[johnhess]

"Things I wont work with" is a great concept that tech should borrow from chemistry. Some things, while they carry possible returns on investment, are simply not worth the risk.

I wonder what "Things I wont work with" would be for tech. I can imagine particular technologies (e.g. predictive policing) or types of data (e.g. I refuse to put digitized therapist's notes on the internet).

[malux85]

No helping oppressive governments spy on dissidents.

No high frequency trading.

No financial targeting the vulnerable (subjective, use your own ethics and good judgement)

No dragnets

No devices to disrupt tor or P2P networks

No troll farming or mass media manipulation

No fake dating profiles

No metric stuffing

That’s it off the top of my head. I know that sometimes secondary effects can happen (e.g. an oppressive government may use a database, and I might work on that database) but that’s not me directly helping them.

Something like this, feel free to add others everyone!

[narrator]

No fully automated slaughterbots. There has to be a man in the loop that at least clicks a mouse every time the robot kills an enemy combatant. No one should ever say: "Oh yeah, we had a bug in the auto-kill algo and our killer robot shot a whole bunch of innocent civilians. Whoops! That's nobody's fault. Nobody's responsible. The algo did it all by itself!"

[blotter_paper]

In the context of a military that accepts collateral damage as par for the course, I don't really see the distinction. Did anybody but Manning go to prison over that Collateral Murder video? We have humans approve airstrikes that we know will kill unidentified civilians when they're close to an identified target. We have humans approve airstrikes that target unidentified individuals which we probabilistically identify as combatants based on movement and cellphone metadata. What difference does it make if a human pulls the trigger --err, presses the button?

[merpnderp]

I'm completely with you, but eventually "we" won't have a choice when adversaries go full autonomous.

[Zaskoda]

Now if someone will make some sort of union I can join so I can strike and support others who share the same fundamental ethics. :)

[chirau]

Out of curiosity... why won't you work with HFT?

[lordgrenville]

Yeah, that one surprised me too. I've read Flash Boys, but I've read a lot of pushback on it, including the idea that it's essentially a very one-sided pitch for IEX.

[edoo]

There are some good arguments that the entire point of HFT is to manipulate the market by front running people who are trying to make actual transactions. Here is a cool video of a few hundredths of a second: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4ENWtfeYp8

[WJW]

There are many purposes for HFT, most of which have nothing to do with front running. Market making is an entirely legal and moral activity which benefits "people who are trying to make actual transactions" and happens to gain a lot from better tech.

[ATsch]

Market making is indeed a useful activity, in isolation. And market making is indeed technically what HFT companies do.

However, pouring unspeakable amounts of money, watts and person-hours into completely unnecessary and wasteful infrastructure just because emergent properties of a system mean that billion dollar companies and their owners can make a lot of money by being a picosecond faster than each other in an eternal battle is of extremely questionable utility.

What exactly do we as a society get in exchange?

[bigtiger]

We get markets that are incredibly fair and nearly frictionless on a global scale.

[spookthesunset]

Better HFT than bitcoin...

[tzs]

> Market making is an entirely legal and moral activity which benefits "people who are trying to make actual transactions" and happens to gain a lot from better tech.

Does that require HFT, or just T?

[DuskStar]

The HF bit lets prices be adjusted faster, which means bid-ask spreads can be narrower.

That's the theory, anyways.

[pixl97]

Then add the caveat "outside regulatory frameworks" to the orginal statement.

[refurb]

It’s amazing when people are vehemently against something and take a strong moral stand, but you dig a little bit and realize that their basic facts are wrong about the issue.

[edoo]

It is illegal to offer a security for sale that you have no intention of selling. I'm pretty sure the way they make money is to flash out orders and see if there is a response for the now unavailable security, allowing them pricing signals they wouldn't otherwise have. The basic solutions people offer are often of the theme "require the order to live long enough for others to actually trade on it".

[bigtiger]

> I'm pretty sure the way they make money is to flash out orders and see if there is a response for the now unavailable security

No.

Market event A is seen to correlate strongly with market event B. The correlation is so obvious that multiple participants compete to make the B trade first in reaction to A. It's part of having a healthy market, electronic or otherwise.

[mattygee]

No software-only interlocks on anything that requires a safety interlock

[ATsch]

While I think these are incredibly important and extremely neglected in the industry, these ethical concerns are really something different from the spirit of the "Things I won't work with" series, which is mainly about safety and sanity.

[8bitsrule]

No voting-machine software. Paper ballots guarded at all times by well-armed disabled vets. Ballot-scanners produce a paper checksum slip for each voter that they can later compare online to verify ballot has been counted correctly.

[schlipity]

Why would your first rule be so limited? Why help anyone spy on anyone else?

[oh_sigh]

Are you against spying on, say, white supremacists who you know are plotting terror attacks on minorities?

[Zombieball]

How would you know they are plotting terrorist attacks before you started spying?

[rockinghigh]

Tips to law enforcement, violent history, threats.

[m0zg]

Anything that can be used to "spy on white supremacists" will almost certainly be (ab)used to spy on other people. There are very few real, actual white supremacists, and even fewer of those who are "plotting terror attacks". In recent memory (~15 years) I can only recall three major terror attacks against minorities perpetrated by real, actual white supremacists: Breivik, the Christchurch shooting, and Dylann Roof.

Besides the definition of what constitutes a "white supremacist" has been getting more ambiguous by the minute over the past few years. Nowadays it pretty much just means "anyone who doesn't like illegal immigration" or "anyone I don't like, but I'm too lazy to articulate why".

[oh_sigh]

All of this is completely off topic from my post. "White supremacists" were just an example. It could have just as easily been neo nazis, or Islamic extremists, or whatever.

Your post is similar to if I proposed a hypothetical about addition using apples, and you posted a screed about how apples are overused in American cuisine and their nutritional value is suspect, especially relative to oranges and pears.

[m0zg]

All of those groups represent a tiny subset of the population ill suited to mass surveillance dragnets and well suited to on-the-ground policing and community engagement (as in, getting sane members of those groups to snitch on the insane).

Just the other week I saw the news that until recently we had 300 (!) Saudi nationals training to fly planes right here in the US. Software won't help us with stupidity/sabotage of this magnitude.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/navy-suspends-flight-trainin...

[samatman]

You can add the Pittsburg synagogue shooting to that list.

I'm not in favor of surveillance panopticons either, for what it's worth.

[m0zg]

Seems more of an antisemite rather than white supremacist per se. Didn't publish any manifestos either. But I'll allow it.

Still, that's very few events, which supports my point. It's basically a more potent "think of the children" trojan horse that routinely gives the government even more power (and potential for abuse) through harebrained and ineffectual laws. See e.g. the current FISA abuse scandal where the FBI _falsified the supporting documentation, and knowingly supplied fake documentation to the court_ to spy on a presidential campaign. Had it been you or me they spied on, nobody would even know.

[jcranmer]

Charlottesville car attack?

[claudiawerner]

Spying is not necessarily immoral, I presume.

[Jestar342]

> I refuse to put digitized therapist's notes on the internet

There is just no way that doesn't already happen all over the place already.

The "things I won't work with" blog lists things that will actually kill you in horrible, mind bendingly painful ways.

In Tech it's more like "things I won't work with because it might fail" or "is too difficult" or "might be a bit too unscrupulous"

[paranoidrobot]

> In Tech it's more like "things I won't work with because it might fail" or "is too difficult" or "might be a bit too unscrupulous"

For some of things, sure.

But there are other things that do cause death, pain and suffering.

If you wrote code that's used in military weapons, that's a more direct relationship.

If you write code that's used to power gambling sites/devices, it's perhaps somewhat abstract - but there are a large number of people who are harmed because of how addictive these things are.

If you write code that's used for managing high-interest loans (like the point-of-sales type of 'buy-now-pay-later' of loans) - then you're enabling the exploitation of people who by-and-large cannot afford the things they're being told they can have, and will spend a large portion of their life paying these loans off.

[Jestar342]

All of which are orthogonal to the blog. The blog is about things the author won't work with out of fear of personal injury. Not writing software for a high interest loan's sake is far from the same.

Being true to one's own ethics is a very worthy virtue. But it just isn't in the same league as not wanting to melt one's face off or accidentally die in a paralysing seizure of excruciating pain.

[big_chungus]

And yet, military weapons serve a necessary purpose. All of us would agree that some military is always necessary. You listed products that are "exploitative", but would you have an issue with working for a manufacturer of hard liquor, a substance with significant addictive potential? What of a gunsmith? A knife manufacturer? Many products have the potential for abuse; few are _inherently_ unethical. If you have ethical qualms, fine, but there seems to be a tendency to condemn those whose ethical qualms do not prohibit producing and selling such things.

[paranoidrobot]

I didn't make an exhaustive list of the companies/industries I wouldn't work for.

For most of the things, my personal opinion on wanting to work for the ones you've listed are definitely in the "it depends on the organisation/management" category.

If it's a company that is (in my opinion) causing more harm than good, then it's not somewhere I'd want to work.

The point of my post was to point out that some tech roles are for companies who do cause harm/pain/suffering whether that's direct (military) or indirect (loan sharking).

Whether the military or an arms manufacturer is necessary is a whole other debate - but the whole point of those types of organisations is the ability to directly cause harm to those they're directed at.

However organisations that provide high interest credit to those who can't afford the thing they're buying, with the intent to keep milking money from their debtors do cause suffering, albeit in a more indirect sense.

[C1sc0cat]

For me payday loans is a hard no, and similar things that battern (take advantage of) on poor people

I am ok with defence apart form Chem and Bio, "that just sqicks me out"

Though it does depend on who id be working for I did turn down a recruiter who was looking for people to work on the MET police Registry, but I would have worked for HMGCC.

Note these where both Avowed Jobs so I am not breaking any laws mentioning them.

[davidgould]

> If you have ethical qualms, fine, but there seems to be a tendency to condemn those whose ethical qualms do not prohibit ...

That's sort of the point of ethics though, it's pretty weak to say "I choose not to steal because it is wrong, but you do you."

[michaelt]

On the other hand, if I said "I choose not to have an abortion, but you do you" that'd be a pretty up-to-date stance, right?

[wyattpeak]

While that statement is usually used as an explicit indicator that the speaker doesn't consider abortion immoral at all, I think there's a difficulty here in that morality is used in two different ways: things I don't think anyone should be doing e.g. owning slaves, and things I'd feel uncomfortable doing e.g. having an abortion.

Perhaps they're two degrees of the same thing, but it doesn't seem obvious to me.

I think there is also a subset of the first: things which I don't think anyone should be doing but social pressure forbids objection - eating meat comes to mind. Abortion may fall into this category for some, but in my experience even in fairly liberal circles people are willing to object to abortion, they just tend to couch it more.

[Vindicis]

What purpose is that? To project power and bully people, sure. If everyone has a gun, no one has a gun. If no one has a gun, everyone has a gun. If one person has a gun, he calls the shots.

[big_chungus]

Self-defense. It's basic game theory that we will never have a world where no one has a gun. This remains true on a national level.

[girvo]

I can tell you that they indeed are going over the internet, being put into a cloud based notes system for medical data at least where my girlfriend works as an optometrist (they have psychologists, GPs, surgeons, etc and they all use the same system)

[MengerSponge]

Just because it's done all over the place already is no excuse for you to do it better.

[Jestar342]

Disagree, though it depends on the measure of "better". If there's a market for therapists to digitize their notes and store them online, then I'd want that software to be secure.

Should the creators of Gmail or Word or etc feel bad because therapists are using their services to send their notes to colleagues?

[patrickmay]

> I wonder what "Things I wont work with" would be for tech.

Online voting. Anything more sophisticated than automated scanning of a paper ballot cannot be trusted, even in theory. Always, always be able to do an audit from the original ballots.

[mulmen]

I would expand that to include electronic voting in general. Even air gaps are not satisfactory.

[jellicle]

The "good" thing about dangerous chemistry is that it is dangerous, first and foremost, to the chemist. Inspiring some caution in the majority of chemists.

The bad thing about dangerous tech is that it is usually someone else who gets hurt, and the technologist is affected last or not at all. Predictive policing? It's not going to be rich white guys who catch the pointy end of that stick...

It should probably be required by law that Zuckerberg keep nude photos of himself on his Facebook account, to encourage security.

[salty_biscuits]

"It's not going to be rich white guys who catch the pointy end of that stick..."

Detection of white collar crime? Surely detection of fraud in financial transactions isn't rocket surgery...

[tomrod]

The problem with the fraud domain is finding all the holes in the dike.

[jeanlucas]

I try to apply this to my own work, nowadays I work with financial software in South America, and I have the power to suggest what to use and what to avoid. I decided, and yet to know if it's a good idea or not, to instead of worrying about leaking data, not collect some types of data at all.

[rsynnott]

> to instead of worrying about leaking data, not collect some types of data at all.

Interestingly, this has probably been the main beneficial effect of the GDPR so far. Personal data has shifted from being a pure asset to a combo of asset and liability, causing some companies to just avoid collecting anything but the essentials.

[Florin_Andrei]

> I wonder what "Things I wont work with" would be for tech

Computer tech is nowhere near as spectacular as chemistry, in an immediate, palpable sense. Almost nothing is. Maybe some narrow areas of physics or real-world engineering. But chemistry is pretty much unique that way.

Chemistry is a great hobby to pick up when you're a teen. Well, assuming you survive the whole thing.

[matthewfcarlson]

More of an embedded/firmware engineer who happens to also be a web developer, I had a rule that I wouldn't make anything that directly killed people. I had many friends go work at various defense companies designing missile control systems. That said, their stories about the challenges and what sort of places they went were fascinating. I'm glad someone did it. I'm just glad it wasn't me.

[girvo]

I was in the process of being hired to work on tech like that last year. The technical challenges and constraints were so exciting, but I couldn’t get past my moral and ethical problems with writing software that kills people, so I ended up turning down the offer

[bryanrasmussen]

I knew someone that claimed he would not work with gambling applications on moral principle, I didn't much respect the stuff he had built as it seemed all brochure ware about 6 years behind the times but at any rate he had the one standard.

[vidanay]

I have never had the opportunity, but I personally would never work with life critical software.

[JshWright]

> (e.g. I refuse to put digitized therapist's notes on the internet)

So... No EHRs?

[eropple]

EHRs don't imply internet access.

[JshWright]

Cloud based EHRs (run by actual professionals) are a lot safer than a "local" EHR, administered by the admin assistant's second cousin, Larry, who took an A+ course back in 2000-something...

[big_chungus]

Even if there's no internet access on the EHR itself, many are accessed through, say RDP anyway.

[CamouflagedKiwi]

My first thought was "more than 2 consecutive *'s" which has something of a resonance with the higher oxidation states the author mentions being wary of.