Re:Roger McNamee: I invested early in Google and Facebook an...
by skmurphy on Tuesday August 08, 2017 @05:55PM
(#14963236)
If your direct goal is to consume more and more of your user's attention so that you can sell it to your customers and you don't place any limits on how much you will "harvest" you are on a path to destroy people's lives. Your points are also valid as to second and third order effects but I think you need to distinguish between the deleterious impact of primary goals and side effects. I would suggest the goal of developing an addictive app is similar to developing digital heroin: likely to be highly profitable but ethically and morally bankrupt. I think McNamee is offering a direct and specific ethical test for anyone developing applications.
Our economy is intertwined enough that "your actions somewhere down the line may be making it easier for someone to make choices that ruin their lives" is probably true of literally every single person. If you work on a product making low-skill hiring more efficient, you're also lowering McDonald's costs and making it even harder for people with unhealthy relationships with food to resist, and thus "you may be ruining some people's lives".
It's so broad a claim that it's utterly meaningless.