But that person could not possibly have predicted the future actions of everyone else, and therefore it's a mockery of moral reasoning to hold them responsible.
What are we holding them responsible for? Was something amoral? They clearly made the first decision for better or worse. Now if there was a sign that said "No walking on the grass", they clearly violated something.
And that's just it. Humanity has carved a path that says, "Make as much money as possible with the least amount of effort."
These machines have taken something we already know is bad, the 90 day, quarterly earnings cycle, which had already obliterated our long-term thinking down to nanoseconds and we want it even shorter.
We have machines moving virtual money around corporations that use money to move real material around the earth -- and beyond.
That is the path we are on right now in this very moment.
Who is going to put a sign up saying, "STOP! Humanity Restoration in Progress. Please choose another path."
Other systems may or may not be created in a similar fashion.
I'm aware of how they work. I'm arguing that someone who builds a system is responsible for it even if they don't know how it works. Ignorance, even in the face of a system so complex that no person could ever understand the underlying causes of what it does, is not an excuse. No one should be able to hide behind complexity.
Developers must either build in protections against their systems going wrong or they shouldn't deploy them.
Every step of the development ladder is fraught with possibilities for error and catastrophe. To quote James Goldman:
"It is too simple. Life, if it's like anything at all, is like an avalanche. To blame the little ball of snow that starts it all, to say it is the cause, is just as true as it is meaningless."
Yes.
That wouldn't even be a change to the current system. That's how it works now. If you take on the role of CEO and it turns out that years earlier the company did something terrible you will be expected to resign. It's one of the reasons they demand so much money.
Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of career CEOs are good hardworking people. Like any high profile position, the outliers skew perception for everyone.
Every organism since the first one has been focused on its individual survival. Interested only in the propagation of its own DNA.
And yeah, humans are still doing that. Everyone who took that path. Everyone who keeps taking that path of survival of the fittest.
We need to start thinking of the survival of the all of us.
(Source: Have walked through fields.)
Desire paths: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/oct/05/desire-paths-...
The first person who walked the final path. Everyone who agreed with that person and walked the same path compounded his decision. Everyone who crossed the field should have thought about what they were doing at the time.
Far too many people, and especially developers, are way more focused on absolving themselves from responsibility for anything bad than they are willing to put the thought in at the beginning, and that's the root cause of a lot of problems.