Similarly tech shouldn't have to consider whether someone with unrelated goals will use their tech for unwanted aims.
If you write software for autonomous cars that is not foolproof at detecting pedestrians, you are culpable. In aviation, catastrophic failure means at least one death and the system should have an overall probability of failure at 10^-9. Critical software is frequently written at one or two orders below. That means 95%, 99%, 99.9%, are not enough.
If you write software that replaces someone's job are you "culpable"? If you create a phone and people are killed when someone texts and drives are you "culpable"? If you create a better facial recognition program as part of building a secure access systems and someone uses that system to discriminate are you "culpable"?
I find this unending process of creating "victims" just so they can be "saved" as tiresome.
If a thief comes and steals money under the mattress meant to pay for your kid's college tuition, and your kid is dropped because she can no longer pay, your kid's loss is a second order effect of the thief's theft, but I still hold the thief responsible*
* this is a hypothetical story; please don't save that kind of money under your mattress.
1. Did they have nefarious aims?
2. Did they reasonably attempt to consider and solve issues surrounding first and second-order effects of their creation?
3. How did they react to previously unknown first and second-order harms when they found out about them?
The first two, I tend to give creators the benefit of the doubt about. But I've become quite dismayed by the responses of creators to the harms of their creations.
Tell me, in the VW emissions scandal, did that happen ? No.
Germany literally changed the laws retroactively to avoid holding their own companies to account. This is technically illegal, but the judicial system REFUSED TO LOOK AT IT.
Given that both management of these firms, and government wants to commit fraud when culpability is assigned ... what point is there discussing the rules ? They won't be applied when it matters.
But of course there are large advantages to people believing they will be applied. Like there are advantages to people not responding to having their wallets taken from their pockets, their children kidnapped for sale into abuse, their houses robbed empty ...
This is the US government in action. Other governments, including European, are worse, not better. These are the people that make, and enforce the rules. Why are we discussing whether the right things will be happening ?
It is the second word, intent, that is the hang up. If a person hurts someone but it was not their intent to do so, that person is not typically to be held morally responsible. So, at least in the western concept of moral culpability, intent matters. But... people also have a responsibility, a responsibility to try to anticipate the consequences of their actions. One cannot shield oneself from culpability by intentionally remaining ignorant. I think that engineers avoid thinking about these things, not out of humility, but because its in their interest to do so.
Absolutely agree.
> I think that engineers avoid thinking about these things, not out of humility, but because its in their interest to do so.
This is perhaps the reason we differ. My experience has been that the vast majority of technologists want to make the world a better place.
I believe you see the industry is filled more with people like Wernher von Braun who want to build something cool regardless of social cost. At the dawn of the social media revolution the dominate theory in tech circles was that information shall set you free. The people making it did not come into the industry for status, being a nerd was still a social negative. Today with the ever rising salaries things are changing.
Perhaps you are right that as the industry matures the sphere of liability should increase. I would still argue that the suggestions in the original article swing that much too far. We shouldn't prevent scientific discoveries merely because engineers may build something bad with the information. On the balance scientific discovery has improved the lives of everyone by many orders of magnitude - even if its distributed unevenly.
Again a first order effect
> If you write software for autonomous cars that is not foolproof at detecting pedestrians, you are culpable.
Again a first order effect connected directly with the immediate goal.
However if you write communications software and people use it to say bad things, those are second order effects. You provided communication software that works as advertised and has beneficial purposes. Others misused it.
Not trying to be inflammatory. This is specifically trying to find if you think there's a point where culpability disappears. I would appreciate a yes/no answer. There's no nuance to the question. I'm not talking about the specific valves, just the notion of a valve.
Did you mean first order or second order kind of like the way physics people mean it (direct linear relationship with strong effect on the unknown variable). Or the way that MBAs mean it (they have their own definition).
Or did you mean structural engineering, same as physics: https://www.quora.com/In-structural-engineering-what-are-fir...
I think what you probably mean is a colloquial interpretation, where first order means something is directly causal in an obvious to see way, where second order is more of an indirect effect that occurs through complex dynamics.
Either way, I don't think those terms are well defined, and they're kind of complex enough that using them to argue for morality, and calling people out for not knowing your definitions, makes you look caddish.
I doubt that they could mean causally indirect. I think it must mean something like: not used in accordance to their the engineer's intent, especially when that intent covers a a general affordance (e.g. affords communication over long distances), but is being judged for a more specific affordance (affords communication over long distances to order a terror attack). I dunno. I'd have to be a philosopher to work it out.
The problem of where to draw those lines is so difficult that legal systems resort to constructing tests based on whether a "reasonable person" could have foreseen the specific consequence of an act.
If that civil engineer sold or allowed (for any reason from negligence, insufficient security protocols, malice, ignorance etc) blueprints for his design to end up in enemy hands, he most certainly would be held liable.
The thrust of that point is the very idea that software engineers on projects involving user data, regardless of how and what they think they are building, are not simply building “bridges”. They are building systems that have the potential to be misused as mass-surveillance apparatuses. And they need to build their systems accordingly, with appropriate data-security and with acknowledgement that their work could leave them personally liable to action should their work be found to be used as a threat-vector towards their users.
The current attitude of “well people know what they’re signing up for and since they signed the User Agreement, we don’t have any liability here” towards users in the industry is sick.
Saying that engineers need to make responsible decisions in their software design is one thing. But you imply that misuse is a liability for the designer? So if someone takes an engineer's code and modifies it for malicious intent the engineer is liable? That's absurd.
That's like saying the person who designed the airplanes used in 9/11 are partially liable for 9/11.
Consider:
The person who makes a car that someone uses to kill someone by running a bystander over. The engineer isn't responsible.
The person who messed up the Prius with the issues where the gas pedal or whatever didn't work. The engineer IS responsible.
The first example is analogous to a software engineer writing image recognition software for a safety app. Then someone maliciously taking the software and using it to discriminate via misuse. The engineer is NOT responsible. If someone takes your software (could even be open source) and applies it or modifies it in a malicious way they are responsible not the engineer.
The second is example is where if an engineer makes a widget app and has a vulnerability but signs off on it, and then widget purchaser credit card info is stolen. The engineer is responsible for negligence and should be liable for the misuse.
Although, predictably enough, I followed up with more thesis length posts to clarify my point! Namedropping einstein too, who do I think I’m impressing? (But Einstein is relevant to this debate, although he made the crucial mistake of only informing the government and not informing the public. Obviously this was well-intentioned on his part and not malicious at all but it’s a lesson that every developer of new innovations needs to take onboard.)
This isn’t about specifically demonizing “engineers” or innovation. Or even to do with liability where “that engineer developed a car that murdered someone”. Liability laws are robust enough to figure out whether the gas pedal was functioning correctly, the driver is at fault, or if not, the engineer (or rather, the company he works for) is at fault.
This debate is about broader strokes: should developers of new technologies be ethically bound to inform both politicians & the public about their innovations, specifically so that, after a public debate on the potential negative consequences of that technology, the public can then demand their politicians to produce robust laws protecting the public from misuse of those technologies. (I say yes, I know it’s tough because I love just developing cool new shit too, but we developers have got to take a step back and realize the future implications of what we make. Data gathering, manipulation and retention is a ticking time bomb. And who knows what’s next.)
Another example is facial recognition, it’s depressingly funny to see experts who know so much about the technology proclaim it to be no big deal without understanding the ramifications of living in a society where your every movement is tracked and potentially monitored. That is a literal police state, and the US constitution has amendments made hundreds of years ago specifically to outlaw such actions to protect the public at large, both from private companies tracking their movements and to protect the public from the government itself. To have all of that progress in the name of “facial recognition will be awesome because you can login to your phone quicker” is not a good move because once that technology is in the wild, until laws catch up to robustly protect the public, who knows what will be done to the public at large with that technology. Ditto for “who cares about data retention and website tracking, it makes marketing so much easier!” and “don’t worry about your DNA being stored and sold by ancestry sites indefinitely because it’s so cool to know that you’ve got a 7th cousin living on a different continent”.
Funny how you believe that. Remember the Miami bridge collapse ?
Workers on the ground misplaced one of the supports, and then didn't stop work when loud noises started coming out of the concrete. This was not documented wrong on the design, it was those same companies first mismeasuring the location of the supports, then simply moving them around when they didn't fit.
Who's culpable ? The designers, of course.
Or take Dieselgate. European, German and French car manufacturers systematically and purposefully installed software in the cars to commit fraud on the testers (the government testers knew that this was happening).
Who's culpable ? A single engineer, of course.
Not the regulators that knew what was happening.
Not the European investment bank, who had seen reports on this.
Not Volkswagen management, that had built several facilities explicitly for committing this fraud.
Let's stop pretending the problem with engineering will be solved by assigning blame to engineers. It won't. It can't.
Large scale fraud, committed by management and government is the problem. It cannot be fixed with engineering.