Re:Ethical OS and Silicon Valley’s Guilty Conscience
by geofft on Saturday August 25, 2018 @07:43AM
(#17840467)
Here's a counterargument: if you're good at what you do, it is better to let the inevitable development of X be done by someone less competent.
If the first mover does have an advantage, then making the first mover slow and buggy gives society more time to argue against it. To pick on Bitcoin (not taking on a position on whether it actually is unethical, but assume for the purpose of argument it is): if someone less thoughtful than Nakamoto had thought up the idea of using HashCash to prevent double-spend attacks, they may have used MD5 as the hash. Or they may have built the initial software with accidental integer overflows. Or they may have tuned it poorly so that the storage requirements got intractable after a few years. Then it would be more possible to shake Bitcoin with a second mover that didn't involve mining (or were actually anonymous, or whatever fix you'd want to make).
If the first mover doesn't have an advantage—if the technology is so clonable that someone can make an evil variant quickly—then there isn't any virtue in shipping the good variant first. Let them discover it on their own, it's not any worse, and spend your time working on either defenses or on unrelated, ethical things.
And it could be better: I seem to recall that there were several countries during World War II who did not focus wholeheartedly on developing the atomic bomb because they had no idea it was even possible. The Soviet nuclear weapons program, for instance, became much more of a priority only once they saw the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If the first mover does have an advantage, then making the first mover slow and buggy gives society more time to argue against it. To pick on Bitcoin (not taking on a position on whether it actually is unethical, but assume for the purpose of argument it is): if someone less thoughtful than Nakamoto had thought up the idea of using HashCash to prevent double-spend attacks, they may have used MD5 as the hash. Or they may have built the initial software with accidental integer overflows. Or they may have tuned it poorly so that the storage requirements got intractable after a few years. Then it would be more possible to shake Bitcoin with a second mover that didn't involve mining (or were actually anonymous, or whatever fix you'd want to make).
If the first mover doesn't have an advantage—if the technology is so clonable that someone can make an evil variant quickly—then there isn't any virtue in shipping the good variant first. Let them discover it on their own, it's not any worse, and spend your time working on either defenses or on unrelated, ethical things.
And it could be better: I seem to recall that there were several countries during World War II who did not focus wholeheartedly on developing the atomic bomb because they had no idea it was even possible. The Soviet nuclear weapons program, for instance, became much more of a priority only once they saw the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.