Re:Don't Be Evil: Utopias, Frontiers, and Brogrammers
by yorwba on Thursday January 04, 2018 @06:35AM
(#16069555)
Yes, guns don't kill people without pulling the trigger. That doesn't mean that everyone else is without responsibility. Obviously there would be no guns to shoot if nobody sold them. There would be no guns to sell if nobody made them. And so on.
I didn't mean to put all the blame on the users of the infrastructure. Actually I was thinking about the case where the user is involved in creating the infrastructure in the first place, and then pulls the "It's an algorithm!" excuse.
If the infrastructure is made available for someone else to use, then part of the blame for abuse also lies with the person who decided to let them use it. But even in that case it's not the infrastructure that is the problem, it is the lack of access control and accountability.
I don't believe that. In a sense, it's like the classic NRA defense, that guns don't kill people, etc.
In reality, certain technologies also come with specific tendencies -- ascribed in their very design and formulation.
In the very least, certain technologies within specific societal contexts tend to have specific outcomes. Which makes placing the blame to "people using that infrastructure" problematic, because those people also operate within that societal context, and are influenced by it, they are not totally free agents.