I would posit that there was no good way to reasonably forecast it at that time. This isn't an irrelevant point, though it will seem that way at first blush. The point is that it's difficult to forecast significantly in advance the consequences of technological advancement. That the people asked to do the forecasting are not trained in analyzing social trends does not make this task easier.
And there are books written in English that talk to the social history of the species. History, physics, etc, being subsets of English syntax (or other "human languages") tailored to describe specific semantics.
A casual look at what happened over the years as various social bubbles suddenly slammed into each other; Columbus and Americas, repeated conquering of Europe and further east.
Doesn't seem a stretch to think "information network could be used for malicious shit." And it has been for years, depending on who talk to (content piracy, trafficking, AI guided weapons, etc) before Facebook. So there's a plain history in contemporary times too. No need to dig that far back into history.
And it's not advocating for binning the abstract research, or avoiding making these things concretely. It advocates for fostering a conversation about the potential pitfalls.
Like programmers do before considering a change.
Deep knowledge of the specifics isn't necessary, IMO. We code heads are already aware of "change in system may have bad side effects. Let's avoid it as much as possible." Emotional consideration is already there.
This thread is devolving into childish attitudes about having to be part of society. Division of labor taken to its extreme, leads people to just disregard they are a part of a bigger picture (society). What did Adam Smith have to say about such things? All the way back in the 1700s. And he had no where near modern formal training. Seems rather spot on here.
Is it possible that this might not have been the planned result of TCP/IP, however? At the time there was just one social bubble and the point was to enable two computers already in it to connect in a more standardized manner. The notion of using the system for malice largely didn't occur, because at that point there was no reasonable way to gain from doing so. People weren't trying to engineer globe-spanning society-merging information networks.
But never mind that. Reasonable people can disagree on questions like the accuracy of our ability to correctly predict the future from 45 years away and counteract those potential distant negative consequences.
Moving on to what I consider the more interesting point: the process proposed. It's pretty clear that this isn't about fostering a conversation. You do not need enforcement mechanisms to foster a conversation. Enforcement abilities - like rejecting papers, which always comes with the risk of killing a paper forever - are about coercion. Maybe there's another way, like including ethical statements outside review processes, with papers that could both foster conversation and not rely on coercion?
You're right again! Fostering conversation is immensely valuable. We are all part of a vulnerable and critically important society. It is our moral obligation to think about that as we look at our work and discuss it with our peers while also being humble and aware of our own limitations. We can, should, and must do this absolutely critical work. The future depends upon it. We are called to the work.
The people behind http://interactions.acm.org/ would say YES. I bet most of academia would say yes.
Then ask them if they understand just how much data Google & Facebook has on their browsing history via cookies, third-party trackers, adboxes & share buttons.
Then ask them if they know that, if they did an ancestry check, their DNA data may soon be shared with their insurance provider?
Then ask them if they know that their credit history was probably leaked to the public via the Equifax hack?
Then ask them if they know that all that data is legally allowed to be used forever with minimal oversight other than what’s mandated by law?
All of the above is obvious to nerds like us but the public at large haven’t got a clue about any of this.
This is a very long and especially old discussion, I'd say it approaches 150-200 years, and it first started out as a reaction to the optimistic views of positivists like Auguste Comte. Afaik nothing conclusive has come out of it yet, even though the discussion focused on some heated topics during all this time: should the physicists that invented the atom bomb be held responsible for Hiroshima? should the chemists be held responsible for the mustard gas used in WW1? should the bureaucrats with their focus on modernizing the State and having everything well-labeled and well-counted for be held responsible for the fact that that made the Nazis' job a lot easier when they needed to find the Jews among the general population? etc etc
It’s about having a public debate to decide what laws are needed to robustly protect the public before the technology is even misused.
So in your examples it’d be:
- when the physicists inform the public, MAD is quickly determined as the outcome of that technology and laws made to prevent nukes being made in the first place. (And optimistically, to negate wars ever happening again due to the possibility that an aggrieved side might develop nukes) Or, because the public debate did not happen until after they were developed and deployed, to allow nukes to be developed and defer wars between nuke-enabled countries to hyper-diplomacy while making every effort to restrict development & deployment, like we currently have.
- when the chemists alert the public that chemical weapons are possibly far more effective than anyone ever imagined, then laws are made to ban their deployment. As is currently the case after informed public debate. But instead of informed public debate before the fact, millions were gassed during WW1.
- when the bureaucrats realist they can identify large swathes of the population unrestricted, laws can be brought in to restrict data gathering to protect the public from such actions.
In all of your examples, an informed public debate could have urged politicians to create laws to robustly protect the public from these technologies.
The key note to realize is that the public debate will happen. It’s inevitable. The key role that the creators of these technologies can play is to raise these ethical concerns before harm is risked. Even though the public debate did not happen until after all of the above technologies were misused, they resulted in swiftly creating laws to robustly protect the public from that technology. Delaying the debate does nothing other than risking disaster.
I know that last line sounds like hyperbolic exaggeration but it’s an inevitability that, if ignored, is unethical.
Or maybe a town refuses to flouridate their water after a series of propaganda campaigns convinces people there that it's toxic and will ruin the purity of their water system.
I understand why you cast it as you do. History is chock full of preventable abuses! Yet, it's worth considering that such things can backfire as well. Public debate is not a panacea, and policy is often rushed and poorly formed to satisfy atavistic fears. A public debate can easily urge politicians to robustly protect the public from imagined threats while enabling real ones.
But on the whole, the general public will drown out cranks who shout about imagines threats like fluoride or vaccines. The science on both is clear.
Likewise, I’m optimistic that the negative realities of net neutrality stifling startups and the mass data-gathering will become so apparent to future generations of lawmakers & voters that they’ll be reversed in due course.
The science may be clear, but it may be unwise to be too certain that future generations will agree with what you and I believe in today.
This pigeon-holing was way beyond tiresome, not to mention grossly inaccurate, 20 years ago: please STOP IT. Computer programmers aren't in general some special class of person incapable of learning new skills and behaviours. Quite the opposite for the most part.
Software engineering is a combination of applied mathematics, data science, and significant engineering practices (do X with Y constraints).
In Engineering proper, we have ethics classes. They entail in how things can fail and cause item, structural, and/or injury up to death.
We have all read about the Therac-25. That was a software and hardware design choice that lead to the death of many.
Computer science seems to skirt the ethics discussions just by being too new of a field. We (royal) aren't looking at the failure modes of having social media. Nor are we considering the ramifications of the code we write.
Intelligence is the ability to write the code. Wisdom is the ability to understand its ramifications.
When MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, et al. were created, the "consequences" were providing an outlet for expression or keeping connected with friends and family. Noble causes. How do we get from there to "...and guess what, it'll be bad for individuals or society in $THIS_SPECIFIC_WAY"? I don't think it's possible.
Ethics evolve with society. Society will develop the ethics necessary to teach computer scientists and programmers. Such things are already underway[1].
Further, I'm seeing too little nuance in the comments on this story. Someone puts a Raspberry Pi in a situation to be responsible for human lives and it fails - is Linus now culpable?
I won’t make a moral judgement on that decision but it is dangerously naive to think all technology has only positive externalities. The criticism of the current state of software engineering is that we don’t consider those externalities.
“It’s new and we didn’t know what would happen” is a really shitty excuse to hear from an aerospace engineer after an airline crash.
It's not clear to me that anyone can predict the consequences of technology even a few years into the future (much less the seventh generation that some folks talk about and that would, if adopted, bring progress to a halt), nor whether any elite should be trusted to decide whether to permit the adoption of some technology. (If you suggest the government, consider Trump and net neutrality.)
That’s the whole point of the article, no one person can ever figure that stuff out. That’s why the public needs tone informed. No matter how educated (malicious or not) an “elite” is, they’ll never be able to predict as much as the general public will.
Yet a wider public debate can.
Your example about greenhouse gases is a good example of this. Forget about the celebrities for a sec and look at the big picture:
The guys in the hydrocarbon industry were experts at their jobs: developing oil, coal & gas and selling those products. Likewise the car industry, experts at building and selling cars.
Their expertise is in building their particular products and selling them. They could not have been expected to understand the negative environmental effects. And moreover, it’s in their interest to ignore the negatives associated with their products because it’s much more profitable for them to produce cheap products that require little R&D.
It took insights from the general public outside those industries to realize how those products affect the population as a whole:
- Burning hydrocarbons releases far more CO2 than the planet can scrub via the carbon cycle, which has lead to the greenhouse effect. Not only that but certain types of coal produce the smog that once blighted our cities and literally killed people with weak respiratory systems. Not only all of that but the lead that was added to gas to prevent engines knocking, kills people too.
- Emmisions from cars not only add CO2 to the greenhouse effect but other car emissions such as carbon nanoparticles, Nitric Oxides, sulfuric compounds also result in measurable deaths among the populations living among those cars.
As a result, laws are passed to make cars release less emissions and also to reduce societal dependence on hydrocarbons. The public debate resulted in the population realizing that there are health hazards to both individuals in the short term and global climate in the long term, and resulted in laws being passed to reduce these health hazards as low as is possible right now.
Without informed public debate we’d never have realized that these negative effects occur and we’d never have saved as many lives as has been saved now that our cities are not drenched in lead and Nitric Oxide saturated smog.
http://dblp.org/db/conf/focs/focs2017.html
So, what might the negative consequences be for An Input Sensitive Online Algorithm for the Metric Bipartite Matching Problem?
> The idea is not to try to predict the future, but, on the basis of the literature, to identify the expected side effects or unintended uses of this technology.
Besides being (ironically) arrogant, your dismissal sounds to me like you want to disavow any responsibility computer programmers have for what the technology they develop is used for.
> founded on an incorrect understanding of what kind of thing programmers are good at
In my personal opinion, if you're not always thinking of the applications and effects on society of your work, you're not a very fully-developed human being and certainly not the best programmer you could be, to say nothing of being a good citizen.
Take an example: your team has developed technology that can identify, with five nines accuracy, the yearly income of a user. That’s innovative, for sure. And nobody is taking the achievement away from your team.
But you don’t need to be Socrates to realize that what you’ve created could be used in horrifying ways. The article is asking creators to take a step back, ignore the excitement of creation for one moment, and consider if what they’re doing should be done. And if the answer is Yes, then decide if a public debate is required to protect the public from that new technology’s misuse.
Now the first reaction from many will be to scoff “fuck that, I’m just building an app here, I’ve got an investment to recoup and money to make”. That’s valid, but it’s an unethical way of looking at the act of creation. Feel free to hide behind the “I’m just doing my job” excuse, but we all know where that ended up.
That is the crux here, politicians can only make laws to protect the public at large from misuse of your newly created technology if they know about it. And the public at large can only demand robust protection (in the form of laws made by their politicians) from misuse of your technology if the public at large knows about it. Without a public debate, new technology could be misunderstood by politicians such that even if they are aware of the technology and even if they legislate, they may not make laws that robustly protect the public.
Thus, from an ethical standpoint, a public debate is needed so that robust laws are demanded and provided in order to protect the public at large from new technologies.
I think if we start to delve into the actual implementation of this, and look at real examples, it will be clear that this idea of "research that can be used for bad should be not published" leads to a bad type of society.
The physicists & engineers didn’t identify the MAD inevitability from developing nukes. The public did.
I’m not demonizing the physicists or engineers here either, how were they to know what the outcome of their developments could be?! But the public at large contains people who have other ways of looking at new technologies other than “this is innovative!” or “this will end the war!” this will be profitable!”. It’s these outsider viewpoints that are needed for the public to decide if laws are required in order to robustly protect the public from that new technology.
In specific implementation scenarios, these debates are pointless because we have the nukes & chemical weapons examples from recent history. The ethics are clear. I’m more speaking about developers of new technologies alerting the public at large about potential risks involved with their technology that would make robust laws protecting the public from misuse of their technology prudent.
But, in saying that, there are examples of programmers who could have alerted the public in the public interest, but kept their mouth shut instead such as the developers who developed the emissions cheat software for Volkswagen. Worse, they knew that their actions would lead to deaths among the populations in which those cars were sold because emission-related deaths have been intimately understood for decades now. That is a crime that was perpetrated at the frontlines of software development. Those guys knew what they were doing and their “secrecy” is nothing more than a bloody conspiracy to murder. They didn’t give a fuck how many have died from the emissions released by their cars during the decade they were on sale because “I’m just doing my job building the software I was asked to build” is an adequate excuse in their book.
Under that framework USSR's suppression of genetics in favor of Lysenkoist bullshit would be justified because an incomplete understanding of genetics could lead to eugenics travesties. It is like King Cnut trying to stop the tides only totally unironically and unsarcastically.
> It implicitly states that computer programmers are, as a field, competent to predict how a technology will impact society.
What the article is proposing is that creators of new technologies inform the public so that the general public can decide if new laws are required to prevent that new technology from being misused against the public at large.
There’s precedents here and I’ve written a ton of comments about them if you want to read a bit about why such a proposition is the only ethical option.
This is the problem, because you know what else is controlled by the market? Your employment. I fully encourage going on strike if asked to make surveillance tech, but you will be fired for it. Then some other firm will be hired, and, oh well.
If "the market" controls democracy, to the extent that the "democratic" government demands surveillance tech because someone on the market wants to sell it, that's the problem to be solved, not a shortage of research scientists martyring their careers for no effective gain against the larger social pathologies.
EDIT: what I mean is, roughly, markets are how we usually screw ourselves up in the first place.
And it's doing a great job of it.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover
[7]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/how-nsa-transforming-l...
In fact, they’re all actions that show that an informed public debate regarding new technologies is needed to protect the public from not only unscrupulous businesses or external threats but to protect the public from their own authorities.
Without public debate and a public that demands robust protection in the fit of laws, misused technologies represent a threat to everyone until that debate is had.
Someone else brought up the culpability of fission researchers for Hiroshima. That's one example of a major technical endeavor where even with historical hindsight people won't all agree on its ethics.
The article is proposing that that public debate happen during or before development so that laws can be made to robustly protect the public from a new technology in the event that it’s misused.
It is impossible to assess the risk of unknown unknowns, so rather than assailing someone with adjectives and persecuting them with the crime of “arrogance” and “hubris,” just judge less and listen. If they’re wrong, move on.
Look at the mirror before you call another one arrogant.
why? aren't we allowed to judge the wrong? nothing wrong in calling someone arrogant if he's arrogant.
Better than invective is a genuine and sincere mutual examination of the facts — actual content rather than mindless reputational slander of an entire field of study.
Your comment would be much better without its first and last sentences. The inverse of a shit sandwich!