in-one-ear-and-out-the-other for 99% of students, probably myself included. I know it was a thorough course but I promptly forgot all of it, and so did everyone else.
Ethical stance is not something you can teach in one course. If you don't have this disposition by the time you're in college, I think you're likely not learning it.
by HEmanZ - Every business school and MBA program has ethics course requirements. Does it really make a difference? Maybe it does, and things would be even worse than they are otherwise. But I'm not sure.by SoftTalker
- Recently my wife got locked out of her bank account - all cards blocked, unable to log in to the website or app, so effectively her whole finances were frozen - because she was trying to order a new bank card over the phone and some system couldnt do voice recognition (which we did not know they even used). We were getting ready to get on a plane to NYC, from California (she banks with TD bank) but after a tearful session of phoning anyone and everyone we could at TD, suddenly it magically got reversed.
The problem is not just the tech, its building systems where humans are essentially slaves to the system, with no recourse or power over whats happening.
- Few things are more important in modern life than access to your money. That's why I would never use an online bank. I use a local credit union but "local" with actual branch offices you can walk into and talk to a human are the important thing.by SoftTalker