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by stlHusker
2872 days ago
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I agree but have a bit different take... "For instance, machine learning is now widely used for surveillance and advertising in ways that violate basic presumptions about privacy rights." Those same mathematical techniques are also being used to more accurately detect cancer in MRI scans. Saying everyone needs to be held responsible for second order effects is unrealistic and ultimately damaging to society. Blaming the toolmaker for things they cannot control will only cause no tools to be made. To me it points to a larger issue in our society that we are on a trend of completely removing context. Context no longer matters, what matters are the effects, regardless of whether you can reasonably be held accountable for them or not. It is thought-crime induced by those who in the same breath rail against that totalitarian behavior and then skip to implementing a version of it themselves. A number of people on this thread immediately jump to the argument on surveillance and data privacy which is a useful discussion but tangential to what is being proposed in the original article. The article is moral hand-wringing with zero clarity or practicality. And the judge of who is culpable or not is left to a hysterical press, driven by a hysterical and sometimes uninformed public. Look at what this behavior has done to political (and personal) discourse. Now imagine it being applied to science. No thank you. |
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As a matter of fact, my work covers fMRI scans of brains for a neuroscience lab, so I'm entirely with you here, but again, with a small caveat:
If society wanted the "toolmakers" (us) to take responsibility for which tools we make and how others use those tools, they would have to give us the actual power to decide what we work on and for whom. Instead the rule has usually been, "if you have ethical qualms about this, we'll find someone who doesn't". All exit and no voice means a society where nobody takes responsibility because everyone self-selects into positions where they can agree with what they're doing, and if broad masses and the hysterical press want to excoriate those doings while also materially demanding they continue, it gets to do so.
It's like when people say that engineers should refuse to work on weapons that would violate the Geneva Conventions -- but the same people then vote for a government that moves funding from the NSF to the Defense Department!