It's a shame we don't have more engineers today that refuse to invent things because so many technological inventions today are being used to further the destruction of our planet through consumerism.
Sadly, human society has a blind spot when it comes to inventions with short-term benefits but long-term detriments.
I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.
> I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.
Refusing to work on something is not newsworthy. I refuse to work on (or use) AI, ads and defence projects, and I'm far from being the only one.
Though let who is free of sin throw the first stone, I now stand on a high horse after having worked in the gambling sector, and now ashamed of it, so I prefer to focus the projects themselves rather than the people and what they choose to do for a living.
> Refusing to work on something is not newsworthy.
One person, no. A hundred, who knows. Ten thousand programmers united together not to work on something? Now we're getting somewhere. A hundred thousand? Newsworthy.
I would bet there are a hundred thousand people refusing to work in war, ai, ads, gambling, crypto etc. I certainly am. But all it means is that pay goes up and quality of engineering goes down a little in those sectors, but not much more.
The issue is quantifying this sentiment. How would you even identify programmers who are doing this? Yet another reason why software engineers really ought to organize their labor like a lot of other disciplines of engineering have done decades ago. Collective action like this would be more easily mustered, advertised, and used to influence outcomes if labor were merely organized and informed of itself.
I also refuse to work on the war machine, blockchain, or gambling.
Unfortunately it looks like that might also be refusing to eat right now. We'll see how much longer my principles can hold out. Being gaslit into an unjustified termination has me in a cynical kind of mood anyway. Doing a little damage might be cathartic.
Regret right now would be letting the stress of unemployment rip my family apart. I've got maybe a handful of door-slamming "what the fuck did you do all day then?" rants that I can tolerate before I'm ready to sign on with Blockchain LLM O-Ring Validation as a Service LLC: We Always Return True!™ if it'll pay the bills and get my wife to stop freaking out.
And this is how all unjust systems sustain themselves. You WILL participate in the injustice, or be punished SEVERELY. Why do the people doing the punishing want to punish you? Because they WILL participate in punishing, or be punished SEVERELY.
People have wondered how so many people ever participated in any historical atrocity. This same mechanism is used for all of them.
It probably doesn't help right now, but you should know you are not the only one in your situation. Perhaps it might help to write down your actual principles. Then compare that list with the real reasons you refuse some employment opportunities.
I think you have already listed one big reason that isn't a high-minded principle. You want to make money. There may be others.
It's always wonderful when you can make a lot of money doing things you love to do. It stinks when you have to choose between what you are exceptionally good at doing and what your principles allow.
If only somebody could figure out how the talents of all the people in your situation could be used to restore housing affordability. Would you take a 70% paycut and move to Nebraska if it allowed you to keep all your other principles?
As you say, kindness isn't hiring. I'd love to see an HN discussion of all the good causes that need founders. It would be wonderful to have some well known efforts where the underemployed could devote some energy while they licked their wounds. It might even be useful to have "Goodworks Volunteer" fill that gap in employment history on your resume.
How do we get a monthly "What good causes need volunteers?" post on HN?
There's a lot baked into that thought, but I wanted to extract this part:
> There’s nothing morally wrong with ... building... gambling.
Say you're building a gambling system and building that system well. What does that mean? More people use it? Those people access it more? Access it faster? Gamble more? Gamble faster?
I agree with you. It's also worth noting that this isn't unique to anything discussed here. EVERYONE has their line in the sand on a huge array of issues, and that line falls differently for a lot of people.
Environment, religion, war, medicine; everything has a personal line associated with it.
2) If you were devising more efficient sugar delivery systems for those acquaintances as a means to take every last cent they had, knowing they'd be unable to resist, you're complicit in robbing and killing them.
I am curious why you avoid ads - personally I view them as a tremendous good for the world, helping people improve their lives by introducing them to products or even just ideas they didn't know existed.
I tend to view ads as the perfect opposite of what you mentioned; it’s an enormous waste of money and resources on a global scale that provides no tangible benefit for anyone that isn’t easily and cheaply replaced by vastly superior options.
If people valued ad viewing (e.g. for product decisions), we’d have popular websites dedicated to ad viewing. What we have instead is an industry dedicated to the idea of forcefully displaying ads to users in the least convenient places possible, and we still all go to reddit to decide what to buy.
> If people valued ad viewing (e.g. for product decisions), we’d have popular websites dedicated to ad viewing.
There was a site dedicated to ad viewing once (adcritic.com maybe?) and it was great! People just viewed, voted, and commented on ads. Even though it was about the entertainment/artistic value of advertising and not about making product decisions.
Although the situation is likely to change somewhat in the near future, advertising has been one of the few ways that many artists have been able to make a comfortable living. Lying to and manipulating people in order to take more of their money or influence their opinions isn't exactly honorable work, but it has resulted in a lot of art that would not have happened otherwise.
Sadly the website was plagued by legal complaints from extremely shortsighted companies who should have been delighted to see their ads reach more people, and it eventually was forced to shutdown after it got too expensive to run (streaming video in those days was rare, low quality, and costly) although I have to wonder how much of that came from poor choices (like paying for insanely expensive superbowl ads). The website was bought up and came back requiring a subscription at which point I stopped paying any attention to it.
We do have such sites though, like Tom's Hardware or Consumer Reports or Wirecutter or what have you. Consumers pay money for these ads to reduce the conflict of interest, but companies still need to get their products chosen for these review pipelines.
Tom's Hardware and Consumer Reports aren't really about ads (or at least that's not what made them popular). they were about trying to determine the truth about products and see past the lies told about them by advertising.
Strictly speaking, isn't advertising any action that calls attention to a particular product over another? It doesn't have to be directly funded by a manufacturer or a distributor.
I'd consider word-of-mouth a type of advertising as well.
To me advertising isn't just calling attention to something, it's doing so with the intent to sell something or to manipulate.
When it's totally organic the person doing the promotion doesn't stand to gain anything. It less about trying to get you to buy something and usually just people sharing what they enjoy/has worked for them, or what they think you'd enjoy/would work for you. It's the intent behind the promotion and who is intended to benefit from it that makes the difference between friendly/helpful promotion and adversarial/harmful promotion.
Word of mouth can be a form of advertising that is directly funded by a manufacturer or a distributor too though. Social media influencers are one example, but companies will pay people to pretend to casually/organically talk up their products/services to strangers at bars/nightclubs, conferences, events, etc. just to take advantage of the increased level trust we put in word of mouth promotion exactly because of the assumption that the intent is to be helpful vs to sell.
To me, ads are primarily a way to extract more value from ad-viewers by stochastically manipulating their behavior.
There is a lot of support in favor. Consider:
- Ads are typically NOT consumed enthusiastically or even sought out (which would be the cases if they were strongly mutually beneficial). There are such cases but they are a very small minority.
- If product introduction was the primary purpose, then repeatedly bombarding people with well-known brands would not make sense. But that is exactly what is being done (and paid for!) the most. Coca Cola does not pay for you to learn that they produce softdrinks. They pay for ads to shift your spending/consumption habits.
- Ads are an inherently flawed and biased way to learn about products, because there is no incentive whatsoever to inform you of flaws, or even to represent price/quality tradeoffs honestly.
Back when I was a professor I would give a lecture on ethical design near the end of the intro course. In my experience, most people who think critically about ethics eventually arrive at their own personal ethics which are rarely uniform.
For example, many years ago I worked on military AI for my country. I eventually decided I couldn't square that with my ethics and left. But I consider advertising to be (often non-consensual) mind control designed to keep consumers in a state of perpetual desire and I'd sooner go back to building military AI than work for an advertising company, no matter how many brilliant engineers work there.
Products (and particularly ideas) can be explored in a pull pattern too. Pushing things—physical items, concepts of identity, or political ideology—in the fashion endemic to the ad industry is a pretty surefire way to end up with an extremely bland society, or one that segments increasingly depending on targeting profile.
>I am curious why you avoid ads - personally I view them as a tremendous good for the world, helping people improve their lives by introducing them to products or even just ideas they didn't know existed.
I would agree with you if ads were just that. Here's our product, here's what it does, here's what it costs. Unfortunately ads sell the sizzle not the steak. That has been advertising mantra for probably 100 years.
If all the programmers working on advertising and tracking and fingerprinting and dark pattern psychology were to move into the field of AI I think that would be a big win.
And that's not saying that AI is going to be great or even good or even overly positive, it's just streets ahead of the alternatives I mentioned.
Is it miles ahead? An engine that ingests a ridiculous amount of data to produce influence? Isn't that just advertising but more efficient and with even less accountability?
I don't think it's advertising that's inherently evil. Like government, it's a good thing, even a needed thing. People need laws and courts, and buyers and sellers need to be able to connect.
It turns evil in the presence of corruption. Taking bribes in exchange for power. Government should never make rules for money, but for the good of the people. And advertising should never offer exposure for sale - exposure should only result from merit.
Build an advertising system with integrity - in which truthful and useful ads are not just a minimum requirement but an honest aspiration and the only way to the top of the heap. Build an advertising system focused, not on exploiting the viewer, but on serving them - connecting them with goods and services and ideas and people and experiences that are wanted and that promote their health and thriving.
I won't work on advertising as it's currently understood... I agree it's evil. But I'd work on that, and I think it would be a great good.
I used to think there were useful ads. But really, even a useful add is an unsolicited derailing of your thoughtspace. You might need a hammer, but did you really have to think about it right then? I think back to how my parents and grandparents got their goods before the internet. If they needed something they went to the store. If they were interested in new stuff that might be useful thats coming out, they'd get a product catalog from some store mailed to them. Is a product catalog an ad? Maybe, depending on how you argue the semantics, but its much more of a situation like going to a restaurant and browsing the menu and choosing best for yourself, vs being shown a picture of a big mac on a billboard every time you leave your home.
AI is the anti printing press. Done well, it removes the ability t read something written by someone far away, because it erodes any ability to trust that someone exists, or to find that persons ideas amongst the remixed nonideas AI churns out.
Advertising is similar, of course, and the only thing that has kept the internet working as a communications medium in spite of advertising is that it was generally labeled, constrained, enclosed, spam-filtered, etc.
The AI of today is being applied to help advertising escape those shackles, and in doing so, harm the ability to communicate.
Only in a sense that computers are all those things on steroids. It's a low-level tech that can be used for many different things. Given the incentives in our socioeconomic system, it will be used for the things that you have listed, just as everything else.
A lot of engineers in the US who are both right out of school and are on visas need to find and keep work within a couple months of graduation and can’t be picky with their job or risk getting deported.
I will never forget the grumpy look on the face of a imperial tobacco representative on a job fair in my university years ago. No one was visiting their booth for anything except for silly questions about benefit package including cigarettes.
Sadly it's not enough for 99% of engineers to refuse to work on an unethical technology, or even 99.99%
Personally I don't work on advertising/tracking, anything highly polluting, weapons technology, high-interest loans, scams and scam-adjacent tech, and so on.
But there are enough engineers without such concerns to keep the snooping firms, the missile firms, and the payday loan firms in business.
One issue we have is that economic pressures underly everything, including ethics. Ethics are often malleable depending on what someone needs to survive and given different situations with resource constraints, people are ultimately more willing to bend ethics.
Now, there’s often limits to some flexibility and lines some simply will not cross, but survival and self preservation tends to take precedent and push those limits. E.g., I can’t imagine ever resorting to cannibalism but Flight 571 with the passengers stranded in the Andes makes a good case for me bending that line. I’d be a lot more willing to work for some scam or in high interest loans for example before resorting to cannibalism to feed myself and I think most people would.
If we assure basic survival at a reasonable level, you might find far less engineers willing to work in any of these spaces. It boils down to what alternatives they have and just how firm they are on some ethical line in the sand. We’d pretty much improve the world all around I’d say. Our economic system doesn’t want that though, it wants to be able to apply this level of pressure on people and so do those who are highly successful who leverage their wealth as power. As such I don’t see how that will ever change, you’ll always have someone doing terrible things depending on who is the most desperate.
There are even engineers with such concerns working in these firms. They might figure that the missile is getting built no matter if they work there or not, so they might as well take the job offer.
I no longer work as a software developer because I feel that technology is ruining normal human interactions by substituting them in incomplete ways and making everyone depressed.
I think we'd be better off making things for each other and being present and local rather than trying to hyperstimulate ourselves into oblivion.
I'm just some dude though. It's not making it to the headlines.
> I'm just some dude though. It's not making it to the headlines.
Doesn't have to be on headlines. Even just hearing that gives me a bit more energy to fight actively against the post-useful developments of modern society. Every little bit helps.
As others have said, a big part of the problem is the need to eat.
I have a family. I work for a company that does stuff for the government.
I'd _rather_ be building and working on my cycling training app all day every day, but that doesn't make me any money, and probably never will.
All the majority of us can hope for is to build something that helps people and society, and hope that does enough good to counteract the morally grey in this world.
The problem is that for every one that refuses, there's at least one that will. So standing on principles only works if the rest of the rungs of the ladder above you also have those same principles. If anywhere in the org above you does not, you will be overruled/replaced.
So do you think that people should be required to become members of a "regulated profession" before writing a VBA spreadsheet macro, or contributing to an open-source project?
Are you required to become a chartered civil engineer to build a house for your dog?
But the software developer who’se code handles personal information of 10 million million people should know that you don’t store them in plain text, which developers and business leaders at Virgin Media did not know, and if you click ‘forgot password’ they would send you a letter with you password In The Mail
I would wish lot more programmers refuse to work with surveillance and add tech... But nearly every site has that stuff on them... Goes to tell what are the principles of profession or in general...
Sadly, human society has a blind spot when it comes to inventions with short-term benefits but long-term detriments.
I would love to see more programmers refusing to work on AI.